History PHILEMON, EPISTLE TO (pros fil�mona; so Tish. WH with Aleph A and other MSS, but fuller superscriptions also occur mainly to indicate that the Epistle was written by the apostle Paul and at Rome) is the name of a short composition which has come down to us from antiquity as the thirteenth in the…

Jerome’s preface to Philemon explaining that some in his day deny Pauline authorship.

In Romans 7:7-25, Paul does not report his own difficulty in obeying the Jewish Law. In Romans 7, Paul tells the story of a pagan’s attempt and failure to obey the law (become a Jew) without Jesus Christ. This old literary technique is called “prosopopoeia”. “The tortured Paul [of Romans 7] never existed. Nowhere other…

There are at least two verbatim parallels: In these latter two doxologies, the grammar is natural and the meaning is plain. The subject is God the creator/Father, and he is introduced first by a direct reference, and to him glory is given: who is [relative pronoun + verb] blessed unto the ages, and, the one…

TOWNSLEY, JERAMY. “Paul, the Goddess Religions, and Queer Sects: Romans 1:23—28.” Journal of Biblical Literature 130, no. 4 (2011): 707–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/23488275. Gnuse, Robert Karl. “Seven Gay Texts: Biblical Passages Used to Condemn Homosexuality.” Biblical Theology Bulletin 45, no. 2 (2015): 68-87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146107915577097.

Romans 8:9-17 engages with a similar debate around a physical versus spiritual body as in 1 Cor 15:35-49. I’ve also seen a similar debate in another text, specifically the Gospel of Thomas saying 29: If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of…

horizo means literally “to mark out,” in the sense of marking a boundary, but it also means to designate or appoint or ordain. This is the earliest written Christology and Paul is saying Jesus was “marked out” as the son of God, by way of his resurrection. This is called an “exulatation Christology.” Yes this…

Fitzmyer (The Anchor Bible) points out 4 main positions about the meaning of the verse: 1. The Messiah is God; Jesus is divine. This reading was preferred by the vast majority of interpreters in the first 8 centuries AD. 2. The Messiah naturally descended from Israel, and God is to be praised for that. Christ…

here’s what Hultgren writes in his commentary:There are several reasons for concluding that 1:3-4 is a pre-Pauline creedal formula: (1) The term “Spirit of holiness” . . . is a Semitism that is otherwise not used by Paul or any other NT writer. . . . (2) The work of the Spirit in this passage…