First of all, greetings to the Dunelm Road readership! This is my (John’s) first official post as a contributor, which is why I feel slightly embarrassed for using this opportunity to publicize my new NTS article: “Erastus of Corinth (Rom 16.23): Responding to Recent Proposals on his Rank, Status, and Faith.”

Erastus has been the center of much debate in NT scholarship, because, as a Corinthian municipal oikonomos, he may have been a believer who had considerable wealth (see also the recent summary post on Erastus by David Pettegrew [Corinthian Matters]). In a previous article, I argued that Erastus probably served as Corinth’s treasury magistrate (quaestor) and was therefore a member of the city’s economic elite. Shortly after that article was released in early 2010, two other pieces on Erastus appeared in print, one by Alexander Weiss (an NTS response to my work) and another by Steven Friesen (an essay in his co-edited NovTSup volume Corinth in Context). My new article is a response to those other two scholars. The aim of the piece is quite modest, so it will certainly not be the final word on the subject. In it I try simply to justify some of my earlier claims and identify some weaknesses in the other two studies. I primarily target Friesen’s assertion that Erastus was not a believer; if it accomplishes nothing else, I do hope the article puts this claim to rest.

While you’re at the NTS site, also check out the new article co-authored by my colleague, Gerry Peterman, and his former TA, Wally Cirafesi, who is now a postgrad at McMaster Divinity School. Their article is a response to a 2009 NTS piece by Michael Bird and Michael Whitenton on pistis in Hippolytus. Peterman and Cirafesi not only challenge Bird and Whitenton’s claim that Hippolytus provides a clear instance of a subjective genitive, pistis Christou construction which unambiguously identifies pistis as Jesus’ death on the cross, but they show through careful text-critical work how Hippolytus’ use of the construction actually supports the objective genitive reading.