Tim Murray

What were the early Christian communities like?

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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 … Continue Reading

Stillness, opportunity and the local church during the pandemic

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Tim Murray writes: Like every other church, we (at Amblecote Christian Centre near Stourbridge) faced an unknown situation when the government started restricting large gatherings and it became clear that the pandemic was going to have a major impact on the shape of our lives. The unknown was not just ‘what we would do as a church’ but … Continue Reading

How do we discern ethics in the writings of Paul?

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Tim Murray offers this review of Ruben Zimmermann’s The Logic of Love: Discovering Paul’s ‘implicit ethics’ through 1 Corinthians (Lexington/Fortress, 2018). Why care about this book? It seems to me that any of us who care for the state of the church and academic theology (including biblical studies) are likely regularly to find ourselves confronting important … Continue Reading

How important was class struggle in the early Jesus movement?

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Tim Murray writes: One of the pleasures of the last few weeks was the chance to review the collection of essays edited by Robert Myles, recently published under the title Class Struggle in the New Testament (Lexington/Fortress, 2019). In a publishing culture that increasingly values quantity of output over any discernible value or purpose, it refreshing to … Continue Reading