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 am going to take the big book on hols and will hope to blog about it.

A valuable online resource from SBL

  The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) have just released their excellent new online resource, Bible Odyssey. It’s a very useful set of articles, aimed at a ‘lay’ audience (although it will be of great value to students, I reckon), about aspects of the Bible. It is well-organised around a series of ‘hubs’, which are places, people or passages. This release of the site has 20-24 items under each of those links, and then each place, person or passage leads to a bunch of other Continue reading →

Jews or Judaeans?

There seems to be a growing movement to use ‘Judaeans’ to translate Ἰουδαῖοι in the New Testament and other ancient writings (e.g. Josephus), influenced particularly to Steve Mason’s key article, ‘Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: problems of categorization in ancient history’, Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period 38 (2007) 457-512. Here’s a fascinating piece by Adele Reinhartz responding to this view and arguing for the continuing use of ‘Jews’—well worth reading.