Tag Archives: Bible

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

7 August 2014 by Steve Walton
4 comments
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
6 comments
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
One comment
  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
2 comments
  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 →

An evil success! The St Mary’s conference on evil

26 May 2014 by Steve Walton
7 comments
I’m delighted to report that the first conference organised by the Centre for Social-Scientific Study of the Bible at St Mary’s University, Twickenham was a resounding success. About fifty of us met to hear papers and engage in fascinating conversation about the topic of evil across a wide range of texts in the Second Temple and early Christian period. My esteemed colleague Chris Keith had done a masterly job in putting this together. Here are some notes on papers which caught my ear—that’s not to say Continue reading →