A new book: Poverty in the Early Church and Today—A Conversation

I’m delighted to announce the publication of a new book which I’ve co-edited with Hannah Swithinbank of Tearfund, Poverty in the Early Church and Today—A Conversation (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019). Here’s an abstract for the whole book: Poverty, its causes and alleviation, are a perennial concern for humanity, and particularly for Christians because of their belief that all people are made in God’s image, and therefore valued and valuable. This book offers creative engagement with issues concerning people in poverty by bringing into conversation perspectives from the earliest church and today’s world. Continue reading →

An interview about my book The Urban World and the First Christians

Tavis Bohlinger of the Logos Academic blog recently interviewed David Gill, Paul Trebilco and me about our edited book The Urban World and the First Christians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), and combined the result with some fab photos of Corinth and Philippi taken by David Gill. The interview is here. The good news is that the book is now available electronically from Logos, here at a bargain price! For my summary of the book and links to other material about it, see here, and for my summary Continue reading →

More Bible reading notes on Luke—and a free offer again!

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had the fun of writing daily Bible reading notes on Luke for Bible Reading Fellowship’s Guidelines notes. The second chunk, covering Luke 14–18, appears in the edition just out—it has notes dated for January to April 2019. This issue has lots on Luke’s writing, including (Bishop) Jill Duff on women in Luke, and my good friend Ian Paul on resurrection in Acts. Here’s the free offer: Bible Reading Fellowship have offered to send a free set of these notes to Continue reading →

Editio Critica Maior Acts: my ‘exegete’s view’ slides

Here are the slides from my brief talk in the Book of Acts seminar session on the new Editio Critica Maior (major critical edition) of Acts at the British New Testament Conference last week. The whole session was fascinating with talks by four major textual critics including (from left to right) Dirk Jongkind (an editor of the Tyndale House Greek NT project), Tommy Wasserman, Jenny Read-Heimerdinger (one of the authors of The Message of Acts in Codex Bezae, 4 vols), Klaus Wachtel (one of the editors of the project), Continue reading →