Out of the many wonderful gifts I received for Christmas, my wife bought a book for me from my Amazon wishlist: Mark Finney's Honour and Conflict in the Ancient World: 1 Corinthians in its Greco-Roman Social Setting. As the subtitle suggests, the book deals with the social context of 1 Corinthians and zeroes in on philotimia (the love and strong desire for honor) and how it, along with several other intoxicating sociocultural ingredients, combined to create a rather toxic situation among the Corinthians Jesus followers.

I'm working on a commentary on 1 Corinthians this year, and this important work will certainly be cited!