Rediscovering Ancient Hymns: My Upcoming Talks at Cambridge, Oxford, and LST

As my research and writing on ancient hymns among Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians has slowly made its way through the wider world of scholarship over the last two decades, I have now been invited to Cambridge, Oxford, and London School of Theology in Feb 2026 to deliver three lectures on my work. It has been an enjoyable process of rediscovering the research and ideas that went into my three books on hymns that I wrote between 2005 and 2018. It is also personally very exciting as this will be my first trip to these renowned centers of research and learning. Below are the three talks. I begin with the last chronologically, as this is the first invitation I received and is the one that started the ball rolling on this “lecture tour” of the UK.

1) “Song in the Ancient World: Echoes of Religion and Resistance.” Cambridge University, Darwin College Lectures Series, Feb 13.

The Darwin College Lecture Series takes one topic each year and, in a series of eight lectures, explores it from a wide range of lenses from across the arts, humanities, and sciences. This year’s topic is “song” and my talk will look at how hymns and religious songs functioned in the ancient world not only as ways of praising the divine but also of communicating with the human audiences that treasured them. This talk is to an educated audience of non-specialists and has been so much fun to prepare. I am happy to share that this talk will be available on YouTube following the lecture and will also be published in a forthcoming volume from Cambridge University Press. I'll share the link once it is available but here is the information on the series and my talk: https://www.darwin.cam.ac.uk/lecture-series/

2) “Hymns in the New Testament? A Conversation.” Oxford University, Keble College, Feb 6.

I am grateful to Professor Markus Bockmuehl’s invitation to present my research at the Oxford New Testament Seminar and to have what he calls a conversazione with another scholar, Andrew Cowan. Andrew’s recent doctoral dissertation reaches some decidedly different conclusions than I do about the possibility and value of identifying hymnic passages in the New Testament. So we will have the opportunity to share our research and have some dialogue about pathways forward based on our findings.

3) “Seeing Jesus through the Lens of New Testament Hymns: Exegetical Challenges and Interpretive Possibilities.” London School of Theology, Feb 11.

In this talk I review some of the challenges raised by scholars (like Andrew Cowan) related to engaging with New Testament hymnic texts and suggest some ways forward that engage the challenges and also open up new areas to explore. I am grateful to Professor Graham Twelftree and Professor Cornelis Bennema for extending this kind invitation to speak to the LST Research Seminar.

Though the talks will draw on material from each of my earlier books, the one that is most accessible and still widely available (and the most affordable!) is my 2018 New Testament Christological Hymns: Exploring Texts, Contexts, and Significance (IVP Academic).

Three things have stood out to me in digging back into this material and preparing these talks.

• First, I am happy to see that I was asking good questions even in the research I was doing twenty years ago. And it seems to me that much of my work holds up pretty well so far.
• Second, more recent research (mine and others) has helped to bring to light additional questions, perhaps more important than those of a decade or two ago. This is exciting to see the ways in which knowledge and creative inquiry are continuing to develop in new directions.
• Third, I am excited to see that there is still much more that can be explored in these hymnic and poetically-styled passages in the New Testament. As poetry and elevated prose with allusive language, references, and metaphors, there are many more ways to gain new insights into these texts and their significance.

Probably one of the most fun parts for me in a university environment is to see how these ways of exploring ancient religious texts and their themes do not live simply in the ancient world. These approaches invite a new appreciation for the kinds of creative ways we as members of a university community (faculty, students, staff, alumni, community partners) can engage our contemporary world with its unique challenges and use these same approaches to find opportunities for nourishing our spirits as we grow and learn together.

Book Release Today!

Very excited to announce that today is the official release date of my book. New Testament Christological Hymns: Exploring Texts, Contexts, and Significance is a study of hymns and poetic passages in the New Testament that describe Jesus in exalted language and give us a window into the origins of Christian worship. I received the author copies two weeks ago and am really happy with the final product. IVP Academic did a very impressive job with this book from start to finish. This book represents the findings of my investigations into early Christian hymns over the last fifteen years. Please check it out if you have an interest in the development of early Christian worship and early Christian engagement with Jewish and Greco-Roman culture.

It is available at the IVP Academic site (on sale today) and also on Amazon at my author page.

Lucian's "The Ignorant Book Collector:" When a Classic Hits a Little too Close to Home

My former professor and good friend David Aune recently passed on to me a generous selection of some of the volumes he had collected from the Loeb Classical Library. I was thrilled to receive this kind gift since, as a doctoral student, I had only been able to acquire but a bare minimum of Loeb volumes, and in the intervening years, I have had little need to enhance my collection (being close to a university library at all times). But since my graduate student days I, like many, had become enamored with the sharp wit and incisive prose of Lucian (a second century Greek writer and satirist). My favorite was his "Alexander the False Prophet," and I am proud to say that I did already own the volume that contains that piece. So I was thus quite delighted to find among the volumes that David sent me volume three of the eight volumes of Lucian included in the LCL. Given my predilection for Lucian, this was the first of the volumes David sent me that I chose to spend some time looking through (with my apologies to Homer and Plutarch). On perusing the table of contents I was intrigued to find an essay entitled "The Ignorant Book Collector." As expected, the essay highlights the folly of an individual who prides himself in acquiring a large library of fine volumes in the hopes that he will gain a reputation as a learned and wise man among his peers. As I prepare to unload these green and red Loeb volumes onto my own office shelves, I cannot help but pause to consider the irony of having received this fine set of books in which the first thing I read is an essay which criticizes book owners who are not worthy of the books they possess. And so I'll quote Harmon's translation of a particular convicting paragraph of this essay:

What good, you strange person, will it do you to own them, when you do not understand their beauty and will never make use of it one whit more than a blind man would enjoy beauty in favourites ? To be sure you look at your books with your eyes open and quite as much as you like, and you read some of them aloud with great fluency, keeping your eyes in advance of your lips; but I do not consider that enough, unless you know the merits and defects of each passage in their contents, unless you understand what every sentence means, how to construe the words, what expressions have been accurately turned by the writer in accordance with the canon of good use, and what are false, illegitimate, and counterfeit. (Lucian, Vol. 3, LCL, p. 177 trans Harmon)

Ouch. To be sure, Lucian raises a high standard of what it would take to really be counted as a learned and erudite reader of ancient texts. I don't dare to hope to go so far as to "know the merits and defects of each passage" in my new collection of Loeb volumes. But I am reminded by his sarcasm and wit, once again, that the value of the classics for a scholar of Christianity and Judaism in antiquity is not so much in understanding the origins of key words or interesting parallels or giving in to "parallelomania," but rather in coming to grips with the thought world which informs ancient Greek and Roman authors of all stripes. With such a broad understanding, scholars of early Judaism and early Christianity can more fully appreciate the world in which educated Jews and Christians contributed their own works and can more effectively articulate the kind of meaningful connections by which these authors engaged the thoughts and hopes and fears of that world in light of their understanding of the actions of the God of Israel in history.

Accordingly, I am grateful to David for this kind gift. And I am energized, once again, as I aim not to be deserving of being counted as a distant descendant of Lucian's ignorant book collector, but instead to be counted among those who truly benefit from wide reading. Not to be known as someone with a passion for expensive books, but rather to be known as one who has begun to take the time to understand these books in ways that open up understanding and enhance my ability to think carefully, critically, and creatively. But for now, I should probably set as my first goal just to unpack the boxes and start reading.

Paul in the eyes of the Greeks and Romans

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Apostle

My graduate seminar on Paul and Early Judaism has just worked through three important chapters from N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God on the philosophical, religious, and imperial contexts of the Greco-Roman world. Students were impressed (and rightly so) with the way in which Wright presented this material in an engaging style which provided both an overview as well as some more detailed analysis of themes and issues relevant for the study of Paul. For my part, I was very pleased with these chapters as well as with the discussion they engendered in class. Students were brought face to face with problems of terminology and anachronism in discussing these ancient cultural phenomena with modern categories, and were challenged to grapple with ancient texts and practices on their own terms.

For example, the generic and seemingly straightforward term "religion" means something quite different today than when we consider the religious world of antiquity. Wright takes pains to show that religion penetrated every aspect of ancient life: home, city, calendar, affairs of state, architecture, art, and so on. Wright explains, “We cannot begin to understand how ordinary people in the first century thought, imagined, reasoned, believed, prayed and acted unless we try to get inside their myth-soaked culture” (255). And while Wright notes that "religion was everywhere because the gods were everywhere” (274), nevertheless this level of understanding about the omnipresence of the gods did not lead to a great concern about morality, doctrine, or even belief (as we might expect of religions today); rather ancient religion was primarily about proper performance of sacrifice or other rituals for the sake of the welfare of the polis. Fulfilling obligations to the gods through sacrifice and ritual was the way to ensure divine favor and to avoid divine displeasure for the sake of the well-being of the city. This is something far different than modern conceptions of religion, particularly in the West. And just as importing our notions of "religion" into the study of ancient religious practices is problematic, so it is with our notion of "philosophy" as well. Rather than being an exercise in academic reflection and theoretical speculation, philosophy in the first-century CE was much more of a "street-level" activity that was concerned with promoting a particular way of life, the good life. Philosophy also had a good deal to say about the nature of the gods and appropriate human responses to them, as well as offering a critique of some religious practices. By raising these kinds of issues, and inviting readers to consider the beliefs, practices, cultures, and customs of the ancients on their own terms, Wright has gone a long way toward setting the stage for a richer understanding of Paul and how he fit into his world. 

One question which this material raises is, "How would Paul and his work of forming communities of disciples have appeared to outside observers? What would your average Corinthian or Ephesian (assuming for a moment there was such an average person) have thought Paul was up to?"

As the comments above about the religious and cultural context of the Greco-Roman world suggest, whatever such a person might have thought, they would probably not have thought that Paul was introducing a new religion. He founded no temple, initiated no sacrificial rites, and was just not concerned with the kinds of things that Greco-Roman religious practice was concerned with. Rather, by traveling throughout the large cities of the mediterranean world, gathering students about himself, gaining the support of wealthy patrons, writing letters of teaching and instruction to his students, exhorting his communities to live their lives in a particular way based on a particular view of ultimate reality, refuting opposing views, critiquing pagan religious practices, and spending his time expounding the meaning of ancient writings and the teachings of Jesus, Paul might have looked much more like a popular philosopher.

Taking this line of thought, E. A. Judge, in a classic essay from 1961, articulated the thesis that Paul may be viewed as a "sophist," not in the pejorative sense of the term as a pseudo-intellectual windbag but in the sense that he adopted the practices of the intellectual, sophistic teachers of the first and second centuries. He explains that he considers Paul a sophist “without prejudice to the value or sincerity of his thought, nor to its independence of other philosophical schools” (539) and that "the term ‘sophist’ has been chosen for lack of a better, and is meant to include many scholars (quite apart from St. Paul!) who would have hotly rejected it” (539). These individuals were learned in rhetoric and also philosophy more broadly, and, because of their influence among the wealthy, and even among the Caesars, at their best “they were intellectual leaders of great eminence, not only in preserving the classical heritage but in guiding public policy and private morality in their own day” (540). Based on his adopting many of the practices of the sophists (by his own reporting in his letters with regard to sponsorship by wealthy patrons; development of a retinue of followers; and so forth) as well as with his emphasis on logos, reason, revealed secrets, gnosis, and his concern for ethics, Judge argues that “the Christian faith, therefore, as Paul expounds it, belongs with the doctrines of the philosophical schools rather than with the esoteric rituals of the mystery religions” (551).

Whether one accepts Judge's view or not, looking at Paul from this perspective of what his practices would have communicated to outside observers can help us to view Paul and his letters in fresh ways, and even open up aspects of Paul's teaching and practice that may otherwise be obscured by our modern reading lenses.

For anyone interested in exploring this issue further, Judge's essay has been reprinted in a collection of his essays, The First Christians in the Roman World (2008), many of which are excellent in their contribution to understanding the Greco-Roman world on its own terms.

Some comments on N. T. Wright's “Paul and the Faithfulness of God”

The preface and first chapter of Paul and the Faithfulness of God (now available on the Fortress Press website prior to the release of the book on Nov 1) provide a helpful glimpse at the scope and approach of N. T. Wright’s impressive new volume. While we await the full volume, here is a brief assessment of the preface and introductory chapter.

Those familiar with the approach and style of N. T. Wright will find few surprises, as this work is the culmination of years of research and writing on the letters of Paul. Wright continues working with the concept of worldview and mindset, maintains the critical-realist approach of the earlier volumes in the series, and seeks to situate Paul firmly within his Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts. Those new to his work will find in these pages a helpful introduction to the larger field of Pauline studies, particularly in his overview of the history of scholarship on Paul (pp. 37-43), which is condensed from his forthcoming companion volume on the history of interpretation of Paul.

Using a familiar analogy, Wright lays out the “puzzle pieces” with which any reconstruction of Paul’s thought-world and theology must deal. Among the pieces of the puzzle: being in Christ; the cross; justification; christology; apocalyptic; salvation history; the spirit; covenant; the law; monotheism; and resurrection. (41)

In each of these areas, in order to assess their importance for Paul, we will need to have some sense of their significance within the broader world of early Judaism, as well as how Paul may have adapted or developed his own new perspectives on these topics in light of his encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Given the complexity of first-century Judaism, as well as the limitations of our sources, this kind of work requires a good deal of caution to avoid imaginary constructs and generalizations against which Paul might be compared. Whether Wright’s picture is ultimately persuasive will require some significant engagement with the evidence he provides through the texts he exegetes throughout the remainder of the volume.

Wright, who is of course aware of these challenges, offers the following:

The main proposal of this book, then, which is advanced in Part III, is that there is indeed a way of analyzing and understanding Paul in which these several multi-layered dichotomies can be resolved, not indeed in a flat or simplistic way, but in that kind of harmony which often characterizes profound thinkers whose work not only touches on different topics but does so in different contexts and a variety of styles and tones of voice. (45)

The hypothesis I offer in this book is that we can find just such a vantage point when we begin by assuming that Paul remained a deeply Jewish theologian who had rethought and reworked every aspect of his native Jewish theology in the light of the Messiah and the spirit, resulting in his own vocational self-understanding as the apostle to the pagans. (46)

Using Paul's letter to Philemon as an example and a test case, Wright argues that messianic reconciliation across national, ethnic, social, and cultural lines is central to Paul:

The heart of it all, as already suggested, is koinōnia, a ‘partnership’ or ‘fellowship’ which is not static, but which enables the community of those who believe to grow together into a unity across the traditional divisions of the human race. This is a unity which is nothing other than the unity of Jesus Christ and his people – the unity, indeed, which Jesus Christ has won for his people precisely by his identifying with them and so, through his death and resurrection, effecting reconciliation between them and God. (16)

At this point one can readily applaud Wright for his efforts to situate Paul firmly within his Jewish context, as well as to consider how his location and mission within the context of the Roman Empire is significant for the development of his thought. The worldview/mindset approach allows for consideration of both of these facets in what I expect will be a deep and compelling way. Further, Wright’s concern to bring to the fore the challenging interrelationship between history and theology is to be affirmed as well.

While we should hesitate to offer any substantive critique of this volume based only on the first chapter, some of Wright’s comments cause me to wonder if he may underestimate the contribution that postmodern approaches to the study of Paul can make. I expect that Wright would agree that the kinds of questions raised by postcolonial, rhetorical, and feminist-critical methodologies can be useful tools even for those pursuing a more historical-critical and/or theological approach to Paul. Even so, it remains to be seen the extent to which Wright does or does not engage with the findings of newer critical methodologies as he examines Paul’s writings more closely in the chapters that follow.

In any event, readers can expect a challenging and rewarding experience looking at Paul through the lens of N. T. Wright’s massive volume.

Sarah Ruden's "Paul among the People"

I recently read Sarah Ruden’s Paul among the People (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010). In this volume Ruden, a trained classicist, examines several aspects of Paul’s writings by comparing them with ancient Greco-Roman writings. The topics she covers include perspectives on sin and sinful behavior, sex, homosexuality, marriage, slavery, and submission to rulers. In each case she brings clarity to Greek and Roman perspectives on these topics, and sheds light on Paul’s meaning by reading Paul against the Greco-Roman backdrop. In some cases, her readings are very plausible and provide much needed correctives to contemporary mis-readings of such passages (chapters 2, 4, 6, for example). In other cases, in spite of creative effort, the results are not as persuasive (chapter 5, on Paul and the state). Even in cases where her readings do not convince, she offers a rich treasury of primary source materials for contemporary readers of Paul to consider.

In this regard, Ruden is to be commended for her fresh approach to reading Paul in his Greco-Roman context. She seeks to defend Paul from negative interpretations and views such as she herself had previously had. As she began reading Paul in context, she writes,

It seemed to me that many reactions to him across the centuries had been distorted or incomplete in ways that would not have survived a look at his main contemporary and near-contemporary audiences through their own books. For every implausible reading of Paul, there were Greco-Roman works through the lens of which he showed more plausibly (4)

Ruden, in spite of having been what she refers to as a “knee-jerk anti-Paulist” (5), has a high view of Paul and his contributions to the history of Western thought. She credits Paul with foundational ideas that shape all of Western history: “no other intellect contributed as much to making us who we are” (xix). Nevertheless, she still seems to maintain some commonplace stereotypes of Paul: “His faults are obvious enough: his bad temper, his self-righteousness, his anxiety” (4-5). And “he never overcame his touchiness, his fussiness, or his arrogance” (26). On the buildup to 1 Cor 13 in 1 Cor 12:29-30, she writes, “The lecture is showing typical irritability” (171).  She seems to cast events and conflicts in Paul’s life in the worst light: “Paul is just not a nice guy” (183).

It seems to me that greater attention to another aspect of Paul’s Greco-Roman context might have helped Ruden position Paul even a little more sympathetically. Specifically, attention to the context of ancient rhetoric and debate, particularly the agonistic paradigm in which Paul wrote, could perhaps help to reframe those otherwise stereotypical ways of reading Paul. It may be that his apparent arrogance, bad temper, and so forth, as Ruden (and others) have perceived them, were simply reflections of how an educated person wrote to persuade others in antiquity (cf. the work of Margaret Mitchell). Sensibilities about how to persuade others in the first century were indeed quite different than our own.

Regardless of this omission about the significance of Pauline rhetoric, overall Ruden rightly appraises Paul’s approach: “The first efforts at setting Paul’s words against the words of polytheistic authors helped explain why early Christianity was so compelling, growing as no popular movement ever had before” (7). In coming to grips with the essence of Paul's message to his communities of believers, Ruden explains: “To those asking, ‘But how do we live, right here, right now?’ his answer was always in essence the same: ‘In a way worthy of God’s infinite love for each of you” (7). Ruden's volume provides some new perspectives on how contemporary readers of Paul can ask and answer that same question.

I hope this volume will also encourage its readers toward additional efforts to read Paul more fully within his Greco-Roman context.