For Every Pastor’s Shelf

As many of you know, I am the “director” of a new DMin program at Northern called “The New Testament in Context,” and we have had our first class — and Joel Willitts guided the class through his first class on the Jewish literature. I will be teaching a course this winter on Jesus and His Jewish Context and then we will have a second course on the Jewish context and then one on the Apostles in their Context(s). This DMin was created because of the number of pastors I know who wish they had spent more time in the contextual sources of the New Testament — from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Josephus to some later rabbinic materials.

These sources force us to think more rigorously and they challenge us to see how blinded we are by our own culturally-shaped spectacles. We become misreaders of the Bible at times (and more often than that). So what we can do to get better at this?

Let me suggest a first and very useful beginning source: Craig Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, just now out in a second edition. Keener’s a master of the sources and a relentless collector of parallels to New Testament texts. Craig would no doubt love to provide hundreds of references per page for the observations he draws, but that would make the book unwieldy. What we have instead is a kind of trust-me and I’ll-provide-some-references source book that still provides rich historical ideas that are at work in every passage in the New Testament.

BBCNT then is a commentary on the whole NT in light of ancient sources with plenty of historical background information provided so that the Bible reader and teacher and pastor will be more than amply repaid simply for using this source for every passage studied and taught and preached.

Buy it and you’ll rise up and call me blessed!