I’m slowly reading over Rowan Williams’ book Meeting God in Paul and really loved this quote: I believe that we need to read Paul with a sense of his own intense conviction that he was exploring a new country – as fertile, beautiful and exhilarating, above all as real and tangible in its working, as any that a sixteenth-century sailor might have run across in his voyages of discovery. Did Paul transform Christianity? Yes, of course. He took a bundle of... Read more

Over at Remnant of Giants, Deane Galbraith has a good post on Luke knew Matthew, But Still Q. In The Gospel of the Lord I’ve advocated this and called this view the Holtzmann-Gundry Hypothesis (HGH) to the Synoptic problem (I hope it catches on). It rests on the idea that although Luke used Matthew, Luke and Matthew might have had sources common other than Mark, including some oral and written materials, especially in the double tradition. Galbraith’s argument is that Luke only uses one source at... Read more

Nijay Gupta has some nice words about my Romans commentary over at this blog Crux Sola. This is a commentary I wrote, not for scholars, but more for pastors! I owe him a coke! Read more

Over behind the RBL pay wall is my review of Divine Visitations and Hospitality to Strangers in Luke-Acts: An Interpretation of the Malta Episode in Acts 28:1-10 by Joshua W. Jipp of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. In brief, Jipp’s thesis is that the Malta episode recorded in Acts 28:1–10 is best understood as a form of theoxeny, that is, an account of hospitality given to a god, which results in the establishment of kinship between the Maltese barbarians, on the one hand, and... Read more

Steve and Sharol Hayner Joy in the Journey: Finding Abundance in the Shadow of Death Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015. Available at Amazon.com By Felicity Clift I remember a lecturer asking my class of students to raise our hands if we knew someone who had been diagnosed with cancer. The question was close to home. A friend of mine – a young, fit man – had been diagnosed with an aggressive lymphatic cancer and was undergoing treatment at the... Read more

Mark L. Strauss Jesus Behaving Badly: The Puzzling Paradoxes of the Man from Galilee Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015. Available at Amazon.com Reviewed by Adam Ch’ng All of us, to one extent or another, read our Bibles selectively.  Feel-good passages are set against picturesque scenery as desktop backgrounds.  While challenging passages are conveniently rationalised or simply ignored. Much the same attitude is regrettably adopted when reading the gospels.  Instead of confronting Jesus as he is presented, we prefer a... Read more

Bart, Bird, and Blogs Over on his blog, Bart Ehrman responds to my arguments that the earliest Christology was not adoptionist (sorry, it is behind a pay wall, but Bart is trying to raise money for charity). During the Greer-Heard debate a couple of weeks ago, Bart and I were part of a forum where we discussed divergent view points on how Jesus came to be regarded as divine. Bart gave a clear and engaging summary of his book How Jesus Became... Read more

One of my PhD students, Brian Wright, has a good piece in TrinJ arguing that ancient literacy rates were probably quite higher than the 10-15% normally estimated for them. See his piece: Brian J. Wright, “Ancient Literacy in New Testament Research: Incorporating a Few More Lines of Enquiry,” TrinJ 36 (2015): 161-89. Read more

I have been very gradually working my way through The West Wing, currently up to Season 2 and I just saw this epic scene where President Jed Bartlett lays into some conservative Christian radio show host for her views about homosexuality. I’ve heard this line of argument several times, it latches onto something genuinely problematic which most Christians have a hard time explaining, so I thought it might be a good idea to offer my own response to President Jed... Read more

Charles Lee Irons, Danny Andre Dixon, and Dustin R. Smith The Son of God: Three Views of the Identity of Jesus Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015. Available at Amazon.com Biblioblogger James McGrath gives a nice introduction to the volume setting out some of the questions that people ask about the origins of Christology and he encourages people to be open to the evidence and wrestling with different points of view. Charles Lee Irons defends a “Trinitarian” view majoring on... Read more