Today IVP Academic announced we have a launch date: October 10. And a book cover I can finally share for Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament! Here’s how they describe it: Some Christians think Paul’s reference to “saved through childbearing” in 1 Timothy 2:15 means that women are slated primarily for delivering and raising children. Alternate readings, however, sometimes fail to build on the best historical and textual evidence. Sandra Glahn thinks that we have misunderstood Paul by misunderstanding the context to which he wrote. A key to reading and applying 1 Timothy, Glahn argues, lies in getting to know a mysterious figure who haunts the letter: the goddess Artemis. Based on groundbreaking research and new data about Artemis of the Ephesians, Nobody’s Mother demonstrates how better background information supports faithful interpretation. Combining spiritual autobiography with scholarly exploration, Glahn takes readers on a journey to ancient Ephesus…

Listen in as I talk with the hosts of the “Honestly, Though ” podcast about my summer spent immersed in Luke’s Gospel and saw Jesus’s focus on the outsider.

My new Bible study, Latte with Luke, weighing in at 328 pages, is the first study in the Coffee Cup series on the life of Christ. Number twelve comes with an all-new cover design. For Black Friday, I’m offering the book at more than 50 percent off the retail price ($7 each!) for orders of five+ books, while supplies last. Maybe you want to lead a group in a study of the life of Christ in the new year? Or perhaps you’d like to give copies for Christmas? Orders of 5+ books are $7.00 each; individual books cost $10.50—still a significant savings. Venmo me your address at the handle below. Or use the store on this site, and I’ll send a refund check with your books. Subscribers to my site can order anytime between now and midnight on Cyber Monday. (S-h-h-h!)

Recently, I dug deeply into a story about one of the lesser-known women of the Bible—the woman Luke describes as “bent over.” And I loved learning more about Jesus’s interaction with her. But first, the backstory: Jesus and his disciples are walking somewhere on a Sabbath, and they feed themselves by taking some heads of grain in a field. And what do the religious leaders do? They object, because Jesus and his team have done “work.”   When this happens, Jesus reminds his listeners of a story in the Scriptures about how a priest gave David and his hungry men leftover consecrated bread on the Sabbath. And Jesus concludes by declaring that the Son of man is “lord of the Sabbath” (Luke 6:5).   Soon after that on another Sabbath, Jesus does something more public and equally unexpected: he heals a man with a withered hand. But again the Sabbath-police object, because…

B. Ann Grafe, 92, died in Vancouver, Washington on September 14, 2022. She was born Beverley Ann Bacon in Portland, Oregon, on April 8, 1930, the only child of Velma Ella Henson Bacon and Theodore Roosevelt Bacon. By the time Ann was eight years old, her mother was a single parent whose mother and father owned restaurants in several small towns in the coastal range of Oregon and provided extra hands in raising their granddaughter. Adopted by her stepfather, Beverley Ann Scharf graduated in the class of 1947 from Thomas Jefferson High School in Portland and went to work at Shell Oil Company. She attended college at Oregon State University, where she met Willis Raymond Grafe. They married on April 26, 1952, at Piedmont United Methodist Church in Portland.  During the couple’s first years together, Willis worked year-round for Oregon’s Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), spending construction seasons in the…

School with students starts for me on Tuesday, but the faculty already had our two-day workshop. And our department had its all-morning meeting. At the latter, our department chair told us how wolves—reintroduced after decades of absence in Yellowstone National Park—transformed both the Park’s ecosystem and its geography (see video below). He reminded us that we don’t have to set out to change the world. Showing up and doing what God designed us to do, aiming at faithfulness rather than world-changing, can have enormous ramifications.

This review first appeared in the April 20, 2022 web edition of Christianity Today. Standing outside a Coptic church in Cairo, I saw a mosaic that sent me back to a college hermeneutics class. In the image’s foreground, a man lay slumbering as an angel hovered over him, pointing. I followed the finger to a horizon dotted with pyramids. And I recognized the Bible’s second “Joseph and Egypt” story, which recounts the holy family’s flight from Herod’s persecution. The image reminded me of how I’d wrestled with a passage from Matthew’s Gospel: “Out of Egypt I called my son” (2:15). The passage was suggesting that when the toddler Jesus returned from the land of pyramids, he had “fulfilled,” in Matthew’s words, a vision from the prophet Hosea: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (11:1). Yet Hosea, for his part, wasn’t issuing…

Virgin hears crash. Lightning flashes She bolts up, jaw agape,   Book falling. The winged envoy kneels   announcing    “Hail, favored one!    The Lord is with you!” Favored, how?  And why? Only a teen Eating bread and pigeons. Living in hut—no Herodian palace. Yet The Almighty sees her. Knows her. Calls her Blessed. But this task! She clenches fist. He is with her. Resolve rises. Who is like the Lord? Has anyone precedent for this? Still, she determines to trust   the impossible. Because all His ways are just. Because the spoken word comes with blaze   And sound of waves. She inhales scent of honeysuckle    and nods. A child this winter. “May this thing you have said  Come true in me.” She thinks Not my will, But God’s. Ruach overshadows, Hovering as when the spoken word brought matter.  Someday she will know  that the one bringing travail himself birthed the universe.

I just spent three weeks teaching in Italy on a trip that had (despite some challenges) many glorious moments. One highlight was getting invited to the home—Villa Aurora—of Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi. Her 16th-century estate, smack in the center of Rome, is loaded with masterpiece paintings from, I kid you not, Michelangelo, Caravaggio (his only ceiling painting ever), Picasso, Dali…. The 72-year-old blonde Texan told of how her late husband, the prince, descended from popes. Wait. I forgot to mention her first-century bust of Julius Caesar, on whose ancient gardens (which inspired those at Versailles) she said the villa is built. Anyway, this all came about because her sister in Fort Worth attends Bible study with one of my students, who posted about going on the trip as a photographer/artist thanks in part to the grant that’s allowing me to explore women in the visual record of the church. And…

In the first half of the Book of Ephesians, the apostle Paul lays out the Christian’s new identity in Christ. In the second half, he provides the “so what,” or the ramifications. As he outlines what Spirit-filled living looks like (Eph. 5:18ff), he envisions a community in which people show Christ’s love by serving one another. And one of the places where such service happens is in the household—where he, in his era, would have found spouses, kids, and slaves under one roof.  People living in the first century under Roman rule would have been familiar with instructions for respectable families known as “household codes.” These codes outlined the ideal for life in the household, and such instructions were always addressed only to the husband. Consider this sample of household-code instruction from Aristotle (384–322 B.C.): Of household management we have seen that there are three parts—one is the rule of…

FYI: I just published a book review of Aimee Byrd’s latest, The Sexual Reformation: Restoring the Dignity and Personhood of Man and Woman (Zondervan Reflective) over on the CT Mag site. In ninety days I can run it here, but before then, please give it a read and let me know your thoughts and questions.

Mitzi A won the free copy in the book drawing. Congrats, Mitzi!

Women in Church History Last week a friend told me that in one of her seminary summer school classes a fellow student insisted the existence of Christian women in public ministry started with radical feminism. And the professor did not seem to realize what the student said was untrue.   I hear such statements often. Here’s one from a Christian blogger: “It was the feminist teachings of the past few decades that first spurred Christians to try to argue for [women in public ministry]. Like it or not, the two schools of thought are intertwined.”  Maybe we get the idea that radical feminism started it all because we don’t realize how active women have been in past centuries and how much of evidence is being rediscovered. Time for an update.  Women Researching Bible Backgrounds Also, our understanding about a lot of Bible backgrounds relating to passages about women is outdated. Now, sometimes…

I am Sandra—daughter of Ann, of Velma, of Ella…all the way back to Eve. But the genetic line stops with me.  Although I went to college, I had no intention of pursuing a career. I dated my high-school sweetheart, and I knew even in my freshman year that I would marry this guy. My main vocational goal was to be a mommy. It was my only aspiration.   When we married at ages 21 and 20, Gary and I wanted at least three children. It never dawned on me that we might face the prospect of no kids at all. If anything, I figured we’d have nineteen like Susannah Wesley and wonder how to handle them all.   After five years of marriage, during which Gary was earning a master’s degree in theology, we decided it was time to expand our little family of two. But a year went by with no…