It only took ten years and a zillion shekels, but finally the IAA has been told to take their marbles and go home, and oh yes, and to give back Oded Golan’s marble as well. It remains to be seen what will happen to Golan’s claim to the James ossuary, but this is a partial victory for his claims. Here is a portion of the article by Matthew Kalman about the surprising outcome. See what you think BW3. By Matthew... Read more

The question of ‘Paul and Empire’ has come up suddenly these last twenty years; in the late 1980s almost nobody was thinking about it, and now it’s all over the place — in more ways than one. That is, lots of people are writing about it and there is no consensus! That is to be expected. But there are two quite different things going on which get confused. On the one hand, there is the serious historical attempt, in line... Read more

The Princeton Theological Seminary Library has recently made available online full texts of some 80,000 volumes, so of which, one would presume, are now out-of-print works, but still valuable for certain research purposes. Still there are plenty of resources here of value. Key point— you need to have the critical judgment to know which is a valuable resource, and which is merely an old book. http://www.commons.ptsem.edu Read more

Let’s be clear from the outset. If your vision of pirates is the Pirates of Penzance or Peter Pan and Captain Hook, or for that matter that good Kentucky boy Johnny Depp, then you have a totally romanticized, and wrong vision of pirates. Pirates, ranging from Blackbeard off the coast of North Carolina to the Somalia pirates in the movie Captain Phillips are nothing like that. They are not swashbucklers– whatever that may be. They are often ruthless, heartless, cut... Read more

BEN: One of your earliest important works was entitled The Climax of the Covenant. On the surface at least, this book seems rather different than your later work when it comes to ‘the New Perspective on Paul’, particularly on the issue of the so-called boundary defining things in early Judaism– circumcision, sabbath keeping, food laws. What was it that did or didn’t convince you about the arguments of Jimmy Dunn and others that when Paul refers to ‘works of the... Read more

For over a century there have been proper critical editions of the works of Luther and Calvin. But it has only been in the last fifty years that we have begun to have a proper critical and annotated edition of the works of John Wesley. It it thus not entirely a surprise that what was available when I was young when it came to Wesley’s Standard Sermons were actually reprints of nineteenth editions of his works. Now that we do... Read more

BEN: Another major theme in several of these essays is justification, a subject which you have written a full book on, reviewed on this blog some years ago. Here I would like to ask— How has your mind changed over the years, or stayed the same, on this subject, if it has? If there is a constant thread for you in your thinking through this issue over thirty-five years what is it? Can you summarize for us how your view... Read more

My friend and colleague Tom Wright now has two new big books on Paul coming out, the first is a collection of his many essays on Paul over the last 35 years (640 pages, out with SPCK first) and the second is his magnum opus on Paul (which we will deal with in due course). Since these essays are mostly all previously published, I thought it would be helpful to do a dialogue with Tom on some of their major... Read more