It is remarkable that new documents from the apostolic age should still come to light, but I’m privileged to offer a rough first draft translation of this newly discovered personal letter from James to Peter. Unfortunately it sheds no additional light on the difficult question of relating Galatians and Acts, but does have a strangely [...]
I’ve been meaning to find some time – and failing miserably – to interact with Gordon Fee’s Pauline Christology. In particular I want to take a long hard look at his attempts to place Wisdom christology beyond use. I must say that I approach this idea with no expectation of being convinced by Fee. This [...]
This would have been a comment to this previous post. However, I want to admit my mistakes up front. I have misunderstood Chris Tilling. Possibly he has been too long in Germany to remember how comprehensible sentences work. But I don’t mind saying it, now he’s clarified himself in the comments: he’s right. (See how [...]
A couple of days ago I picked Chris Tilling up on his espousal of Tom Wright’s ideas about the exile. In a comment on my post he has clarified his language, but holds determinedly to the point.
I meant that the two exiles were an obvious fact to the first century Jew. The law showed itself [...]
I’ve been reading Richard Burridge’s Imitating Jesus (Eerdemans 2007 ISBN 978-0-8028-4458-3), a book subtitled “An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics.” This is a book that has, at its heart, a very simple argument, worked out in detail in a number of quite densely argued chapters. The key proposal is that both the gospels, belonging [...]
I’d like to thank Loren Rosson for offering his argument in favour of the North Galatian hypothesis in response to my question. For a variety of reasons I am not persuaded. I don’t think any of these counter arguments I offer here depend on the reconciliation of Acts and Galatians 2:10, nor on reconstructions of [...]
The worst argument I have ever heard for the idea that Paul wrote Galatians to the North Galatians, the ethnic Galatians, rather than to the southern Roman province was this: “It would have been quite insulting – and ethnic slur – for Paul to refer to those living in the Roman province as “Galatians”. (I [...]
Michael Bird begins 2008 by announcing the demise of the “New Perspective on Paul” era. While I regard NPP as a useful shorthand for describing a number of views, I’m not entirely sure the differences between many of its leading proponents aren’t nearly as great as those between “NPP scholars” and others. I’m not totally [...]
(For the earlier posts on Piper’s book The Future of Justification, see, in order, here, here, here and here. I expect this to be the final post in this short series).
Another part of Wright’s summary of Paul that Piper objects to strenuously is his characterisation of the gospel. For Wright, the good news is understood [...]
(For the earlier posts on Piper’s book The Future of Justification, see, in order, here, here and here)
Piper spends two chapters looking at justification and law-court imagery. This has been at the heart of Wright’s argument for nearly three decades. Wright argues that God’s final judgement is in view, and that justification is about [...]
