Call for papers on Acts

14 January 2015 by Steve Walton
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My excellent co-chair Matthew Sleeman and I warmly invite offers of papers for the Book of Acts seminar at the British New Testament Conference in Edinburgh, 3-5 September 2015. Below is the call for papers; here’s a link to the A4 poster version as a pdf file which you can download—if you have access to the notice board in a Department of Theology, please do put it up. Please get in touch if you are interested—or tell others who you think might be interested. We welcome seminar Continue reading →

Come and do a PhD with me!

9 December 2014 by Steve Walton
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I have good news! We have had some extra places for PhD work in New Testament open up at St Mary’s University, Twickenham (London), where I’m Professorial Research Fellow. You’d be supervised by me, perhaps in collaboration with my excellent New Testament colleague, Professor Chris Keith. However, to start in October 2015, you’ll need to move pretty smartly—applications need to be in by 12 January 2015. If you aren’t in a hurry to start in the autumn (fall for those in North America), we have a Continue reading →

Larry Hurtado on the ‘Hellenists’ in Acts

4 December 2014 by Steve Walton
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Here’s another excellent piece by Larry Hurtado, expounding the view which I have also argued in print, that there is zero evidence that the ‘Hellenists’ in Acts 6:1, etc. were a group who held a different theological position to the ‘Hebrews’. This view has a history going back to F. C. Baur in the nineteenth century, and reaching through to Martin Hengel and Jimmy Dunn in our day. Reconstructions of the development of earliest Christianity are built like castles in the air on this assumption: Continue reading →

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 →