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.
After reading a lively discussion about the ascension on James McGrath’s blog, it occurred to me that we are too quick as rationalist moderns to latch on to the question of what actually or literally or scientifically happened and can easily omit to ask what Luke understood the meaning… ( | 2 comments)
The J. Craig Venter Institute has announced that it has successfully created the first living cell by means of man-made genetic instructions. Venter told The Times: It is our final triumph. This is the first synthetic cell. It’s the first time we have started with information in a computer, used… ( | 1 comment)
In his disappointing and underachieving book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman has a disillusioned Jesus pray to the emptiness in Gethsemane. There are no miracles, no healings, no answers to prayer – he cannot keep making promises that God never fulfils. There… ()
I have been reading a book by Cory Labanow called Evangelicalism and the Emerging Church (Ashgate, 2009) for the purpose of writing a review for the Evangelical Quarterly. The book is an ethnographical study of a rather poorly camouflaged Vineyard congregation in the UK that has… ()
When we think of the words ‘gospel’ or ‘evangelism’, what invariably comes to mind is the church telling people (often reluctantly) that God loves them, that Jesus died for them, and that if they believe in this good news, they will have the assurance of eternal life, by which is usually meant life… ( | 7 comments)
I regard myself as an evangelical, but the social and intellectual structures that have sustained and made sense of modern evangelicalism are disintegrating, and it is not at all clear that modern evangelicalism can or should survive their collapse. My broad aim as a theologian is to endeavour to… ( | 32 comments)
Here’s an extraordinary insight into the historical Jesus from an ancient source that is unquestionably independent of the Gospels. The historian Josephus, writing a few years after the disastrous Jewish uprising against Roman occupation, describes Jesus as a rustic from the provinces who… ()
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