Tag Archives: Paul

Love: a two-part sermon

Below are the two parts of a sermon on love based on Matthew 22:34-40 and 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8, recorded for my church’s online service for Sunday 25 October 2020. The first part focuses on Jesus’s teaching on love (Matthew; c. 16 mins), and the second Paul, Timothy and Silas as examples of love in action (1 Thessalonians; c. 8 mins). Comments welcome!

A new book on healing and exorcism in second temple Judaism and the New Testament

Mikael Tellbe & Tommy Wasserman, eds.Healing and Exorcism in Second Temple Judaism and Early ChristianityWUNT 2/511; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019; ISBN 978-3-16-158936-2 Another month, another new book! Just out from Mohr Siebeck is this collection of essays from an excellent conference hosted by Tommy Wasserman and Mikael Tellbe at the theological college in Örebro, Sweden. I hugely enjoyed participating in the conference (see my report here), and am now delighted to see the revised papers published—with one or two additions, including a very helpful essay Continue reading →

A fascinating discussion of Matthew Novenson’s The Grammar of Messianism

There’s a really interesting conversation about Matthew Novenson’s fascinating The Grammar of Messianism going on at Syndicate, the home of many such book discussions, at present. A key claim of the book is that it helps to think about ‘Messiah’ passages in Jewish and Christian texts as engaging in a ‘language game’ in which they use the term in a variety of ways—and this is better than the ‘idealist’ tradition of constructing one view of ‘Messiah’ and then reading the texts in the light of Continue reading →

Review: Tom Wright, Paul: A Biography

I’ve just had my review of Tom Wright’s Paul: A Biography (London: SPCK/San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018) published in the excellent Review and Expositor. For those with online access to the journal, you can read the final version here. If you don’t have online access, by kind permission of the journal, you can read the accepted version here. This is a fun book!