I first came across F. Scott Spencer’s work when I was a salesman for Hendrickson Publishers and he published with us Journeying through Acts. I read his work again more recently as he was one of the contributors to a volume on multiple views on hermeneutics (Spencer taking the “Literary/Postmodern View”). Even when I had read his chapter, I wasn’t quite sure what this view was all about, but he takes up such a view again in his recent book from... Read more

John T. Carroll is familiar to me as co-author of an excellent book called The Death of Jesus in Early Christianity. Thus, it was with great anticipation that I ordered his new commentary on Luke in the WJK NTL series. His commentary is rather short compared to other recent commentaries on Luke (Bock’s two volumes in BEC amount to about 2000 pages!; Joel Green’s NICNT is 1000+), but the NTL series tends to produce succinct commentaries that follow the flow... Read more

John T. Carroll is familiar to me as co-author of an excellent book called The Death of Jesus in Early Christianity. Thus, it was with great anticipation that I ordered his new commentary on Luke in the WJK NTL series. His commentary is rather short compared to other recent commentaries on Luke (Bock’s two volumes in BEC amount to about 2000 pages!; Joel Green’s NICNT is 1000+), but the NTL series tends to produce succinct commentaries that follow the flow... Read more

The online Methodist seminarian journal Catalyst just posted their Feb 2013 issue, which includes a short article of mine on some Pauline commentary recommendations. My recommendations change pretty much daily, but I will say that, right now, as I am teaching through Galatians, I find Richard Hays’ Galatians commentary (NIB) spectacularly rewarding! For Catalyst, see here. Read more

The Feb 2013 issue of Currents in Biblical Research is online. This issue includes an article of mine called: “What is in a Name? The Hermeneutics of Authorship Analysis Concerning Colossians” – my desire is not to solve the authorship debate, but to examine how the landscape of study of authorship has shifted and changed over the years and how the issues are quite complex at the moment. Even our term “authorship” can mean a number of things. Other articles in this... Read more

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Scholarly apetite for researching and debating about Paul’s letter to the Romans is voracious. How can anyone keep up? Short answer: you can’t. So don’t try. But there are ways to stay up to date on scholarship. Commentaries are good resources for that. Articles sometimes offer overviews of current research. Well, luckily in the case of Romans, SBL recently published a collection of essays on Romans that makes accessible to non-specialists the ideas and contributions of a number of key... Read more

Scholarly apetite for researching and debating about Paul’s letter to the Romans is voracious. How can anyone keep up? Short answer: you can’t. So don’t try. But there are ways to stay up to date on scholarship. Commentaries are good resources for that. Articles sometimes offer overviews of current research. Well, luckily in the case of Romans, SBL recently published a collection of essays on Romans that makes accessible to non-specialists the ideas and contributions of a number of key... Read more

Many essay collections seem to be a kind of topical potpourri – inklings and ideas from various scholars on a given topic. These end of being informative, but all-too-often they are forgettable. Once in a while, though, a book is conceived of, and contributors are commissioned, with a view towards driving the discipline away from something and/or towards something else. I think of the book Richard Bauckham edited and promoted called The Gospels for All Christians (1998). As a result of the... Read more

I was very excited to read that there is a second (revised/updated) edition of the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels coming from IVP in September 2013. These famous “black dictionaries” get tons of use by me on a constant basis. It will be nice to have an up-to-date version of the “DJG”! What’s new about the second edition? You can read all about it in the interview with the editors contained in this newsletter. Read more