Oxford Bibliographies Online: New Entry on Philemon Scholarship

I was excited to discover today that Oxford University Press has published my article on Philemon scholarship in the Oxford Bibliographies databases. Unfortunately, full access to the 100+ item annotated bibliography I created requires an institutional subscription, but they do offer a small preview for free (click HERE). (If you have access to OBO, you might be interested in another entry I wrote on Faith in the NT.)

This research on Philemon has been beneficial for one of my major book projects I will be working on in 2023: a volume on Philemon and Philippians for Cambridge University Press in their New Testament Theology series (which is now being updated). Howard Marshall, one of my favorite NT scholars of the 20th century, wrote the material on Philemon for the original NTT series. I am honored to follow in his footsteps. It has often been said that Philemon is not “theologically important” in the New Testament, but I disagree. What I think is apparent is that Philemon doesn’t contain as much explicit theological teaching in the same way we find in 1 Corinthians or Philippians. But we can learn a lot about how Paul approached the situation of Onesimus and Philemon from a Christian perspective. More on this to come…