Posts tagged as:

Paul

Gaius is not Stephanas

November 28, 2009

Richard Fellows suggests with many that in the Corinthian Church Gaius and Titius Justus are to be identified as the same person. He goes a step further and suggests the man with this good proud Roman name is also to be known by a Greek nickname and identified with Stephanas.

The name “Stephanas” means “crowned” or [...]

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Conspiring against Tom Wright

November 16, 2009

I’d like to thank Jon Swales for drawing attention to this. He is surprised that Themelios asked John Piper’s executive assistant to review Tom Wright’s robust demolition of Piper’s attack on the New Perspective. He is not surprised that the review is unfavourable.
One may suspect the influence of the general editor, one Don Corleone Carson. [...]

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Messianic Judaism: just say no!

November 14, 2009

One of the subjects on which I am prone to irrational rants (I know, I know you can’t believe I would do any such thing) is so-called Messianic Judaism. It is the ghastly love-child of a certain type American dispensationalist fundamentalism and a theologically ignorant ahistorical romanticism.
Yesterday Claude Mariottini posted a link to an article [...]

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Rescuing priesthood from Witherington’s “perfectly clear” NT

October 26, 2009

Ben Witherington has a post up today on Why arguments against women in ministry aren’t biblical. I shall assume that in his discussions of the arguments offered by evangelicals on the basis of specific texts he knows what he is talking about. I find them rather bizarre but I imagine he must have those arguments [...]

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Whose righteousness? Translating Paul with prejudice.

October 22, 2009

Lutheran interpretations of Paul tend to be ingrained in translations. It is one of the reasons it can be hard for New Perspective views to gain a hearing. Minds conditioned by centuries of Protestant translation hear NPP views as distorting the text, when all they are doing is offering a different reading.
I suggest a case [...]

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Coming up: Tom Wright’s coherent Paul

October 15, 2009

Andy Goodliff has a blurb for Tom Wright’s big book on Paul, together with some fairly pertinent questions.

Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Volume IV of Christian Origins and the Question of God) combines history and theology (exegesis being a branch of both), using the worldview-analysis outlined earlier. I shall examine (i) Paul’s characteristic praxis, [...]

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Mamma Mia! It’s the Abba Daddy debate again

October 11, 2009

Yesterday, Rick Brannan raised again the whole question of the meaning of “Abba” in the New Testament. I guess that whatever anyone now says, a semi-charismatic bowdlerisation of Jeremias’ initial position will continue to flop around the prayer meetings. There will always be someone who thinks it means “Daddy”. It doesn’t.
However, it seems to me [...]

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Justifying the flesh as a good translation of Paul

September 3, 2009

Mark Goodacre makes a pointed criticism of the NIV’s use of “sinful nature” as a translation of sarx – flesh. Matthew Montonini follows up with some discussion of Moo’s position, linking to a paper of his on the translation of sarx in Romans.
I agree that it is actually a difficult word to translate, not least [...]

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Hey, help you Paul scholars (and others) out there!

August 27, 2009

Does anyone out there know of any serious post-Sanders attempt to use Paul (and a kind of mirror-reading of him) as a primary source for reconstructing first-century Pharisaism?
I’m aware that would be a risky business and need a very careful methodology. However, it seems to me that, if you are persuaded by Steve Mason’s (inter [...]

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The lost leaders of Corinth?

August 25, 2009

It seems a fairly common assumption that the way in which Paul deals with the problems at Corinth suggests that there is no clear leadership there. If there were elders, or some such office of leadership, then why is it so absent from Paul’s attempt to bring some sort of order to the Corinthian chaos. [...]

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