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.
In a post on the ‘community of the Beatitudes and the restoration of creation’ I suggested that while the Beatitudes are not universal ‘Christian’ truths but contingent teaching aimed at the formation in Israel of a community of transitional renewal, it may nevertheless make sense to ‘transpose’… ( | 5 comments)
Douglas Campbell has a curious and ambivalent excursus (89-94) appended to the section in The Deliverance of God in which he claims that Justification theory and the ‘alternative theory’ of salvation drawn from Romans 5-8 differ markedly in the place that they accord ‘coercive and violent… ()
I got my hands on Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God only at a late stage of writing The Future of the People of God and could not make more than limited and very selective use of it. That may have been just as well—in any case, I have now picked it up again with the… ( | 2 comments)
Brian MacArevey picked up on a comment I made about the relationship between suffering and prosperity in my post on sonship and suffering in Romans and wondered out loud what I would make of a piece he had written about ‘eschatological blessing’ – and you really have to ask yourself: How did… ( | 22 comments)
Mike was preaching about sonship yesterday and the need for Christians to discover or claim for themselves the full blessings of having been adopted as sons. I have more sympathy for prosperity theology than is probably good for me, and I take quite seriously the argument that we are often a long… ()
This quotation from a book by J. Todd Billings called The Word of God for the People of God: an entryway to the theological interpretation of scripture rather effectively gets to the heart of the dilemma created by readings of the New Testament that insist on the historical… ()
Peter has reached the point of sheer exasperation in our discussion of the meaning of Jesus’ parable of the wise and foolish virgins, so it is time to stop, apologize, and perhaps try to understand why it can be so difficult to reach agreement over matters of biblical interpretation. ( | 5 comments)
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