The concept of "memory," especially of "social memory," is a live issue among New Testament scholars. ( Social memory  r...

I haven't read Pieter Botha before. I've done quite a bit of reading in oral traditional research and the gospels (including the gos...

A common refrain among scholars and people who want to appear scholarly is, "Context is king" (or some something similar). So when...

I'm reading an essay by Kristina Dronsch and Annette Weissenrieder, entitled, "A Theory for the Message for New Testament Writings ...

I'm currently reading Richard Horsley's essay, "The Gospel of Mark in the Interface of Orality and Writing," in The Interf...

I've returned to Harry Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts  (New Haven and London: Ya...

I have assigned a selection of readings from Plutarch's Moralia (the Quaestiones romanae et graecae ) and from Seneca's Epistles  (...

Toward the end of the third chapter of his monograph, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven ...

Harry Gamble quotes the following from Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History , which provides an interesting discussion of text-production i...

One of my perennial interests centers on the ways different cultural and historical perspectives influence the way we perceive written texts...

I'm currently reading through Loveday Alexander's chapter in Jesus in Memory: Traditions in Oral and Scribal Perspectives (Werner H...

With the beginning of the semester barrelling down on us like a melodramatic steamtrain, I haven't had as much time to spend with Harry ...

I'm finally addressing a series gap in my professional reading. Considering that (i) my major work, Structuring Early Christian Memory ,...

The December 2009 issue of Journal for the Study of the New Testament [ JSNT 32/2] arrived in the mail today, though the website still has...

I still remember—vividly—the first time I actually heard someone refer to someone else as colored . I was nineteen, and I think I was actual...

In the most recent issue of RBL Werner Kelber offers a typically poetic review of Katherine M. Stott's book, Why Did They Write this Way...

In the ninth installment of her series, "Creating Jesus," April DeConick asks, " Why did Jesus die? ," though her post d...

Installment no. 8 in her series, "Creating Jesus," focuses on issues of " Rereading and Remembering ," and I have to con...

I'm reading a pre-publication version of an article on the significance of the (later) insertion of the Pericopae Adulterae (John 7.53–...

A good friend of mine has recently put me on to an article that is giving me the language to say things I've been struggling to say for ...