I was unable to attend SBL this year, but Chuck Bumgardner was kind enough to gather titles and abstracts for PE related papers at SBL from the helpful abstracts page on the SBL site.
Here is what was listed. It is encouraging to see this much work being done on these letters.
I have just realized that Tony Costa, in his book Worship and the Risen Jesus in the Pauline Letters (Peter Lang, 2013) incorporates the Pastorals in his analysis. He acknowledges the debate surrounding authorship, but announces at the outset that he will include all the letters attributed to Paul in his investigation. I have only been able to scan the book online, but it looks like the Pastorals show up fairly often.
I am encouraged to see this as we, in this space and in our ETS study group, are investigating how the typical neglect of the Pastorals impacts our view of Paul.
The Pastoral Epistles were given significant attention at this year’s Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. First, we had an excellent session in the Pastoral Epistles Group.
Chuck Bumgardner began our session with a paper titled, “Kinship, Fictive Kinship, and the Letters to Timothy and Titus.” Bumgardner compared what these letters say about family relationships and relationships within the body of Christ (Bumgardner used the phrase “fictive kinship” because it is the standard phrase used to refer to social relationships which are seen or described as familial though there is no blood relation ). He argued that Paul’s use of such language in the PE is not incompatible with his use of it in his other letters, and it does not necessarily indicate that the church is moving from an egalitarian stage to a hierarchical one. His paper also provided an initial sounding of the intersection between Christian family and social family roles in the PE, suggesting that Paul navigates such intersections with a missionary concern for outsiders.
© 2021 Pastoral Epistles
