After the landmark work of E. P. Sanders, the task of rightly accounting for Paul’s relationship to Judaism has dominated the last forty years of Pauline scholarship. Pitre, Barber, and Kincaid argue that Paul is best viewed as a new covenant Jew, a designation that allows the apostle to be fully Jewish, yet in a manner centered on the person and work of Jesus the Messiah. This new covenant Judaism provides the key that unlocks the door to many of the difficult aspects of Pauline theology.
Paul, a New Covenant Jew is a rigorous, yet accessible overview of Pauline theology intended for ecumenical audiences. In particular, it aims to be the most useful and up to date text on Paul for Catholic Seminarians. The book engages the best recent scholarship on Paul from both Protestant and Catholic interpreters and serves as a launching point for ongoing Protestant-Catholic dialogue.
The volume is currently available for preorder.
Freedom begins a new blog series, “Working in the Age of Distraction” with a goal “to explore the various tools, techniques, and strategies used by real professionals to help them succeed in a distracted world.”is
The series’s first interview with fiction writer J. T. Ellison. Of course, besides Michael Bird, not many biblical scholars write fiction. But Ellison’s core practices and advice about the craft of writing can definitely prove helpful to writers in biblical studies as well.
A few choice excerpts are:
The glory and excitement of I’m writing a new book! or I’ve just finished writing a new book! is so fleeting. The vast majority of this job is simply sitting down at your computer day after day after day and building upon the work you’ve done in the days prior.
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I also always, always, have an all is lost moment around the 75k[-word] mark, though the last two books, it didn’t hit until 90k.
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Writing begets writing.
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The backing up of work is an underrated but vital part of the process.
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The quality of your work diminishes exponentially if you’re distracted.
For the balance of the interview, see Freedom’s original blog post.
