Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
Dr Tim Murray offers this review of Bruce Longenecker’s latest book, The Materiality of Early Christ Devotion Our historical imagination matters Most of what we know about early Christianity we know from texts. Indeed, the degree to which these Jesus-communities engaged in textual activities (reading, writing, memorising, teaching, copying) and the variety of their literary …
The theme for the Tyndale New Testament Study group this year is Paul within Judaism, and we are meeting from Wednesday 1st to Friday 3rd July 2026 at High Leigh Conference Centre in Hertfordshire, just 20 minutes north of London by train and 45 minutes from Cambridge. The subject of Paul within Judaism has been a …
It is fascinating to see the way that traditions have grown up around the celebration of Christmas, and how many of those traditions are not merely absent from the Bible, but in fact contradict not only the content of the Bible, but the heart of its message. Somehow, where the birth narratives in Scripture are …
It is fascinating to see the way that traditions have grown up around the celebration of Christmas, and how many of those traditions are not merely absent from the Bible, but in fact contradict not only the content of the Bible, but the heart of its message. Somehow, where the birth narratives in Scripture are …
This is the time of year when various Christmas tropes come around again—and therefore it is worth repeated articles from previous years. I previously published this one in 2020 and 2021. One of the repeated themes of short Christmas expositions is that, in the nativity story, we see God coming to the ‘poor’, and as …
One of the repeated themes of short Christmas expositions is that, in the nativity story, we see God coming to the ‘poor’, and as a result the main message of Christmas is that we should pay particular attention to the ‘poor’. I put the term in inverted commas, because in both these contexts the term …
Dr Tim Murray offers this review article of Group Survival in the Ancient Mediterranean: Rethinking Material Conditions in the Landscape of Jews and Christians by Richard Last and Philip Harland: Imagining the Early Church Both academics and pastors are frequently required to reconstruct ‘what it was like’ in the early church to make sense of the New …
One of the repeated themes of short Christmas expositions is that, in the nativity story, we see God coming to the ‘poor’, and as a result the main message of Christmas is that we should pay particular attention to the ‘poor’. I put the term in inverted commas, because in both these contexts the term …
Bruce Longenecker is Professor of Christian Origins and W. W. Melton Chair of Religion at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. He has a long-standing interest in the cultural context of the early Christian movement, and has just published In Stone and Story, an exploration of the Roman world of the first century, and how Christian faith engaged with, …
