Sarah Ruden, a joyful iconoclast
The most exciting book of historical analysis I've read in ages -- indeed the most exciting book period -- is the Classical scholar and translator Sarah Ruden's "Paul Among the People" (Pantheon) which attempts to defend St. Paul against his modernist critics (e.g. those who consider him an impossible troglodyte for his views on women and homosexuals) by explaining the Greco-Roman social and cultural context in which he composed his letters. It's quite eye-opening, and remarkable in part because Ruden is a research fellow at Yale Divinity School (no bastion of Christian conservatism), as well as a Quaker pacifist. What makes reading Ruden such a pleasure, aside from the quality of her thinking and her prose, is her willingness to question settled truths, and to do it with such a lightness of spirit.
Read all of this great interview at http://blog.beliefnet.com/roddreher/2010/02/the-iconoclastic-sarah-ruden.html