Scriptural Works

Greg Camp and Patrick Spencer
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Hosted by two biblical scholars with diverse career backgrounds, Greg Camp (Sheffield University, Ph.D.) and Patrick Spencer (Durham University, Ph.D.), Scriptural Works focuses on a dynamic exploration of how to read and interpret scripture for greater meaning in today's postmodern world. Each episode unpacks the tools, methods, and insights that can be used to bring scripture alive, whether through their engaging dialogue or through conversations with guest scholars who bring specialized perspectives to particular texts or themes. From ancient contexts to contemporary application, from literary analysis to historical insights, Scriptural Works equips both lay readers and religious leaders with fresh approaches to biblical interpretation. Whether you're a curious reader, a minister seeking fresh perspectives, or anyone interested in developing a deeper grasp of scripture, Scriptural Works provides the intellectual tools and practical approaches to make biblical texts more accessible and meaningful.

  1. Did Luke Model Jesus After Socrates? Plato's Hidden Influence on Luke-Acts | Dr. Jan Kozlowski | Ep. 21

    HACE 15 H

    Did Luke Model Jesus After Socrates? Plato's Hidden Influence on Luke-Acts | Dr. Jan Kozlowski | Ep. 21

    Think you know Luke's Gospel? Think again. Classical philologist Dr. Jan Kozlowski challenges the long-held assumption that the New Testament exists in a literary vacuum. With surgical philological precision, he demonstrates that Luke didn't just know Plato—he knew him by heart. The three-fold accusation against Jesus in Luke 23:2 mirrors Socrates' trial in Plato's Apology. The "don't weep for me" scene maps onto Plato's Phaedo with stunning exactness. Even Luke's curious phrase "deep dawn" at the resurrection tomb traces back to Plato's Protagoras and Crito. This isn't speculative parallelomania—it's grammatically verifiable Greco-Roman intertextuality in Luke-Acts. Luke was simultaneously "turbo Greek and turbo Jewish," a literary virtuoso weaving Plato and Torah into a single masterwork. The either/or dichotomy is dead. Kozlowski pushes beyond intuitive parallels to mathematically precise philological evidence—tracking word density, grammatical structure, and rare Greek constructions across the Platonic corpus. The implications reshape how scholars and serious readers understand Luke-Acts as ancient literature: not a naive community document but a sophisticated Greco-Roman narrative that rivals the intertextual complexity of Virgil's engagement with Homer. From the Socratic trial motif to the noble death tradition to the resurrection dawn, Luke emerges as a master literary architect operating fluently across Jewish Scripture and classical Greek philosophy. For biblical scholars, seminary students, and anyone interested in New Testament studies, Plato and the Bible, or ancient literary criticism, this conversation redefines what it means to read Luke. Academia: https://uw.academia.edu/JanKozlowski

    59 min
  2. Terrorized Woman, Traumatized Nation: Reading Hosea After Empire | Rev. Dr. Brad E. Kelle | Ep. 20

    21 FEB

    Terrorized Woman, Traumatized Nation: Reading Hosea After Empire | Rev. Dr. Brad E. Kelle | Ep. 20

    What happens when an empire's boot presses down on a nation's throat for fifty years? Rev, Dr, Brad E. Kelle reframes the prophet Hosea through the lens of communal trauma—and the result redraws everything you thought you knew about eighth-century BCE prophecy. This isn't about individual crisis or personal breakdown. It's about a whole people losing their grip on who they are. As Neo-Assyrian imperialism dismantled economies, corrupted religious practices, and reshuffled political power across Israel and Judah, the nation entered survival mode. Tribute payments drained wealth upward. Land changed hands. Religion got co-opted to serve the throne. And through it all, Israel's leaders—the priests, kings, and powerbrokers Hosea targets relentlessly—weren't healing the social wound. They were tearing it wider, compounding the trauma by dragging the people further from the Exodus identity that Hosea believed was their only real lifeline. Kelle brings trauma hermeneutics out of its comfort zone—away from Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the fall of Jerusalem—and applies it to a prophet rarely read this way. His argument is precise: Hosea isn't just condemning idol worship or sexual immorality. He's diagnosing a communal identity crisis driven by bad leadership under imperial pressure. The Exodus narrative runs like a spine through the book, a counter-memory Hosea wields against every political compromise and religious accommodation his contemporaries are making. This conversation is a masterclass in reading ancient prophetic literature as something raw, urgent, and stubbornly alive—a wounded nation arguing about who it still has the courage to be. Kelle's Latest Book: The Bible and Moral Injury: Reading Scripture Alongside War’s Unseen Wounds, https://www.amazon.com/Bible-Moral-Injury-Scripture-Alongside/dp/1501876287/ref=sr_1_1 Article: "Is Hosea Among the Traumatized? The Book of Hosea and Trauma Hermeneutics," JBL 144 (2025): 63-83, https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/sblpress/jbl/article-abstract/144/1/63/399521/Is-Hosea-Also-among-the-Traumatized-The-Book-of.

    1 h y 8 min
  3. Justice or Noise: The 8th Century Prophets vs Holy Corruption | Dr. Hemchand Gossai | Ep. 19

    1 FEB

    Justice or Noise: The 8th Century Prophets vs Holy Corruption | Dr. Hemchand Gossai | Ep. 19

    The temples were packed, markets overflowed, and everyone worshiped harder than ever—yet the 8th-century prophets declared God despised every bit of it. Dr. Hemchand Gossai dissects what Amos, Isaiah, Hosea, and Micah were actually condemning: a society intoxicated by performative piety while systematically crushing the poor. Beneath the gilded surface of Israel and Judah's prosperity lurked predatory debt schemes that stripped peasants of ancestral lands, merchants who rigged scales and sold chaff as grain, and a legal system thoroughly captured by the wealthy. The prophetic verdict was savage—"I hate your festivals; take away the noise of your songs." Yahweh demanded justice and righteousness, not cultic theater from economic predators who showed up at the sanctuary with blood still wet on their hands from the week's exploitation. Hemchand traces how these themes evolved through the exile and beyond, examining how Jeremiah 29's famous "seek the welfare of the city" gets stripped of its radical context—a command to serve the very Babylonians who dragged Israel into captivity—and reduced to refrigerator magnet theology. Similarly, Isaiah 58 eviscerates fasting as religious performance while the practitioners oppress their workers. The conversation exposes an uncomfortable pattern: religious observance consistently becomes a smokescreen for exploitation, a way to feel righteous while participating in systems that devour the vulnerable. The prophets weren't calling for better liturgy or more sincere worship; they were indicting an entire social order that had made religion complicit in its crimes. This isn't comfortable devotional material—it's a 2,800-year-old indictment with a live wire, and Hemchand doesn't let anyone off the hook. COMPANION ARTICLE: https://scripturalworks.com/when-prosperity-breeds-prophets-economic-exploitation-in-8th-century-israel RELATED WORKS FROM HEMCHAND: Take Heart: From Despair to Hope in Turbulent Times (Eugene: Pickwick Publications 2022): https://www.amazon.com/Take-Heart-Despair-Turbulent-Times/dp/1666719943/ref=sr_1_6 Social Critique by Israel’s Eighth-Century Prophets: Justice and Righteousness in Context (Eugene: Wipe & Stock Publishers, 1993): https://www.amazon.com/Social-Critique-Israels-Eighth-Century-Prophets/dp/1597526304/ref=sr_1_3

    1 h

  4. 17 ENE

    Pontic Hicks, an Alexandrian Intellectual, and 12 Ephesians in Acts 18 and 19 | Dr. Patrick Spencer | Ep. 18

    What happens when an elite Alexandrian intellectual gets schooled by two nobodies from the backwaters of Pontus—and one of them is a woman? Luke knew exactly what he was doing. In Episode 18, Acts 18-19 gets torn apart to reveal that Luke wasn't just telling a story—he was detonating ancient assumptions about who gets to teach and who belongs. Apollos had the pedigree, the eloquence, the prestigious address. Ancient writers called Alexandrians the pinnacle of intellectual achievement. Priscilla and Aquila? They had tents and a trade that literally made them stink. Ancient sources described Pontic people as "thick-witted," "uneducated," and so backward that even Athens couldn't fix them. Yet it's these "hicks" who correct the scholar—privately, graciously, and with a woman taking the lead. This isn't accidental. It's Luke's trademark move: flipping power structures while nobody's looking. But there's more beneath the surface. The episode unpacks why Apollos gets a quiet correction while twelve unnamed disciples in Ephesus need full rebaptism and a dramatic Spirit encounter. Same deficiency—John's baptism only—but radically different resolutions. The answer lies in reading these scenes as intentional mirror images, a literary technique called syncrisis that first-century audiences would have recognized immediately. Add in the echoes of Pentecost, Joel's prophecy, and the Exodus narrative, and suddenly this overlooked passage becomes a theological powerhouse about community formation, boundary markers, and what it actually means to be "on the way." COMPANION ARTICLE: https://scripturalworks.com/when-pontic-hicks-taught-the-intellectual-how-ancient-stereotypes-subvert-status-in-acts-18-19

    1 h y 12 min

  5. 30/12/2025

    Stereotyped "Huckster" Women at the Center of Acts 16 and Joshua 2 | Dr. Patrick Spencer | Ep. 17

    When read through narrative and ethnographic lenses, Acts 16 becomes a clash of markets, bodies, and authority, not a tidy conversion script. Luke’s pacing (the Macedonian summons, the river encounter, the delayed house visit, the silenced slave girl, then the jail) keeps profit and control in view. Lydia, a seller of purple from Thyatira, sits inside elite cash networks: purple means high-status clients, negotiated access, and reputations that can be bought—or burned. Dr. Patrick Spencer foregrounds the harsh Greco-Roman stereotype of Lydian women as sexually promiscuous, an ugly label that shadows any public woman with means. Against that backdrop, Lydia’s insistence that Paul stay with her reads less like quaint kindness and more like a risky, calculating offer of protection and partnership. Read beside Joshua 2, Lydia can function like a Rahab-type figure in a conquest scene: the outsider whose dangerous welcome helps the mission “take” Philippi without swords. The slave girl storyline isn’t a detour—her owners lose revenue, and the backlash is economic before it is legal. Philippi’s Roman-colony swagger turns the beating into public theater, but the jail sequence flips the power story: the prisoners stay, officials panic, and the magistrates end up apologizing, which is its own indictment. Even the “place of prayer” feels like contested space, not a devotional backdrop. And the ending is the sharpest move: Paul and Silas finally acquiesce, “going in” to Lydia’s house—language that, on this reading, deliberately courts scandal and echoes Joshua 2, implying the takeover is sealed through alliance-hospitality that carries sexual rumor in its wake. It’s a reading that refuses to play safe. COMPANION ARTICLE: https://scripturalworks.com/huckster-slave-and-jailer-how-luke-trolls-ethnic-assumptions-in-acts-16

    1 h y 29 min

  6. 16/12/2025

    God's Acts for Israel, Gentiles, and Christians: A Theology of Acts | Dr. Joshua Jipp | Ep. 16

    Joshua Jipp's volume God's Acts for Israel, Gentiles, and Christians represents fifteen years of scholarship on Luke-Acts, arguing that this isn't theology you observe from a safe distance. It puts you in the dock. The narrative demands response. You don't get to catalogue what Luke believed without eventually answering whether any of it might be true. And what makes divine activity in Acts so fascinating is that God refuses to be obvious. Something happens; humans scramble to interpret. Peter works through the Psalms after Judas's betrayal. Pentecost erupts and onlookers think everyone's drunk. God acts; humans discern. The Cornelius episode gets pride of place in the conversation—48 verses when Luke could have handled Gentile inclusion in a paragraph. Why the excess? Because discernment is agonizing. Peter is confused, annoyed, demonstrating what Jipp calls "hospitable openness" that moves forward without a roadmap. Hospitality threads everything together. The Emmaus disciples recognize Jesus only after offering shelter to a stranger. Luke subverts stereotypes—Roman centurions pray devoutly, Maltese "barbarians" show extraordinary kindness. The early Jerusalem community's economics aren't proto-communism but deliberate rejection of Pharaoh's extractive model. Jipp's interpretive approach challenges readers to enter others' pain and recognize they might be guests rather than hosts. JIPP’S GOD’S ACTS FOR ISRAEL, GENTILES, AND CHRISTIANS: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802883780/gods-acts-for-israel-gentiles-and-christians/

    1 h y 14 min

  7. 02/12/2025

    How Acts 27 Forms Christian Imagination Through Ancient Echoes | Dr. Amanda Jo Pittman | Ep. 15

    Acts 27 becomes a high-pressure lab for discipleship in this conversation with Dr. Amanda Jo Pittman. Instead of treating the shipwreck as Bible background noise, she reads it as a story where bodies, fears, and loyalties are trained in real time. Paul isn’t a serene stained-glass saint but a battered “reverse Jonah” who runs toward his calling and refuses to treat anyone on board as disposable. While sailors scheme, soldiers are ready to kill prisoners, and empire fumbles its way through crisis management, Paul keeps insisting on a wild claim: Stay together, stay on the ship, and God will lose no one. The storm exposes what people really trust when control is gone—technique, violence, or a promise that sounds almost reckless. Pittman traces how Luke braids Jonah, the stilling of the storm, and Luke 21–22 into a thick web of intertexts where salvation is tasted, felt, and performed. Fasting, breaking bread, and staying put become embodied spiritual practices rather than throwaway travel details, shaping a community that resists redemptive violence and refuses to scapegoat the vulnerable when everything is taking on water. Pittman asks the question, "How do churches lead when institutions are fragile, anxiety is the default, and sacrifice usually means 'someone else pays so I don’t have to'?" Acts 27 starts to sound less like an ancient accident report and more like training ground for non-disposable community—calm, stubborn, and willing to trust that God’s saving work includes the people we’d rather blame, sideline, or quietly throw overboard. By the end, the wreck looks less like a failure of God’s plan and more like the rough space where resurrection-shaped courage is learned. COMPANION ARTICLE: https://scripturalworks.com/narrative-artistry-social-dynamics-and-rhetorical-strategy-in-pauls-sea-voyage-in-acts-27

    1 h y 3 min

  8. 17/11/2025

    Fatal Real Estate Transaction: Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 | Dr. Stan Helton | Ep. 4

    Ananias and Sapphira don’t just fudge a pledge—they run a carefully staged con in the heart of a Spirit-filled community, and their bodies hit the floor as a warning shot to anyone who thinks holiness is negotiable. Dr. Stan Helton notes that where Barnabas’s open-handed generosity becomes the backdrop that makes this couple’s secret hoarding so toxic. Money “devoted to God” is treated like something radioactive: once laid at the apostles’ feet, it isn’t theirs to manage for image control or financial security. The conversation traces how a voluntary gift becomes a lethal lie, how deception fractures trust in a covenant people, and why Luke’s first use of the word ἐκκλησία (“church”) comes wrapped in fear, not comfort. From there Helton pushes back into Joshua 7 and Achan, showing how Luke plays with the script of stolen devotion, communal risk, and judgment that ripples through the whole body. They wrestle openly with divine violence, cheap grace, and why God seems more “dangerous” to a generous-looking couple than to a magician later in Acts. Along the way the conversation drags modern church habits into the light: pious branding that hides private idols, wealthy believers who want applause without surrender, leaders who weaponize fear instead of letting it expose hypocrisy. Sapphira’s separate interrogation becomes a sharp word about agency and responsibility—she is not just “the wife”; she stands or falls on her own truthfulness. The story refuses to behave like a safe stewardship sermon; it demands that congregations, pastors, and wary church folks ask where Ananias and Sapphira are alive and well in their budgets, platforms, and respectable religious culture. COMPANION ARTICLE: https://scripturalworks.com/fatal-real-estate-transaction-property-deception-and-divine-judgment-in-acts-5

    1 h y 4 min
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Hosted by two biblical scholars with diverse career backgrounds, Greg Camp (Sheffield University, Ph.D.) and Patrick Spencer (Durham University, Ph.D.), Scriptural Works focuses on a dynamic exploration of how to read and interpret scripture for greater meaning in today's postmodern world. Each episode unpacks the tools, methods, and insights that can be used to bring scripture alive, whether through their engaging dialogue or through conversations with guest scholars who bring specialized perspectives to particular texts or themes. From ancient contexts to contemporary application, from literary analysis to historical insights, Scriptural Works equips both lay readers and religious leaders with fresh approaches to biblical interpretation. Whether you're a curious reader, a minister seeking fresh perspectives, or anyone interested in developing a deeper grasp of scripture, Scriptural Works provides the intellectual tools and practical approaches to make biblical texts more accessible and meaningful.

Información

  • Creador
    Greg Camp and Patrick Spencer
  • Años de actividad
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodios
    21
  • Clasificación
    Apto
  • Mostrar sitio web
    Scriptural Works