A Book that You’d Be Surprised to Learn that I Like

I want to launch a series whereby bibliobloggers nominate “a book that you’d be surprised that I like.”

Now most readers of this blog will know by now the kind of authors that I like, love me some Wright, Hays, Hurtado, McKnight, Dunn, Witherington, etc. And I’m generally into NT theology, commentaries, and histories.

In particular, I am a Gospel of Mark fanboy. While I have several favourite Mark commentaries (Gundry, Boring, Evans, Collins, etc.) one of the commentaries I enjoyed the most was a little known one by Herman C. Waetjen, A Reordering of Power: A Socio-Political Reading of Mark’s Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989/Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).

This was a book I read in seminary and it opened my eyes to the fact that in the ancient world that religion, economics, and politics were not neatly separated, but were closely intertwined. It showed that Mark is a religious text with a strong political texture. The account of the passion narrative is excellent. While Ched Myers’s book Binding the Strongman is more well known for its political reading of Mark, I actually prefer Waetjen’s because his approach is more concise and overall more compelling.

I’d like to tag several bibliobloggers to also write a blog post on “a book that you’d be surprised to learn that I like.”

Scot McKnight
Patrick Schreiner
Nijay Gupta
James McGrath