Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
In the Ephesus Museum in Selcuk there is the head and left forearm of a colossal acrolith (a statue with stone head and limbs and body of wood) which is labelled there (and in the ruins of Ephesus) as a statue of Domitian. However, I think there is a strong case for believing this is …
Maggie and I are planning to lead another study trip to western Turkey next autumn, from Tuesday 28th September to Thursday 7th October 2027 inclusive visiting Istanbul and the seven cities of Revelation, plus some other key sites of archaeological importance. It is a great time of year to go, as the weather is warm …
The discovery of the Vindolanda tablets in the 1970s, and since then the Uley tablets and the Bloomberg tablets, has transformed our understanding of ordinary, functional literacy in the Roman world. This has a major impact on how we understand the world of the New Testament and the way that the New Testament was written …
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 …
Please note: this trip is now also booked up! If you would like to be on a waiting list in case of cancellations, or would like to be notified of future trips, please email our partner Steve Upton at st***@************ca.com. We are planning to offer a trip to Paul’s Greece in April 2027, the Seven …
PLEASE NOTE: I am very sorry—but the trip is now full for 2026. If you would like to be added to a reserve list in the case of a cancellation (there are four places that still need final confirmation), or you would like to be sent information for the 2027 trip when plans are available, …
When we read the letters of Paul, we often skip over the introductions and the conclusions in our impatience to get to the heart of the letter. But in doing so, we might miss some things that tell us a lot about Paul, his ministry, his material cultural context, and even how we managed to …
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 …
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, …
