Tag Archives: biography

A cracking read: Luke Timothy Johnson’s autobiography as a scholar

31 October 2022 by Steve Walton
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Luke Timothy Johnson, The Mind in Another Place: My Life as a ScholarGrand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022. ISBN 978-0-8028-8011-6. I read Luke Timothy Johnson’s book with great appreciation over the weekend. It’s clear, lucid, engaging, and very encouraging and stimulating. I’ve long been an admirer of his work: his published PhD dissertation, The Literary Function of Possessions in Luke-Acts (SBLDS 39; Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1977) was a pioneering ‘narrative’ reading of Luke-Acts which I found very helpful in my own PhD work a few years later, Continue reading →

A review of Sean Adams’ Greek Genres and Jewish Authors

25 February 2021 by Steve Walton
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Sean A. Adams. Greek Genres and Jewish Authors: Negotiating Literary Culture in the Greco-Roman Era. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020. xvii + 430 pp. $79.95. ISBN 978 1 4813 1291 2. This excellent study does exactly what it says it will do: explore the way Jewish authors used and adapted Greek genres of writing between 300 BC and AD 135. Dr Sean Adams shows an astonishing and impressive breadth of engagement with the primary sources for this period, and has put us in his debt Continue reading →

Review: Tom Wright, Paul: A Biography

2 January 2019 by Steve Walton
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I’ve just had my review of Tom Wright’s Paul: A Biography (London: SPCK/San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018) published in the excellent Review and Expositor. For those with online access to the journal, you can read the final version here. If you don’t have online access, by kind permission of the journal, you can read the accepted version here. This is a fun book!

I (Still) Believe—a helpful (and very varied) book

20 December 2016 by Steve Walton
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No, not this, but a book of that title which appeared in 2015, edited by John Byron and Joel N. Lohr, from Zondervan. In it a bunch of stellar biblical scholars write about how faith and academic biblical studies have gone together for them. The answers are very, very varied, as you might imagine. There’s a common thread for many of the North American contributors (about ⅔ of the authors) of ‘I grew up in fundamentalism, discovered it was more complicated than that, and here’s Continue reading →