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Reading Tom Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (1)

6 August 2014 by Steve Walton
6 comments
I’m reading through N. T. Wright’s massive Paul and the Faithfulness of God (hereafter PFG), so I shall put up a series of periodic posts on what I’m reading and my thoughts about it. Disclaimer: I am not a Pauline specialist, so these are the views of an interested amateur, rather than someone like Simon Gathercole, whose valuable review of PFG I posted about recently. I did substantial review articles of the second and third books in Wright’s big series Christian Origins and the Question of God, namely Jesus and Continue reading →

Simon Gathercole on Tom Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God

26 July 2014 by Steve Walton
One comment
  Here’s a fresh, generous and stimulating review of N. T. Wright’s big Paul and the Faithfulness of God by my friend Simon Gathercole, who teaches in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge. I’ve greatly enjoyed reading Simon’s review, which is gracious and clear, and clarifies and maps areas of agreement and disagreement nicely. It’s preparing me for reading Wright himself—I am going to take the big book on hols and will hope to blog about it.

A valuable online resource from SBL

9 July 2014 by Steve Walton
2 comments
  The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) have just released their excellent new online resource, Bible Odyssey. It’s a very useful set of articles, aimed at a ‘lay’ audience (although it will be of great value to students, I reckon), about aspects of the Bible. It is well-organised around a series of ‘hubs’, which are places, people or passages. This release of the site has 20-24 items under each of those links, and then each place, person or passage leads to a bunch of other Continue reading →

Jews or Judaeans?

24 June 2014 by Steve Walton
One comment
There seems to be a growing movement to use ‘Judaeans’ to translate Ἰουδαῖοι in the New Testament and other ancient writings (e.g. Josephus), influenced particularly to Steve Mason’s key article, ‘Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: problems of categorization in ancient history’, Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period 38 (2007) 457-512. Here’s a fascinating piece by Adele Reinhartz responding to this view and arguing for the continuing use of ‘Jews’—well worth reading.