Category: Books and articles

Blog posts stimulated by, or about, books or articles I’ve read.

Will Ross reviews R. Scott Gleaves on Did Jesus Speak Greek?

    Here’s a fine review/response to R. Scott Gleaves’ book Did Jesus Speak Greek? by my friend Will Ross. Will is a fine Septuagintalist, working on a Cambridge PhD at present, and has very helpful things—in agreement and in dispute—to say on this book, which revisits the debate over the language(s) which were around in first-century Palestine and (thus) the probable...

Au revoir, Professor I. Howard Marshall (1934–2015)

I share others’ sadness (such as Mark Goodacre, Tyndale House, Darrell Bock, and Ray van Neste—and now [21 December] Ian Paul) in reporting the passing of I. Howard Marshall on Saturday 12 December. Howard (as he always asked to be known) was for many years Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Aberdeen, and latterly Professor Emeritus. He was a lovely human...

A third thoughtful interaction on Chris Keith’s Jesus against the Scribal Elite

    Here’s the third of the series of interesting interactions of scholars with my colleague Chris Keith over his excellent book Jesus against the Scribal Elite (first here and second here, plus my original review here). This time Chris Skinner engages with the book and focuses on issues around criteria for authenticity, and the offensiveness of suggesting that Jesus was illiterate to...

More discussion on Chris Keith’s Jesus against the Scribal Elite

        Here’s a further post in the ongoing symposium on Chris Keith’s valuable book Jesus against the Scribal Elite, this time by Tobias Hägerland (Lund University, Sweden), along with a response by Prof. Keith. (See my note on the first one here and my review of the book here.) Prof. Hägerland suggests that Prof. Keith understates the political and religious threat Jesus...