Associate Professor of New Testament, Tyndale Seminary
Note: This portrait of Lydia is fictional, although it is based on the realities of ancient city life and depicts experiences that would have been common. Unlike most of my fictional portraits, this one uses the name of a real figure we know from Paul’s letter. The details of her story, though, are from my…
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Orpheus was born a slave. His first master put him to work in a tannery, where he slept next door to the vats of caustic urine and alum. The child woke each morning with his eyes watering from the fumes, took whatever crumbs of bread were left by the older slaves, and set to work…
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Cassandra was a widow, but she would have laughed if you felt sorry for her. The husband who was drowned in a storm off the coast of Crete had been a terrible man. She still fingered the white scars when she happened to think of him. The one mercy had been that his work had…
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Krates spends his days under the Stoa of Attalos, in the shade of the broad porch. As the morning bustle gives way to the languid pace of the afternoon, he and a few others sit on the flagstones at the feet of their teacher Teles. There are more famous Stoic philosophers in Athens, but his…
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Patroclus’ family has called Ephesus home for more generations than they can remember. His life had been lived almost entirely in the shadow between the two ancient hills, Panayir Dagh and B’lb’l Dagh. His days and weeks and years had been spent within the strong embrace of the great Lysimachian Walls, which had yet to…
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We do not know much about Luke’s patron, Theophilus, but we can easily imagine the kind of person he might have been. Perhaps his home was Alexandria, the pearl of Hellenistic culture at the mouth of the Nile, chief city of Roman Egypt. On this morning Theophilus left his city house early and rode out…
Read MoreReading Matthew for the Effect I laid out in another article an approach to reading the New Testament that places the focus where it lay for the authors of the texts–on the transformation of human lives (see “Interpreting a Gospel Passage: Part I“). Whether we engage the documents as believers or skeptics, I suggested that…
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The First Written Gospel If we had been part of Mark’s first audience, we would not have picked a bound book up from the shelf of a library or bookstore. In fact, we would not likely have been reading it at all. For years we would have been used to hearing the stories of Jesus…
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Ian W. Scott 