“Fashions, Fallacies and Futures in NT Studies”

I’m pleased to report that my article, “Fashions, Fallacies and Futures in New Testament Studies” has just been published in the advance-online locus of Journal for the Study of the New Testament.  You can see the table of contents of the issue and my article here.

I’ve uploaded the pre-publication version onto the “Selected Published Essays” tab on this blog site here.

In the article I note one or two “fashions” in NT studies of past decades, ideas or emphases that seem all the rage for a short while but then seem to have faded just as quickly as they appeared.  In this case, I cite “structuralist exegesis.”

I also discuss a couple of “fallacies,” by which term I refer to ideas that obtained wide and long-lasting currency but have subsequently been shown to be errors.  The question here is why this happens.  How do a wide assortment of scholars take something as given when there never was adequate basis for it?

Finally, I explore very briefly some possible future emphases in the field, such as the growing internationalization of those who comprise NT scholars, the growing interest in “reception history,” and one or two other things.

The article originated as the Graham Stanton Lecture given at the British NT Conference in 2013 (St. Andrews).  The print version will appear in due course.