It looks like the next phase in the study of Paul, after the New Perspective on Paul and Paul within Judaism, will be Paul (within Judaism) within paganism. See, for example, Paul Within Paganism: Restoring the Mediterranean Context to the Apostle, edited by Chantziantoniou, Fredriksen, and Young (2025), which presents “a florilegium of essays tracing the various ways in which Paul’s Jewish religious program is native to the ancient Mediterranean” (xi). The British New Testament Society conference this year will have a session on the book and related themes, to which I will be contributing.
It is essential for the integrity, credibility and mission of the church that we read the Bible well. Modern evangelicalism has preserved a particular theological outcome, a thesis, from scripture—the argument that God became incarnate in Jesus for the purpose of dying for the sins of the whole… ( | 7 comments)
I argued in the recent posts on Luke’s Christmas stories and on Paul’s description of Jesus as a “servant of circumcision” that a central plot-line in the New Testament narrative is that God saves Israel through Jesus and the Gentiles respond to this, in the first place, by praising the… ( | 7 comments)
At the beginning of last year a lot of people were proclaiming the imminent demise of the emerging church. That prognosis may have been premature. Andrew Jones is sometimes credited with having written a self-defeating obituary from within the movement, but he has clarified his position: the… ( | 1 comment)
What we are faced with here is a basic dilemma regarding the structure of the story about salvation in Jesus. On the one hand, we have a conventional view, according to which Jesus is sent into the world in order to save humanity from its sins. On the other, we have the argument that Jesus “came”… ( | 9 comments)
In a comment on the first of my true-meaning-of-Luke’s-Christmas posts my old friend Rogier asks whether the argument about judgment has not been overstated: I raise this with you, because in so many of our conversations it seems like you interpret much of the gospel and the Jesus-story… ()
Embedded in the familiar story of the birth of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel are a number of resonant prophetic and poetic statements: the announcements to Zechariah and Mary, Mary’s Magnificat, Zechariah’s Benedictus, and the angel’s message to the shepherds. They interpret the… ()
During the reign of the god and saviour Caesar Augustus Joseph and Mary travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem in order to be registered. While they were there, Mary gave birth to a son. She wrapped him in old cloths and put him in a feeding trough where the animals were kept because the house was… ()
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