Tag Archives: Bible

Reading Tom Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (4)

14 August 2014 by Steve Walton
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Here the fourth of my series of posts as I read through Tom Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. The earlier posts are here, here, and here. This post focuses on chapter 4, ‘A Cock for Asclepius: “Religion” and “Culture” in Paul’s World’. The chapter title echoes Socrates’ final words to his friend Crito after Socrates had taken hemlock to commit suicide—he instructed Crito to offer a cock to the god of healing, Asclepius, probably as a thanksgiving for the ease of his death. Wright’s point Continue reading →

Reading Tom Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2)

7 August 2014 by Steve Walton
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This is my second post as I’m reading through N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (= PFG). For introduction to the series, see here. After his preface and introductory chapter, where he engages with Philemon and lots of methodological stuff, Wright turns to a series of four chapters on the dominant worldviews of Paul’s day: Judaism, Greek thought, Graeco-Roman religion and culture, and the Roman imperial scene. Chapter 2, which this post focuses on, is about Judaism, especially Pharisaism. This is a very readable chapter Continue reading →

Reading Tom Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (1)

6 August 2014 by Steve Walton
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I’m reading through N. T. Wright’s massive Paul and the Faithfulness of God (hereafter PFG), so I shall put up a series of periodic posts on what I’m reading and my thoughts about it. Disclaimer: I am not a Pauline specialist, so these are the views of an interested amateur, rather than someone like Simon Gathercole, whose valuable review of PFG I posted about recently. I did substantial review articles of the second and third books in Wright’s big series Christian Origins and the Question of God, namely Jesus and Continue reading →

Simon Gathercole on Tom Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God

26 July 2014 by Steve Walton
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  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

9 July 2014 by Steve Walton
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  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 →