Book Announcement: Porter & Dyer (eds), Paul and Ancient Rhetoric

One of our contributors, along with a friend and colleague Bryan Dyer, has co-edited another book, Paul and Ancient Rhetoric: Theory and Practice in the Hellenistic Context (CUP, 2016). It contains a collection of 13 essays on Paul and rhetoric, surrounding the question of whether or not Paul was an ancient rhetor, and what exactly […]

A Response to Runge’s Response to Porter’s Response to Runge in the latest BBR

Not too long ago, I received the latest issue of the Bulletin for Biblical Research (BBR), the journal of the Institute for Biblical Research (IBR), of which I am a fairly recent member. I appreciate IBR for its attention to scholarship within an evangelical framework and am excited to be a contributing member of this […]

Book Announcement: Paul and Gnosis (Porter and Yoon, eds)

Two of the contributors to this blog have recently co-edited a collection of essays, Paul and Gnosis, the ninth volume in the Pauline Studies (PAST) series by Brill (our third contributor also has a chapter in it). The series has been one of the more popular ones by Brill, covering a wide range of topics […]

Thoughts on Koine Greek Pronunciation

Believe it or not, there are some strong opinions on how to pronounce Koine Greek, a language that has been dead for over seventeen-hundred years. For example, Constantine Campbell, in his recent book Advances in the Study of Greek: New Insights for Reading the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015) (see reviews of this book […]

Book Announcement: Porter, When Paul Met Jesus

One of the contributors to this blog, our most prolific author, Stanley Porter, has another book published called When Paul Met Jesus: How an Idea Got Lost in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Porter revives a theory set forth earlier by William Ramsay, Johannes Weiss, and James Hope Moulton, that Paul had seen Jesus […]

Book Announcement: Porter, Sacred Tradition in the New Testament

One of our bloggers, Stanley E. Porter, has recently come out with a new book published by Baker Academic called Sacred Tradition in the New Testament: Tracing Old Testament Themes in the Gospels and Epistles. It is not your standard OT in the NT treatment but examines rigorously the methodology behind the subject of the […]

“Did Jesus Really Exist?” and Social Memory

Brian Bethune, in a recent article, “Did Jesus Really Exist,” published in Maclean’s Magazine (28 March/4 April 2016), writes, “The reason Biblical historians cannot find even the outline of a historical Jesus, argues an increasingly persuasive chorus of challengers, is that there is nothing to find: Jesus Christ never lived at all” (39). Here we […]

Third and Final Post on Campbell’s Advances in the Study of Greek

In this final post, I deal with chapters 6-10 of Campbell’s book (see Part One and Part Two). This final post might seem longer than the first two parts, and in fact is, because I found it necessary to say more about the chapters on discourse analysis. Chapter 6 focuses upon idiolect, genre, and register. […]

Requiem for Sheffield

Most of us now know that Sheffield Phoenix Press (SPP) announced last week that it was shutting down its efforts. The sad and unfortunate demise of SPP marks the fall of the last pillar of what had supported the Sheffield School of biblical studies. Sheffield as a department of biblical studies and as an avenue […]

Commemorating the 200th Birthday of Constantine Tischendorf

This article might have come a bit late for its stated title, but it is nevertheless never late for commemorating the life and work of this important, but perhaps much neglected, scholar who was responsible for providing the primary manuscript basis of the Greek New Testament Bible scholars use today. Less than a month ago, […]