Recent years have seen a steadily growing interest in the question of how the parameters of society in the Roman Empire influenced the communities behind the New Testament texts and their respective authors. While some have argued that the NT texts indeed display critical interaction with this Roman sphere, others are more critical of assuming such conflicts and the idea that they are a kind of hermeneutical key for understanding the early Christians. This debate is probably best exemplified by the debate between N. T. Wright and John M. G. Barclay (which Theresa and I have analysed in an essay that has been discussed on this blog here).

If you are interested in my own take on the issue, you can read a short version of my argument on how this question should be evaluated for free here. I also have a book that develops these points into more detail. Furthermore, at the time of writing this post, there is a monograph in print with Peeters (see here), which exemplifies some of these considerations – including modifications of Wright’s hypothesis – with regard to Paul’s talk about the Roman triumphal procession in 2 Cor 2:14.

A book that has received quite a bit attention in recent times (it’s part of Mike Bird’s top ten list on “the NT and the Imperial Cult” and also included in Andreas Köstenberger’s list of the top ten books of 2015 ; cf. also Nijay Gupta’s remarks here) is Bruce W. Winter’s Divine Honours for the Caesars: The First Christians’ Responses.

I have written a review for the Journal of Theological Studies, which can be found here. If you don’t have access, you can read the pre-pub version on my academia.edu-webpage for free. However, I would also like to point you to an essay that has just been published on Reviews of Biblical and Early Christian Studies. It’s not simply a more extensive book review. Rather, I tried to enter a deeper conversation with Winter’s work by approaching it from my own specific point of view on this issue and by seeking (as I put it  in the essay) “to set Winter’s contribution in the broader context of the study of the early Christians’ engagement with Roman ideology while focusing in particular on where his methodology might lead to promising results and where it falls short of the path chosen by other scholars.”

Christoph Heilig is working on an SNF-Project on “Narrative-Substructures in the Letters of Paul” with Prof. Jörg Frey. He is the author of Hidden Criticism? Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul, WUNT II 392 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015) and Paul’s Triumph: Reassessing 2 Corinthians 2:14 in Its Literary and Historical Context, BTS 27 (Leuven: Peeters, [hopefully] 2016).