One of my favorite Christmas presents this year was getting Paul Sampley’s (ed) 2nd edition, Paul in the Greco-Roman World (Bloomsbury, 2016), now expanded to two volumes. Originally 21 chapters, it is now 28 chapters, not only with several “brand new” essays but also with revisions to the original chapters. Before addressing the “new” chapters, I just want to say that when the first edition came out in 2003, I was in seminary and it quickly became one of my... Read more

Well folks, it is that time of the year! Best biblical studies books of 2016. Overall Best Book: The Crosses of Pompeii (Bruce Longenecker) What an incredibly interesting book! This is how you build an argument and topple a specious consensus. You can find an interview I conducted previously with Longenecker about this book HERE. Several years ago, when my family and I were visiting Rome, we chose to visit Ostia Antica instead of Pompeii. Now I am regretting our laziness!... Read more

I took two books with me to read on my way to and from SBL – Larry Hurtado’s Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World was one of them (the other was Gaventa’s When in Romans). I am currently fascinated with early Christian social history, so I was eager to see what Hurtado had to say. There have been several interviews and online discussions about this book already, so I won’t spend time here summarizing the book (You can... Read more

Happy December! Logos is giving away Tremper Longman’s How to Read Proverbs for free, and for a $2 you can add his How to Read the Psalms – I would get both if I were you. Please note, at present there is a glitch in the system for Logos and it adds some other random books into your cart – make sure to delete those before checking out.   Read more

This is about my 10th or 11th SBL. I remember those early years of being starstruck when I saw Luke Timothy Johnson in the flesh, or when I got a few minutes in line at a cafe to talk to D. Moody Smith. The first papers I presented – how much I prepared and rehearsed. There are so many wonderful things about SBL. It has always been a highlight of my year. I am trying now, settling into a decade of... Read more

Rowan Williams has a clear knack for homiletical and devotional writing. I greatly enjoyed his previous work, Being Christian, which focused on the topics of baptism, the Bible, Eucharist, and prayer. I found many of his brief reflections utterly profound and spiritually inspiring. Williams has a way of drawing in wisdom from great theologians without it being too “academic.” This new work, Being Disciples, has the same format, though here split into six chapters: being disciples (ch 1), faith, hope, and love... Read more

What Kind of Tools and Resources Do I Use for Productivity? In the previous post on this, I mentioned the following GoogleDrive/GoogleDocs – just this year, I am in the habit of storing all my notes and files on GoogleDrive and as GoogleDocs. They offer stronger searchability and can be accessed easily from anywhere. ATLA database – I do a lot of my initial bibliographic compiling on ATLA. I figure out what I can get as pdf right away, and what... Read more

How Do I Take Notes? Throughout the years I have tried different approaches, software, and philosophies for taking and tracking my notes. Like others, I have not been good at being consistent or even particularly well-organized. But I have a plan at present that works for me. GoogleDrive! Whenever I start a project, I create a Google Doc. In that doc I make a series of section titles for parts of the research project. I have Google Doc create a... Read more

Allow me to introduce you to an interesting new book called Paul Behaving Badly: Was the Apostle a Racist, Chauvinist Jerk?, by E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien (IVP, 2016). This is the third in a series including God Behaving Badly (David Lamb) and Jesus Behaving Badly (Mark Strauss). As the authors of this third book note, talking about Paul is a bit different because he was a “regular human” (not God or Jesus), so it very could be that he was severely... Read more

Last year I did a set of posts on how senior scholars do research (Gorman, Dunn, Attridge, Bond, Blomberg, etc.). A few commenters asked if I would share how I myself do research. Well, I am still learning, which is part of why I wanted to do the series in the first place.  But I am now about a decade into my life as a researcher, so I thought I would share where I am on this at the moment. I will... Read more