This week I’m reading and lecturing on Rom 3:21-31 with Moo’s second edition of Romans and McKnight’s Reading Romans Backwards. Moo takes this section to be principally about the availability of God’s righteousness to all who respond in faith (p. 237) – hard to disagree with. He thinks Paul is probably dependent upon Jewish Christian tradition but not necessarily citing a traditional formulation (p. 240). Moo takes “but now” as temporal, indicating that a new era of redemptive history has begun (p.... Read more

Matthew: Interpreted by Early Christian Commentators Edited and Translated by D. H. Williams Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018. Available at Eerdmans By Laura Thierry For the uninitiated, entering the world of patristic and medieval Scriptural interpretation can feel a little like being a Muggle who suddenly finds themselves at Hogwarts: Everything is interesting, brilliant, even magical… but also just a little bit too uncomfortably odd. How, then, does a 21st century Christian attempt to work out the systems and mysteries that... Read more

Seasoned Speech: Rhetoric in the Life of the Church James E. Beitler III Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2019. Available at IVP. By Laura Thierry Rhetoric in the life of the Church tends to get a pretty bad wrap. Associated with manipulation, cunning, deceit, and emotionalism, we often find it easier to quote Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 and flee from ‘plausible words of wisdom’. But is this the last word on the role of rhetoric in life of the... Read more

This week I’ve read through M. David Litwa’s new book How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2019). This is a book I fundamentally disagree with, but it is an interesting read, and will probably elicit a whole lot of controversy about the relationship of the Gospels to Mythology. I would love to see an SBL panel on it and hopefully we can review for JSHJ. You can also listen to a podcast interview with... Read more

I’ve now finished a second reading of John Barclay’s superb volume Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015). This is certainly one of the most significant books in Pauline studies, up there with N.T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God, and E.P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism as a monumental and must-have book. The genius of Barclay is that he offers what I take to be a nuanced apocalyptic perspective on Paul that cuts through the dichotomy... Read more

Tremper Longman III  Genesis  The Story of God Bible Commentary, Zondervan 2016. Available at Zondervan. By Jill Firth The Story of God Bible Commentary has a “story-centric” approach which locates the biblical text within the whole sweep of the biblical narrative. The series firstly examines the text in its original context, but also looks at each text from a New Testament perspective and considers how to “live the story.” Tremper Longman is the General Editor of the Old Testament series,... Read more

I’m continuing my Mondays with Moo series, but now adding Scot McKnight’s Reading Romans Backwards because it just arrived! Interestingly, Moo continued to argue the view that justification to the doers of the law is hypothetical (2:13), he sees no Gentile Christians (2:14-15) except allusively towards the end of the chapter (2:27-28): We think, therefore, that vv. 7 and 10 set forth what is called in traditional (especially Lutheran) language “the law.” Paul sets forth the binbilal conditions for attaining eternal... Read more