What have the Pythons ever done for us?

In Marginalia Review of Books online, St Mary’s University, Twickenham PhD student Sarah Prime has published a very good summary and review of the conference on the movie ‘The Life of Brian’, held at King’s College London in the summer. Well worth reading—she identifies some very good issues arising from the papers and conversations at the conference.

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 the canonical and non-canonical Gospels

A highlight of the British New Testament Conference this year was Dr Simon Gathercole’s scintillating and provocative plenary paper, ‘Jesus, the Apostolic Gospel and the Gospels’. Dr Gathercole is Senior Lecturer in New Testament in the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge, and in this paper he asked whether there is anything distinctive about the four canonical Gospels relative to the other Gospels we have. This is a hot question in New Testament Studies at present, for study of the non-canonical Gospels is a growth industry (to which Dr Gathercole himself Continue reading →

Two interesting posts by Larry Hurtado on Acts

Professor Larry Hurtado has an excellent blog on New Testament Studies, and he’s always fun and stimulating to read. He’s recently put up two very helpful and useful posts on key issues in recent scholarship in Acts, and they are rich in valuable bibliographical resources, not least on the text of Acts. They are here and here. Highly recommended.

Classic New Testament Studies articles for the 60th anniversary

I am grateful to Larry Hurtado for drawing my attention to the excellent page of ‘classic’ articles from the journal New Testament Studies which have been made freely available until 31 December to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the journal. The articles have been chosen by the present editor, Professor Francis Watson, and he’s chosen well. NTS is one of the top journals in the field, and has published some very important articles over the years. There are some crackers here, too, not least—for those of us Continue reading →