Jason A. Staples's Blog

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A video lecture from Dr. Jason A. Staples. He spoke on “The Art of Gentle Reading: Reading Scripture with C.S. Lewis” at the Inklings Weekend in Montreat in April 2025. Inkling Weekend in Montreat is an annual event in Montreat, NC, at Montreat College, hosted by Drs. Hal Poe and Don King.

The post “The Art of Gentle Reading: Reading Scripture with C.S. Lewis” appeared first on Jason Staples.

A video lecture from Dr. Jason A. Staples. He spoke on “Death Works Backwards: Sin, the Law and Redemption in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” at the Inklings Weekend in Montreat on April 2025. Inkling Weekend in Montreat is an annual event in Montreat, NC at Montreat College hosted by Drs. Hal Poe and Don King.

The post “Sin, the Law and Redemption in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” appeared first on Jason Staples.

The post The ‘Within Judaism’ Perspective – Virtual Enoch Conference appeared first on Jason Staples.

It is with great pleasure that I pass along the news that I have signed a contract with Cambridge University Press to publish my book, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites, expected to be released in the spring of 2023.

This book represents two decades of work, and I cannot wait to see it in the wild and see how others interact with it. A basic abstract of the project follows:

This study examines how the concept of “Israel” was constructed and contested among Jews, Samaritans, and others in the Second Temple Period (roughly 515 BCE–70 CE), as different sects and groups laid claim to the heritage of biblical Israel and differentiated themselves from others doing the same.

Through exhaustive analysis of early Jewish and Samaritan evidence, the books demonstrate that (contrary to the assumptions of most modern scholarship) the terms “Israelite” and “Jew” were not synonymous in Second Temple Period. Instead, the most common view reflected in early Jewish sources is that the Jews are only a subset of the larger body of Israel, namely the descendants of the southern kingdom of Judah. Samaritans, by contrast, neither called themselves Jews nor were they regarded as such by others, but they did consider themselves Israelites, with different Jewish groups having varying responses to this claim. Moreover, the study demonstrates that the continued distinction between “Jews” and “Israelites” in Jewish literature frequently seems to reflect continuing hopes for a future restoration of reconstituted twelve-tribe Israel including the northern tribes of Israel scattered by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE.

The project thereby introduces a new model for understanding the relationship between the terms “Israelite” and “Jew,” a problem that has drawn increased attention in recent scholarship. In the process, this study helps contextualize the variety of eschatological views that appear in Jewish literature from the Second Temple Period, correcting several recent scholarly trends in this area.

I am especially pleased that the book will be priced affordably, around $39 per hardback copy.

The post Paul and the Resurrection of Israel to Be Published by Cambridge University Press appeared first on Jason Staples.

My article, “Vessels of Wrath and God’s Pathos: Potter/Clay Imagery in Rom 9:20–23” has just published with Harvard Theological Review. It’s open access, so all can download freely! The abstract:Starting from the concept of divine patience in Rom 9:22, this article argues that Paul employs the potter/clay metaphor not (as often interpreted) to defend God’s right to arbitrary choice but rather as an appeal to what Abraham Heschel called divine pathos—the idea that God’s choices are impacted by human actions. The potter/clay imagery in Rom 9:20–23 thus serves to highlight the dynamic and improvisational way the God of Israel interacts with Israel and, by extension, all of creation.I’m very grateful to the HTR editorial staff for catching more than the usual number of typos, including several embarrassing Greek accenting mistakes. They definitely made the final product better.

The post My Harvard Theological Review Article on the Potter and Clay in Romans 9 Now Available appeared first on Jason Staples.

This week marks the release of my book, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity.

It’s a great relief to finally have it in the wild after 18 years of working on the larger project of which this is the first portion to be released, and I’m excited to report that it has managed to retain its spot as the #1 new release in Judaism at Amazon through its first week.

Nevertheless, it is next to impossible to eradicate all typos and mistakes from a book, particularly one that was in progress for over a decade. In the interest of scholarly clarity and transparency/accountability, this page will therefore serve as the repository for the typos and errors in the first printing of the book. If you have found any others, please let me know either through a comment on this page or via email and I will add it to the list.

p. 7: In the Grosby block quote, “though” should be “through”

p. 33: Where it says Kuhn “delivered the same lecture,” that is a mistake. The lecture from Nov 9, 1938 was the same lecture (properly cited in footnotes 36 as “Gedankenakrobatik des Talmud”) that he had delivered on Nov 1, 1938 in connection with the Nazi propaganda exhibition “Der ewige Jude” at Munich. At the University of Berlin lecture, he gave his lecture on “Die Judenfrage als weltgeschichtliches Problem,” which was not “the same lecture.” (I somehow mixed this up in the editing/rewriting process. Thanks to Dr. Ulrich Kusche for alerting me to this error.)

p. 52:  “is a term” is repeated

p. 64 n. 34; 151 n. 28; 152 n. 34: “Nodet, ‘Building of the Samaritan Temple'” should be “Nodet, ‘Israelites, Samaritans, Temples, Jews'” (my bibliographic software had the wrong short title for Nodet’s chapter, the consequence of duplicating the chapter of an edited volume in the database and changing author/title/page number but not the short title field)

p. 103: “expected be aware” should be “expected to be aware”

p. 205 n. 100: the page range for Freyne’s article “Studying the Jewish Diaspora in Antiquity” should be 1–5, not 1–9

p. 270 “There is, however, there is no indication” should be “There is, however, no indication”

pp. 325–27: “Ps. Sol.” should be “Pss. Sol.”

p. 297: in the block quotation, “ground’s” should be “grounds” (how this one happened is beyond me since I cut and paste such quotes)

I have also discovered that I had apparently not fully reworked my translation of two passages quoted in the DSS chapter that were mostly (but not completely) derived from the Wise/Abegg/Cook translation I used for convenience in the initial stage of writing.

Obviously any errors are mortifying for an author who wants everything to be perfect, but I very much appreciate it when people notify me of mistakes. (The biggest scares in the editing process were when a couple of footnotes had somehow dropped out, resulting in unattributed quotations, but we hopefully caught everything of that nature.) Hopefully this book sells enough that we can get the errors here corrected in a future printing.

[Update: these mistakes have been resolved for the second printing and beyond.]

The post The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: First Printing Typos and Errata appeared first on Jason Staples.

This week marks the release of my book, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity.

It’s a great relief to finally have it in the wild after 18 years of working on the larger project of which this is the first portion to be released, and I’m excited to report that it has managed to retain its spot as the #1 new release in Judaism at Amazon through its first week.

Nevertheless, it is next to impossible to eradicate all typos and mistakes from a book, particularly one that was in progress for over a decade. In the interest of scholarly clarity and transparency/accountability, this page will therefore serve as the repository for the typos and errors in the first printing of the book. If you have found any others, please let me know either through a comment on this page or via email and I will add it to the list.

p. 33: Where it says Kuhn “delivered the same lecture,” that is a mistake. The lecture from Nov 9, 1938 was the same lecture (properly cited in footnotes 36 as “Gedankenakrobatik des Talmud”) that he had delivered on Nov 1, 1938 in connection with the Nazi propaganda exhibition “Der ewige Jude” at Munich. At the University of Berlin lecture, he gave his lecture on “Die Judenfrage als weltgeschichtliches Problem,” which was not “the same lecture.” (I somehow mixed this up in the editing/rewriting process. Thanks to Dr. Ulrich Kusche for alerting me to this error.)

p. 52:  “is a term” is repeated

p. 64 n. 34; 151 n. 28; 152 n. 34: “Nodet, ‘Building of the Samaritan Temple'” should be “Nodet, ‘Israelites, Samaritans, Temples, Jews'” (my bibliographic software had the wrong short title for Nodet’s chapter, the consequence of duplicating the chapter of an edited volume in the database and changing author/title/page number but not the short title field)

p. 205 n. 100: the page range for Freyne’s article “Studying the Jewish Diaspora in Antiquity” should be 1–5, not 1–9

pp. 325–27: “Ps. Sol.” should be “Pss. Sol.”

p. 297: in the block quotation, “ground’s” should be “grounds” (how this one happened is beyond me since I cut and paste such quotes)

Obviously any errors are mortifying for an author who wants everything to be perfect, but I very much appreciate it when people notify me of mistakes. (The biggest scares in the editing process were when a couple of footnotes had somehow dropped out, resulting in unattributed quotations, but we hopefully caught everything of that nature.) Hopefully this book sells enough that we can get the errors here corrected in a future printing.

The post The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: Typos and Errata appeared first on Jason Staples.

I just received word that my article, “Vessels of Wrath and God’s Pathos: Potter/Clay Imagery in Rom 9:19–23” has been accepted for publication in Harvard Theological Review. The abstract is as follows:

Starting from the concept of divine patience in 9:22, this article argues that Paul employs the potter/clay metaphor not (as often interpreted) to defend God’s right to arbitrary choice but rather as an appeal to what Abraham Heschel called divine pathos—the idea that God’s choices are impacted by human actions. The potter/clay imagery in Rom 9:20–23 thus serves to highlight the dynamic and improvisational way the God of Israel interacts with Israel and, by extension, all of creation.

The post Article on Potter/Clay Imagery in Romans to Be Published in Harvard Theological Review appeared first on Jason Staples.