Category: Books and articles

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

My article ‘The State They Were In: Luke’s View of the Roman Empire’ available to download

As a follow up to my review of the interesting Jesus is Lord: Caesar is Not, with kind permission from the editor, Peter Oakes, I’m making my article ‘The State They Were In: Luke’s View of the Roman Empire’ from Peter Oakes, ed., Rome in the Bible and the Early Church (Carlisle: Paternoster/Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002) 1-41 available on this...

My review of Jesus is Lord—Caesar is Not

My review of a fascinating collection of essays, Jesus is Lord—Caesar is Not: Exploring Empire in New Testament Studies, is now available online on Reviews in Biblical and Early Christian Studies. I enjoyed reading this book which makes a valuable and accessible contribution to the debates over the impact of the Roman empire on what the New Testament authors say (especially...

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

    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 Tom Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God

  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...