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Friday at SBL (IBR): J. Ross Wagner and Craig Keener

22 November 2014 by Steve Walton
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It’s 5.42 am and I’m wide awake in San Diego, so here’s my first set of notes on this year’s sessions at SBL and IBR. Friday is IBR day in my calendar, and I went to two very interesting sessions. First, I heard the excellent J. Ross Wagner of Duke University give a limpidly clear and lucid paper on the way the letter to the Hebrews reads Psalms 8 and 40 (LXX 39). Ross explored the way that the use of Psalm 8 in the first Continue reading →

Paul’s persecutions—of Jesus-believers and his own

21 November 2014 by Steve Walton
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                             Here’s a great blog post by Larry Hurtado, engaging in discussion with Paula Fredricksen about the nature of the persecution of Jesus-believers by Paul prior to his Damascus road experience, and the nature of his own persecution once he himself became a believer. Fredricksen’s article is in an (expensive!) edited book: Paula Fredriksen, “How Later Contexts Affect Pauline Content, or: Retrospect Is the Mother of Anachronism,” in Jews and Christians in the First Continue reading →

What have the Pythons ever done for us?

12 November 2014 by Steve Walton
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In Marginalia Review of Books online, St Mary’s University, Twickenham PhD student Sarah Prime has published a very good summary and review of the conference on the movie ‘The Life of Brian’, held at King’s College London in the summer. Well worth reading—she identifies some very good issues arising from the papers and conversations at the conference.

Review: Claire S. Smith, Pauline Communities as ‘Scholastic Communities’: A Study of the Vocabulary of ‘Teaching’ in 1 Corinthians, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus

27 October 2014 by Steve Walton
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    I commented on this stimulating and thoughtful study by Claire S. Smith some while ago on this blog, here, and sketched some of its implication. Now my review has been published by Review of Biblical Literature online, so you can read it here. There’s also a shorter, but helpful, summary-review by Andrew D. Clarke in Themelios online here.

Simon Gathercole on the canonical and non-canonical Gospels

14 October 2014 by Steve Walton
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A highlight of the British New Testament Conference this year was Dr Simon Gathercole’s scintillating and provocative plenary paper, ‘Jesus, the Apostolic Gospel and the Gospels’. Dr Gathercole is Senior Lecturer in New Testament in the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge, and in this paper he asked whether there is anything distinctive about the four canonical Gospels relative to the other Gospels we have. This is a hot question in New Testament Studies at present, for study of the non-canonical Gospels is a growth industry (to which Dr Gathercole himself Continue reading →