Honored to have a discussion of my book Paul and the Language of Faith with my friend Patrick Schreiner on the Western Seminary podcast. Patrick is really sharp; he read the book in pre-pub form and gave me tons of helpful pushback and feedback. In this interview he asks really good, challenging questions and we have an excellent conversation. Read more

Join me again for a free FB live lecture this week This coming Wednesday, I will be giving another free Facebook Live Public Lecture. This time, I will address my interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:8-15. This subject is at the intersection of two books I am working on right now. One is a commentary on the Pastoral Epistles. The other is a project called The Women Leaders of the Early Churches (IVP Academic). This lecture is graciously sponsored by IVP Academic and—yes!—there... Read more

Studying the New Testament through Inscriptions is one of those resources I wish I had 15 years ago. Burnett has done the NT academy a huge service. We need more textbooks like this to aid students and researchers. If you want to do accurate and comprehensive investigation of real life in the ancient world, you need to be able to work competently and responsibly with relevant epigraphical remains; and this book is designed to help you do that. What are “Inscriptions”?... Read more

Should Israel Annex the West Bank?: Church Leaders Weigh In Dr. Bruce Fisk has brought to my attention a statement on the issue of Israel’s possible annexation of the West Bank next month, written by the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME). NEME stands against this possibility. We oppose Israel’s proposed annexation of the West Bank: it is not good for Israelis nor for Palestinians. Evangelicals share a deep love for the Jewish people. Some identify as “pro-Israel”... Read more

New Blog Series on Philippians When Mike Bird and I co-wrote our Philippians commentary (New Cambridge Bible Commentary), we didn’t want to just copycat or cannibalize other commentaries. We wanted to offer our own reading based on fresh study. And in the midst of that research, we found ourselves questioning several scholarly assumptions about the interpretation of Philippians. In this series, we offer several of our refutations of specious readings.  Where Was Paul in Prison? There is a long-standing tradition... Read more

The Gospel as Manuscript (Oxford University Press, 2020) We read the Gospels on our computers, phones, and in print, and we often take for granted that the story of Jesus was written down. We assume if something was important, it was inevitable that it became recorded in literature. Chris Keith, in his new book The Gospel as Manuscript, pauses to consider this event, the “textualization” of the Jesus tradition, as an important occasion in the lives of the early Christians. Here... Read more

Confession: Lately, I have been going on a “Mary Beard” binge, especially watching every online lecture she has given. If you are not familiar, she is Professor of Classics at Cambridge and a world renowned historian of ancient Roman literature. I just watched her 2019 lecture on “Whiteness” in the Roman World, it was absolutely fascinating. She notes that some white supremacists today imagine some kind of white legacy going back to Greece and Rome. Beard questions that narrative and... Read more

My friend Max was kind enough to answer some questions about his important new book Moral Transformation in the Greco-Roman Philosophy of Mind (Mohr Siebeck, 2020).   NKG: How did you become interested in the topic of “moral transformation” in the ancient philosophers? MJL: How does a person change? Ever since I became a Christian my sophomore year in college at Cal Berkeley, I wondered: If sin has formed me a certain way for 19 years of my life until the... Read more