Remembering Larry Hurtado

23 November 2020 by Steve Walton
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The good folk at the Lexham Press blog have this week put up three excellent posts remembering the fine contributions Professor Larry Hurtado (who died a year ago this week) made to New Testament Studies, on textual criticism (by Tommy Wasserman), Christology (by Chris Tilling), and the Gospel of Mark (by Holly J. Carey). They’re well worth your time, and summarise beautifully the way Larry moved each of these fields forward through his scholarship. He’s one of a few giants who’ve left us in the Continue reading →

Bravo, Eric Clouston! A new book on Acts in its literary context

24 February 2020 by Steve Walton
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Eric Clouston, How Ancient Narratives Persuade: Acts in its Literary ContextLanham, MD: Fortress Academic/Rowman & Littlefield, 2020ISBN 978 1 9787 0660 6 I am delighted to receive my copy of my student Dr Eric Clouston’s revised doctoral thesis, How Ancient Narratives Persuade: Acts in its Literary Context. Scholars have long studied the speeches in Acts as persuasive; Eric looks at how the whole book functions as persuasion, by comparing it with other first-century Jewish writers: Philo, Josephus, the author of Joseph and Aseneth, and the Continue reading →

Some helpful pieces on planning and study

16 September 2019 by Steve Walton
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I’ve been finding a number of really helpful pieces on different aspects of planning, research and study recently, and here share three of my favourites. Here is a belter of a piece by the wonderful Katherine Firth about ‘Taking a critical distance break’, explaining the very helpful process of stepping back from a project you’re engrossed in, to give yourself time and head space to see what’s really going on, what’s most important, how things fit together, etc. Here is a very helpful piece on Continue reading →

A fascinating discussion of Matthew Novenson’s The Grammar of Messianism

24 July 2019 by Steve Walton
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There’s a really interesting conversation about Matthew Novenson’s fascinating The Grammar of Messianism going on at Syndicate, the home of many such book discussions, at present. A key claim of the book is that it helps to think about ‘Messiah’ passages in Jewish and Christian texts as engaging in a ‘language game’ in which they use the term in a variety of ways—and this is better than the ‘idealist’ tradition of constructing one view of ‘Messiah’ and then reading the texts in the light of Continue reading →

Tavis Bohlinger on choosing the life of the mind

18 February 2019 by Steve Walton
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Tavis Bohlinger posted this excellent reflection on choosing the life of the mind, highly relevant for scholars, doctoral students, and those considering doctoral study. He has kindly given me permission to share it here as a ‘guest post’ on my blog. Over to Tavis… Why, in the face of material prosperity and the endless production of greater and better goods, would anybody choose the life of the mind? I use the definite article with purpose. There are plural “lives” of intellectual priority that one might Continue reading →