Blogs
Michael Bird commented on fellow Aussie Con Campbell’s latest book Advances in the Study of Greek.
Ken Schenck is continuing to blog through I (Still) Believe: Leading Bible Scholars Share Their Stories of Faith and Scholarship with posts on essays by Ellen Davis and James Dunn.
Larry Hurtado uploaded his essay Who Read Early Christian Apocrypha? from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha.
I came across this huge sale today from B&H Academic on their Perspectives series (multiple views written by various authors in one volume). I already bought the volume on the ending of Mark and want to read it just to have the various views on it….
Εἰ ἀπεθάνετε σὺν Χριστῷ ἀπὸ τῶν στοιχείων τοῦ κόσμου, τί ὡς ζῶντες ἐν κόσμῳ δογματίζεσθε; (Colossians 2:20)
There are two difficult elements of Greek grammar here, but, once sorted out, we see a powerful question posed to the Colossians. The first four words are simple enough, “If you died with Christ…” But the following preposition ἀπό seems strange following the verb ἀποθνῄσκω, “to die”; what does it mean to “die from” something? As you can imagine, it means more to “die to” or with reference to something, but even more than that. According to BDAG….
Blogs
Brian Davidson at the Center for Ancient Christian Studies interviewed Ken Penner on his forthcoming book, The Verbal System of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which discusses how the Hebrew language evolved between the Bible and the Mishnah.
Larry Hurtado discusses the issue of the history of the emergence of orthodoxy….
How can we please God? Colossians 1:9-12 is a complex passage with lots of participles and prepositional phrases. One could translate each clause and read it well enough, but analyzing the paragraph as a whole enables us to see what the major idea of the passage is and how Paul develops that idea. After Paul tells his readers that he always thanks God for their faith, hope, and love, he continues on that basis (Διὰ τοῦτο, “because of this”) to say that he never ceases praying and asking “that you might be filled” (ἵνα πληρωθῆτε) with the knowledge of God’s will….
This Galatians commentary is concise, well-informed, accessible, and obviously filled with an immense amount of research and thought – not only thought about Galatians’ theology, but also about methodology. Peter Oakes uses knowledge from various disciplines, such as archaeology, sociology, linguistics, and historical background to enlighten our reading of Galatians….
We’re proud to announce today the publication of the first issue of the Exegetical Tools Quarterly. Our Quarterly is a unique resource among a variety of similar publications. Most peer-reviewed journals include mostly articles with book reviews appended to the back. Some journals are just a collection of popular-level essays, maybe with some book reviews. Our Quarterly, however, is strictly resource-driven….
Blogs
Nijay Gupta posted an interview with George Guthrie about his recent commentary on 2 Corinthians in the BECNT series. Books At a Glance also posted a two-part interview with Guthrie about the commentary.
At the Center for Ancient Christian Studies Shawn Wilhite, Coleman Ford, and Trey Moss interviewed Dr. Jarvis Williams on his academic journey in relation to Pauline studies and Jewish backgrounds. They also discussed Williams’s latest book Christ Died for Our Sins: Representation and Substitution in Romans and their Jewish Martyrological Background….
Book Deals
FREE on Kindle: Relationships: A Mess Worth Making, by Timothy Lane and Paul Tripp
$0.99 on Kindle: Colossians and Philemon (Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament), by Murray Harris
New Books
‘Return To Me’: A Biblical Theology of Repentance (New Studies in Biblical Theology), by Mark Boda (IVP Academic)
I’m not sure why a series such as this one wasn’t published sooner. The Baylor Handbooks on the Greek New Testament are a beautiful addition to the library of any student, pastor, or scholar. The purpose of these volumes is to give a grammatical and syntactical analysis of the Greek text of each book of the Bible. This is the “prequel” to commentary proper (ix). However, as we will see, deSilva’s volume does more than label Greek words or phrases with their corresponding syntactical category.