I forgot that 23 Feb is the traditional day for celebrating the anniversary of the Martyrdom of Polycarp. Then, the proconsul urged him, and saying, “Swear, and I will set you free, curseChrist;” Polycarp responded, “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any wrong: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?” M.Pol. 9.3 Photo form Mosaic in Ravenna. Read more

Over at the Alliance of Evangelicals, Rick Phillips has a post on Social is Evil, concluding: Capitalism does not offer salvation: only Jesus can deliver us from our sins.  Socialism, on the other hand, is a manifestly evil system from which we should pray to be delivered. Well, on the one hand, I think Margaret Thatcher was mostly right when she said, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” I do think socialism can... Read more

Bruce W. Longenecker The Cross Before Constantine: The Early Life of a Christian Symbol Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015. Available at Amazon.com Easily the best book so far for 2016 is Bruce Longenecker’s small paper back on the cross before Constantine. Whereas a branch of scholarship has argued that it was only after Constantine that the cross became a significant symbol of the Christian faith, Longenecker blows that thesis out of the water by showing through literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and archaeological evidence... Read more

Over at The Jesus Blog, James Crossley has a rather spirited response to my piece on Marcan Christology. Crossley thinks my post was a rhetorical over play on parallelomania. Here is my offending statement: “Parallels are good for mapping how readers familiar with a given text might understand the story – reading after all is matter of context and prior reading experiences – but parallels cannot determine purpose or over power the narrative sweep of a text.” What I mean by “parallelomania” is... Read more

After my initial post about Mark’s Divine Christology there have been a flurry of responses from varied folks, both critical and affirmative, commenting on aspects of Marcan Christology. Chris Keith has a great post on Maybe Mark Knew What He Was Doing, where he comments: In short, I personally think that Mark is explicitly raising the question of Jesus’ identity vis-à-vis the God of Israel via his characters and implicitly answering it with a high Christology, but in such a fashion... Read more

Scot conducts an interesting and effusive interview with John Barclay about his book Paul and the Gift over at the Kingdom Roots podcast.   Read more

Over at Eerdmans, John Barclay responds to criticism from J.V. Fesko that his book Paul and the Gift is semi-pelagian. Fesko wrote: For all of his claims to move past the Old Perspective on Paul and the Augustine-Pelagius debate, this looks very much like classic Roman Catholic semi-Pelagian soteriology. With Barclay, Rome would affirm the incongruity and priority of grace, and would agree that Paul doesn’t perfect the efficacy of grace. And they would agree that grace is not unconditional  Listen to Barclay’s response... Read more

Over at Zondervan Academic, Jeremy Bouma blogs on Why Did Paul Write Romans? Michael Bird Offers Five Possible Reasons. Romans, then was “designed to win over the audience to Paul’s gospel, to support his mission in Spain, to draw Jewish and Gentile Christians in Rome closer together, to strengthen them in the faith despite the periods of Roman culture, and to encourage his audience to identify with the apostle to the Gentiles as he goes to Jerusalem.” (11–12) Its a... Read more

God and the Faithfulness of Paul is a volume of international contributors which engages with N.T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. A great study in Pauline theology by an international cast of biblical scholars and theologians. Edited by Christoph Heilig, J. Thomas Hewitt, and Michael F. Bird. See the Mohr/Siebeck site if it is not on Amazon.com. N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God is the culmination of his long, influential, and often controversial career – a landmark study... Read more

Below is a video of the Greer-Heard forum on “How did Jesus become God?” with discussions between Bart Ehrman and Michael Bird, featuring also Larry Hurtado, Simon Gathercole, Dale Martin, and Jennifer Knust. It was an awesome time. Ehrman sketched out his general view, I did a critique about the earliest christology being adoptionist, Hurtado set forth his case about early Christ-devotion, Gathercole covered ancient Jewish monotheism and NT Christology, Martin spoke about the resurrection, theology, and historiography, and Knust discussed... Read more