Recently in Biblical studies Category

I was reading William Klein's review of David Peterson's Acts commentary. It included this strange argument:

In a startling example of eisegesis Peterson states, "... we may assume that wherever resistance to the message is recorded, Luke believed the Lord had not yet acted in grace and power to enable belief" (p. 404). May we? In fact Luke explains that the Jews rejected the word of God and judged themselves unfit for eternal life (13:46). I guess this shows how we all see what we want to see in texts and may wish to ignore other ways of seeing things.

The following two claims are at issue, and Klein seems to think the second claim is supposed to undermine the first. I'm not sure how.

1. Resistance to the gospel only occurs when God hasn't led someone to believe.
2. Jews rejected God and thus became unfit for eternal life.

Earlier in the review, Klein makes it clear that Peterson accepts a standard compatibilist Calvinism, whereby "God determined the players' roles in Jesus' crucifixion (2:23) without diminishing those players' responsibility for their actions". So it isn't as if he thinks Peterson denies human responsibility. But it seems the second claim is merely an affirmation of human responsibility, and somehow that's supposed to undermine the view that resistance occurs only in the absence of saving grace. Only if you took the hyper-Calvinist view that we aren't responsible for our actions would you end up thinking your belief in 1 was incompatible with 2. So I'm completely at a loss as to why Klein thinks this criticism applies to Peterson's view, because he knows that Peterson isn't such a hyper-Calvinist and even said so earlier in this review.

Am I just missing something here?

Darrell Bock reviews Bart Ehrman's book Jesus, Interrupted. I especially liked this paragraph, which captures very well my own concern about what I've read by Ehrman:

I think what is most bothersome in this book is the way it sets up discussions. It pursues a topic for several pages, often noting in one or two quick and embedded sentences that the point is not as devastating as the impression given by the rhetoric of the whole section. Such qualification involves a quick almost aside that qualifies things so the author has cover. But it becomes a faint cry in light of the more skeptical thrust of the whole work. The result is to launch a discussion in a direction that implies more than the evidence really gives, leaving a greater impression about what is said than the author claims in the qualification. More than that, by excluding other key factors, the discussion leaves the impression of making a point clear that actually is not as cut and dried as the presentation suggests.

As I was thinking through the following prayer of Paul last week, several things occurred to me:

And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God. [Phil 1:9-11, ESV]

The logical order here is almost the reverse of the order Paul writes it in. He prays for these believers in Philippi that their love would increase so that they'll approve what's excellent. He prays that they'll approve what's excellent so that they will be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. He prays that they'll be pure and blameless so that it will be to the glory and praise of God.

One thing to notice is that he prayed for their love to overflow in knowledge and all discernment. It doesn't serve the goal of approving what's excellent for them to love if they don't love in knowledge and all discernment, because love wrongly applied might lead to approving of what's not excellent. So I can understand why Paul would include that.

But I wondered what grammatical structure was really going on here. In which of the following ways is the prepositional phrase "in knowledge and all discernment" functioning?

1. The pool overflowed in the backyard.
2. The pool overflowed with water.

If it's the former, then he's praying that their love would overflow in the context of having knowledge and all discernment, so that the knowledge and all discernment can aid their love in serving to develop their approval of all that's excellent.

If it's the latter, then he's praying that their love would overflow with the knowledge and all discernment that their love someone is producing out of itself.

I first read it as the latter, but it seems unlikely that he thought love would be the generating force for knowledge and all discernment for the sake of approving of what's excellent. It seems more likely that he thinks love overflowing in an environment where there's knowledge and all discernment would serve approval of what's excellent. Love uses knowledge and all discernment to produce approval of what's excellent. It doesn't generate the knowledge and all discernment.

If this is right, then it provides an interesting motivation for seeking knowledge and understanding. Philosophers tend to approve of what we do because we think pursuit of knowledge is intrinsically good. It's good in itself to have a better understanding of what's going on in the world or of how various truths interact and explain other truths. Thinking through the nature of what's true is simply worth doing, even if it never leads to any good consequences besides a better understanding of things.

I don't see anything here to deny that, but I do see something here that might serve as a guide to a more important reason for caring about getting a good understanding of things. If knowledge is intrinsically good, that doesn't mean that there's no more important good that knowledge also serves. Paul seems to be taking the approval of what is excellent as a good that love together with knowledge and discernment can produce. I wonder if he'd even go as far as seeing that approval of what is excellent as a higher good. It is further along in his progress toward the goal that he says the whole succession leads to, which is God's glory. But that's compatible with every step of the succession being intrinsically good (contra John Piper, who on my reading reduces all other purposes to serving the glory of God).

If that's right, then the pursuit of knowledge might best be guided by a higher motive of trying to pursue and acknowledge what is excellent, which in turn should be pursued in significant part because it can be an aid toward more excellent living. If this is a higher purpose than mere understanding, then it might change which things we spend more time on thinking about and might focus our efforts to arrive at the truth in a direction that serves thinking about what's excellent for the sake of becoming a more excellent person. I'm not sure if many Christian philosophers spend a lot of time evaluating which things they think about in such ways, but it seems to me that it could have a major impact on Christians in the discipline if they did.

One final observation: the fact that the series ends in God's glory might give pause to those who strongly resist the idea that God's glory can be an ultimate goal that love can serve. As I've already indicated, I don't agree with John Piper's view that everything God does, including the entirety of God's love, is purely for the sake of increasing God's glory. Such a view doesn't allow recognizing God's love as intrinsically good or recognizing the objects of God's love as intrinsically good. But it's just as bad, I would say, to try to resist Piper by denying that God can love people in part because it gives him more glory. If Paul can pray that our love would grow, with the eventual goal of bringing glory to God, then surely love doesn't rule out the possibility that it has a purpose of bringing such glory to God, and then God's love itself also must not be mutually exclusive of the purpose of bringing glory to himself.

It may well be that Piper is right in saying that everything God does he does to bring glory to himself. What I would deny is that that's God's only purpose in everything he does. I think Piper is wrong to give a reductionist account of God's motives, where everything reduces to his pursuit of his glory. But I wonder if those of us who question Piper on this can go too far if we insist that there are things that God does not do for his glory in any way. I think maybe the proper middle ground is to say that God does do everything he does for his own glory, as long as we also say that there are other motives God has for all the things he does that aren't merely reducible to his pursuit of his own glory. They're goals that have intrinsic worth of their own, and love is one of those.

[cross-posted at Evangel]

Justin Taylor posted a video of Tremper Longman discussing Genesis 1 and the historicity of a real person named Adam. His main claim seems to be that we shouldn't insist on the text requiring an actual historical person to have existed and that it's an overly literalistic interpretation that requires that. I read through the comment section, and I think a lot of people are making some mistakes both in interpreting what Longman is saying and in what it implies about his view of scripture.

Several points seem to me worth emphasizing.

1.Longman has denies neither plenary inspiration of scripture nor inerrancy. What he has done is deny a view that many people here take to be implied by (a) inerrancy or the plenary inspiration of scripture together with (b) a certain view of what Genesis 1 and/or other texts of scripture, when interpreted correctly, actually teach.

2. If Longman is incorrect about the matters (b) describes, then his view is compatible with inerrancy but incompatible with the correct interpretation of scripture. But lots of people have views incompatible with the correct interpretation of scripture, and we don't claim that they are therefore denying inerrancy. Do continuationists claim that cessationists are denying inerrancy (or vice versa)? No! They simply disagree with their interpretation of scripture. It would be another thing to say that a text really means something but that what it says isn't true. The Fuller Seminary view of scripture allows for that. Longman's doesn't.

3. Longman didn't actually say that Genesis 1 should be taken in such a way that there was no single Adam. What he said is that we shouldn't insist that it must be. He also didn't say that the same is true of other passage of scripture. It's possible, for all he said, that he thinks Genesis 1 doesn't necessitate a single Adam but other parts of scripture do. I get the sense from his language that he's more interested in recognizing that people can accept inerrancy and accept the conclusion of the consensus of science than he is at arguing that we ought to take any particular view of how to interpret Genesis 1.

He does say that insisting on the traditional interpretation is overly literalistic, but he doesn't actually go as far as saying that merely taking it that way is overly literalistic. He says that insisting on taking it that way is overly literalistic. There's a difference. One is insisting on keeping the borders of inerrancy intact rather than confusing them with heremeneutical issues. The other is insisting on a certain interptretation of a certain passage. He doesn't in this video do the latter. I'd have to hear more from him to know his full view, therefore, but I see no insistence that there was no single Adam. We ought, at least, to keep that in mind.

4. There are ways to fit the non-individual approach to Adam to the other texts people are citing. It does mean a somewhat unnatural reading of a few statements (such as Paul's comparison of the one man Adam and the one man Jesus), but it's possible to take those statements as true while not referring to an actual one man Adam but to the one man Adam in the Genesis account. I don't think this is the most natural way to take either the Genesis narratives or Paul's statement, but it's possible to take the Genesis narratives as true in the sense parables are true and Paul's statement as true in the same sense that it's true that the Good Samaritan helped the man that other passersby ignored. It's true that the Good Samaritan did this. It's just truth within a story. The character in Jesus' parable did that. It's just that he was telling a parable and not implying the existence of a real person who did what the Good Samaritan did.

Someone could take Genesis' early chapters in a similar way, teaching about how we are all fallen and how we all do what Adam and Eve did, thus in NT terms taking there to be an explanation of why there's a need for a savior, without believing there was a real individual person whom the Bible calls Adam and a real individual person whom the Bible calls Eve. So the other passages that Longman doesn't discuss don't necessitate denying scripture in other places. The fact that he only mentions Genesis 1 doesn't mean he'd have to say that someone holding the view he wants to make room for (but doesn't seem to endorse) is denying some other part of scripture. It just means he didn't address those other passages, and a fuller presentation of such a view would have to do that.

So, short of further information, I'm not seeing any justification for some of the claims I've seen in the comment section of Justin's post. Longman doesn't deny inerrancy or the plenary inspiration of scripture. He doesn't endorse the view he's making room for and doesn't say the traditional view itself is overly literalistic but just says that insisting on the traditional interpretation as the only possible one is overly literalistic. He doesn't comment on other passages but presumably could, and it's not as if there are ways to fit such a view with the rest of scripture without denying inerrancy. There's plenty of room for arguing about whether such a view is the best way to take various texts, but there's no room in my mind for claiming that this approach is a denial of a high view of scripture itself. It's just a denial of common interpretations that, together with a high view of scripture, would lead to the view of a historical individual Adam.

Every once in a while I run into someone criticizing the Bible because it contains some depiction of someone doing something immoral, usually when the text never endorses that act or even if it's clear from the general context that the narrator considers the act downright evil. For example, Richard Dawkins objects to the story of Jephthah's rash vow, that if God gives him victory he'd sacrifice the first thing coming through his gates to greet him as he returns home, only to be greeted by his daughter, so he sacrifices her. His reason for objecting? Well, Jephthah did something obviously wrong. So the Bible must not be a good guide to immorality.

As has been said many a time, Dawkins would fail an introductory philosophy or religion course if he submitted materials from his book or similar quality work for such classes. This idea that the mere inclusion of an immoral act in a narrative somehow makes that narrative immoral is downright crazy. No one really believes that. Murder mysteries would suddenly because evil, for instance, because a murder does take place in them. You couldn't have crime-fighting stories of any sort, because those would contain evil acts to be fought against.

Nevertheless, despite this idea being absolutely ridiculous, it apparently comes up in contexts that have nothing to do with the Bible. There's been a campaign against the forthcoming Stargate Universe, the third (and I think what may well be the best) series in the Stargate franchise. Darren Sumner of Gateworld has an excellent discussion of what these objections are and why they fail completely.

Aside from the fact that it's pretty dumb to criticize a show you haven't even bothered to wait to see when you have at best partial information, the argument itself seems silly. It's been rumored that there will be some temporary body-switching, with the consciousness of one person controlling the body of someone else in a different galaxy (which the Stargate franchise has done several times before), only this time the controlling parties will have sexual encounters using other people's bodies. That raises obvious moral questions, in particular if the owner of the body in question didn't consent to have their body used this way. But merely depicting them something doesn't imply endorsement, and it's almost certainly true (given what I know from the Stargate writers) that they will want us to question whether this is ok, again assuming no consent (and we haven't been told if there will be consent to use each other's bodies this way by mutual agreement, which for all I know will be part of the arrangement).

The claim (see the comments) is that it's rape, and they shouldn't be depicting it. Well, we don't know if they'll be depicting it. But they do depict rape on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, or at least they sometimes come close enough. They did depict rape on Battlestar Galactica. There were people who objected to the latter, but I never understood why the mere depiction of rape, especially when it's absolutely clear that the people doing it are being downright evil, is somehow wrong. It was, in that case, an easy way to show the morally degenerate state of the Pegasus crew under Admiral Cain's command. The Galactica crew were certainly not perfect, but the Pegasus crew had gone well over the edge to true evil. That scene made that abundantly clear, and it was good storytelling.

The difference here, as some commenters in that thread point out, is that main characters carry this out. But main characters can be morally flawed in a good story. They can even be pretty evil. Why is it immoral for a storyteller to have a main character do something as bad as raping someone? I see no argument for this claim anywhere in any of these discussions.

But comparing these two kinds of fallacious criticisms at least helps me understand that such shoddy thinking isn't present just among those seeking to have any argument, no matter how bad, against the Bible. Those who want to have any argument, no matter how bad, against a forthcoming TV show will resort to the same tactics. So maybe this isn't a problem just among those who want to attack Christianity, the Bible, or religion. It occurs much more generally than that.

In the opening verses of Judges 3, there's an apparent contradiction:

1 Now these are the nations that the Lord left, to test Israel by them, that is, all in Israel who had not experienced all the wars in Canaan. 2 It was only in order that the generations of the people of Israel might know war, to teach war to those who had not known it before. 3 These are the nations: the five lords of the Philistines and all the Canaanites and the Sidonians and the Hivites who lived on Mount Lebanon, from Mount Baal-hermon as far as Lebo-hamath. 4 They were for the testing of Israel, to know whether Israel would obey the commandments of the Lord, which he commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses. 5 So the people of Israel lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 6 And their daughters they took to themselves for wives, and their own daughters they gave to their sons, and they served their gods. [Judges 3:1-5, ESV]

Verse 2 seems to say that the only reason God allowed some Canaanites to remain in the land and not be destroyed is so that future generations of Israelites who weren't part of the conquest would learn warfare. Verse 4 seems to say that God allowed the nations to remain in the land as a test for Israel of whether they would follow the Torah or revert to the Canaanites' ways.

There are those who conclude that these two verses must have been written by two different authors who had conflicting agendas, and somehow and for unfathomable reasons they got combined by some idiot who couldn't tell they flat-out contradicted each other. If you thought ancient writers or editors were either stupid or unconcerned with telling a coherent narrative, then you might be attracted to such a theory, but most decent literary interpretation tries to make sense of the text rather than trying to read it in the least charitable way possible. So it would be nice to find an explanation that doesn't make the author or final compiler look like a complete dunce.

I think the apparent inconsistency disappears if you think of learning warfare not as learning how to fight (which doesn't seem to be the sort of thing God ever emphasizes in the Bible anyway and wouldn't matter if there were no enemies anyway) but rather as knowing the experience of being at war. Why would God want them to have the experience of war? Verse 4 explains that. If this is right, then verses 2 and 4 aren't providing contrary explanations but are emphasizing different aspects of the same explanation. It may not be the most natural interpretation of verse 2 if that verse were taken in isolation, but these other factors should count for something.

So I've listed ten myths that I at one point just believed when I first heard them, even if in some cases it was only when I was pretty young. I also wanted to put together a list of myths that never sounded plausible to me, even the ones I heard as a kid, but that somehow get passed around as if true (and in some cases even get trotted out as if any serious scholar must believe such a thing).

1. KFC changed its name from Kentucky Fried Chicken because they don't use chicken anymore. They use clones of chickens grown without heads, and the U.S. government won't allow them to call that chicken.

2. There's such a person as Santa Claus.

3. The Bush Administration orchestrated 9-11.

4. Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S.

5. The Pentateuch was compiled over several generations by people with different and conflicting ideologies, and we can reconstruct which ideology is behind which verses or even partial verses with pinpoint precision, according to such tell-tale signs as which name is used for God or whether it happens to involve a negative or positive assumption or conclusion about a certain tribe of Israel. It amazes me how confident scholars can be of this even though no sources have ever been found for such texts, no textual statements in the text we have indicate anything about any such sources, and no two scholars can even agree on which parts come from which sources.

6. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels, is a practitioner of Wicca who sought to convert Christians to Wicca by writing novels about magic.

7. Sarah Palin cut funding for teen mothers because of pro-life convictions.

8. George W. Bush attacked Iraq because he believed God told him to.

9. Sarah Palin thinks God directed the U.S. to attack Iraq.

10. Divine foreknowledge and predetermination are incompatible with human freedom and responsbility. Sorry, I suppose I should find something less controversial. How about the commonly-heard line about how Jesus' statement that it's easier for a camel to get through an eye of a needle than for the rich to enter God's kingdom once you know that there's a gate in Jerusalem called the eye of the needle, and camels can get through it, but it's hard. (I once heard someone repeat that false background to Jesus's statement and then say that knowing that changed her life. Somehow. She never explained any further and probably couldn't have done so even at gunpoint.)

In Matthew 22:41-46, Jesus raises a question to the Pharisees who were doubting his identity as sent from God. He cites Psalm 110:44, which has the psalmist saying:

The LORD said to my Lord, sit in the place of honor at my right hand until I humble your enemies beneath your feet. [Matthew 22:44, NLT]

Jesus asks them how David could call the Messiah "My Lord" if the Messiah is David's son, and they have no answer.

There are plenty of interpretive issues going on here, but it strikes me that Jesus' argument relies on Davidic authorship of the psalm. Most scholars today deny the authenticity of the psalm headings as later additions. I have a couple contemporary commentaries on the Psalms that do take these headings seriously (I think the arguments in the introduction to Geoffrey Grogan's Two Horizons commentary are excellent, and if I remember correctly Derek Kidner's Tyndale volume takes this approach), but a lot of pretty conservative evangelicals, even inerrantists, don't consider the psalm headings to be a genuine part of the canonical scriptures. The problem with this is that anyone who takes Jesus' teaching as authoritative has strong reasons to accept Davidic authorship of Psalm 110, because Jesus' argument relies on that. So there's a choice between (1) accepting Jesus' teaching as true and accepting this psalm's heading as reliably reporting the truth about David's authorship of the psalm or (2) allowing Jesus to have taught something false if David didn't actually write this psalm.

The only way I can think of to get out of this argument is to consider Psalm 110 to have been written by someone other than David but to express something that, if David had said it, would be true. Then Jesus could give an argument that relies on David having fictionally said something that would be true if he'd said it, and it would therefore have to make sense with David saying it, so his conclusion would follow. But this isn't how those who reject Davidic authorship generally take Psalm 110. They generally take it to refer to God speaking to a Davidic king and a human but not Davidic Israelite (not a king) referring to God speaking to that king as "my Lord". So it seems as if the usual non-Davidic-authorship interpretation still doesn't work if Jesus' teaching is accurate. So even though there does seem to be a third option available, I don't think it reconciles how most who reject Davidic authorship actually take the psalm with how Jesus takes it.

Most recent discussions of the sin(s) of Sodom and Gomorrah focus on whether homosexuality is the sin that brought God's wrath down on them or whether it was instead lack of hospitality. It's as if the point of this passage is to score points in the debate over homosexuality, which misses the point entirely. I was therefore thoroughly impressed with the job David Wayne did at treating the question of the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah.

David looks to the text and draws out its implications based on what it actually says and what the things it says assume. The picture of the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah is much more comprehensive and shows elements of degredation along most axes. Progressives and conservativees alike should have serious moral difficulties with most of the items on the list, even if some aspects of a few of them might be controversial.

David's point is that Billy Graham was wrong to say that the U.S. is worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. While I'm not going to weigh in on that debate, I do want to draw attention to Jesus' comment that the people who rejected him would wish they were in Sodom and Gomorrah because their punishment would be worse than Sodom and Gomorrah's. It certainly creates trouble for the picture of Jesus as the non-judgmental peacenik, but I think we miss the point again if we leave off at such observations. His claim is that those who reject him are worse than the significant picture of evil (in largely-unconstroversial terms) that David presents, not perhaps morally worse in their everyday lives but worse in the most important aspect of human life, which is our attitude toward God.

So if we're going to weigh in on whether Billy Graham is right, we'd have to evaluate whether current American culture is more at odds with Jesus than those Jews of his day who rejected him. That would be more immediate to the question than trying to observe the inner attitudes behind the actions by comparing outward behavior with the outward behavior in Sodom and Gomorrah.

The so-called New Perspective on Paul, spearheaded by E.P. Sanders and James D.G. Dunn, is
sometimes seen (and I think this is part of the motivation for some of its proponents) as a more Jewish-friendly view than the traditional understanding of Paul. On the traditional view, the prevailing mindset among the Jewish leaders, especially Pharisees of Paul's day was a theology of works-earned salvation. On the New Perspective, the Jews held a view more like the contemporary Roman Catholic view. People enter the covenant by God's grace but remain in it by works. I've wondered sometimes if some of the idea behind the NPP is to try to make the New Testament more friendly to Jews in this politically-correct age. If the view we attribute to the Jews of Paul's day (at least a notable portion of certain sorts of their leaders and those they
taught), then we don't seem as down on the Jews. Given the history of negative attitudes toward the Jews from the Christian-influenced world, anyone with a shred of respect for Judaism should at least like the idea of distancing Christianity from Anti-Semitism.

I don't happen to think the arguments for the NPP are remotely convincing, and for that reason I do wonder if some who want to be tolerant of Jews are engaging in wishful thinking in adopting the NPP. I don't see the need, because I don't think the traditional view is even close to anti-Semitic. Paul was in the tradition of the prophets, culminating in Jesus himself, in his self-criticism of his own Judaism. The internal critique found in Hosea or Jeremiah certainly wouldn't be seen by most Jews as anti-Semitic, and there's nothing that Paul does that's any different, even on the traditional view. But I'm not the only one who has wondered if some of the motivation for the NPP is a desire to abandon a view that's often been portrayed as anti-Jewish. Even if that's not true, there certainly are NPP proponents who offer that as a plus for their view.

There's a deep irony in all this, though, a double irony in fact. The very act of adopting the NPP, even if motivated by the a desire to think highly of the Jews of Paul's day, ends up leading to an unintended consequence while not really achieving the intended result to begin with. First, changing their view of the view Paul is condemning doesn't change the fact that he condemns it. It doesn't soften Paul's harsh language against the Galatians in calling them heretics and thinking it would be better to emasculate themselves than let circumcision do whatever it is (which is a matter of debate here) that they saw circumcision as doing. It doesn't make the Jews of Paul's day suddenly become orthodox Christian thinkers in Paul's mind. The Christians who were accepting the Jewish theses that the Galatians were playing around with would still be heretics in Paul's mind, no matter who wins the debate about what those theses happened to be. So the tolerance motivating the NPP doesn't lead to a tolerant conclusion on either the traditional view or the NPP. There's a theological view that gets rejected here, and revising our view of what that view is doesn't change the fact that Paul considers it s heresy.

Second, there's an unintended consequence. As I said at the beginning of this post, the view that the NPP attributes to the Galatians is pretty much the official Roman Catholic position. The view most people in the traditional approach attribute to the Roman Catholic position is actually a misrepresentation of official Catholic teaching but is common enough among Catholics who misunderstand the teaching of their church. I grew up in a very Catholic area, and it's obvious to me that many Catholics do hold the Galatian heresy to the extent that they have any beliefs on the matter at all (and many I knew didn't). But the official teaching of Roman Catholicism is not the Galatian heresy but rather a view very much like the view the NPP thinks Jews of Paul's day held.

The result is that, in extending so much tolerance toward the Jews of Paul's day, the NPP ends up closing the only door to separating Roman Catholicism from the Galatian heresy. Someone who holds the traditional view on what Paul was responding to can distinguish between that view (which Paul calls heresy) and the Roman Catholic view (even if many who hold the traditional view fail to do this). But someone holding the NPP seems to me to have to say that Roman Catholics are heretics. I wonder if the tolerance that NPP proponents are so motivated by can extend to Roman Catholicism. There's at least an internal tension within some who hold the NPP between one key motivation and one logical implication of the view.

I'm expecting to begin reading a commentary on Acts in a few months or so. I suspect that it will be one of the following: Ben Witherington's Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, Darrell Bock's BECNT, or David Peterson's brand-new Pillar volume. I expect that there might be several people reading this who have some experience with commentaries on Acts, and I'm interested in any information or evaluations anyone might have to offer about any of these three books, especially if you can detect specific reasons to prefer one to the others or over one of the others on a particular issue.

Some of the issues that come to my mind include:

1. I know that Bock had access to Witherington, and Peterson had access to both of the other two, and that gives the more recent ones priority in my mind over the earlier ones, all other things being equal (which is often not the case). So my presumption is to prefer Peterson to Bock and Bock to Witherington if no other factors influence my preferences. Bock had a chance to learn from Witherington, and Peterson had a chance to learn from Witherington and Bock. Of course, if they didn't fully avail themselves of those chances then it's still possible that they don't present the best of what came before them.

2. Witherington doesn't include the text of the book of Acts, which would mean having a copy of that in addition. That gets unwieldy the way I read books, because I carry them around with me and pull them out to read when I get a chance while waiting for something or while walking. Bock and Peterson, I believe, both include a translation of the text of each section before the discussion of that section.

3. Some reviews I've seen claim that Bock does a lot of commenting on other commentaries, which some people claimed meant that he didn't discuss the text as much for himself and often didn't indicate his own view on the issue he was discussing, but I don't know if this is true. The suggestion was that it's better to read Witherington than to read Bock's comments on Witherington and several others, which is true only if Witherington's discussion is better at sifting through the information than Bock's.

4. Bock had the advantage of writing a hefty commentary on Luke before writing his Acts commentary, and Luke-Acts is a two-volume work by the same author. The other two don't have that. (Witherington will eventually do every NT book, but his Acts commentary was one of his earliest, and he hadn't done Luke yet at that time.)

I'm currently leaning toward Peterson at the moment, but anything anyone might say to sway me in a different direction or to confirm that choice is welcome.

Jerome Walsh's commentary on I Kings is probably the best thing out there on narrative issues in I Kings. I've heard good reports on it from several commentary reviews, and two people who have used it in their sermon preparation for our current sermon series in Kings have found it very helpful. It's fairly rare that he says anything that evangelicals would find problematic with regard to the nature of scripture, but I did identify one thing when reading his commentary on I Kings 11, and I don't think he can consistently maintain it given other things he says.

When discussing Solomon's failures as a king, Walsh says the following about the narrator's perspective underlying the critical account (from p.136):

Yahweh is described as "the God of Israel" to contrast with the other national deities named in verses 5 and 7. The concept here is very different from our own. The narrator presumes a polytheistic worldview: other gods besides Yahweh existed, and each deity had its own national sphere. The text does not understand Solomon's apostasy as turning away from the only true God to worship false gods. Solomon's evil is that he supported in Israel, Yahweh's own nation, the worship of Yahweh's rivals.

First of all, Walsh uses the wrong term. The view that there are other gods that you shouldn't worship and only one you should worship is not polytheism, which is the worship of many gods. It's called henotheism. There's evidence within the Bible itself that some people in ancient Israel were henotheists. There's actually more evidence that many were polytheists, including Solomon himself according to this passage. But the consistent message of the biblical narrators and prophets is not of henotheism but monotheism. The book of Kings is actually a pretty clear case of this. Solomon's speeches and prayers at the temple dedication are pretty clear that there is just one God who is sovereign over all the earth.

In fact, even four pages later Walsh seems to recognize this. In his discussion of the rebellions Solomon faced from two subjugated peoples (Edom and Aram) and one internal rebellion (Jeroboam), he emphasizes the narrator's theological perspective of Yahweh's sovereignty over the doings of those in other nations (p.140):

The effect of this heaping up of parallels is to recall that both Moses' and David's careers were divinely directed, and thereby to intensify considerably the impact of the claim that "God raised up" Hadad and Rezon. The same Yahweh who raised up Moses as Israel's savior, the same God who raised up David to be Israel's ideal king, now raises up adversaries to oppose Solomon. The punishment of Solomon and the impending disintegration of his empire become part of the sacred history of Yahweh's dealings with Israel, on part in importance with the Exodus and the covenant with David.

Such a view of Yahweh's role with respect to other nations doesn't necessarily require thinking the other gods don't exist. They might just be fairly impotent beings in comparison with Yahweh's sovereign might. But it's hard to see it as consistent with the view that the only reason to worship Yahweh is because he's the god who happens to be Israel's god, whereas other nations have real gods who happen to be their gods. It's very hard to put Walsh's own view of the narrative position of Kings together with his statement that Solomon's sin is disloyalty to the god who happens to be Israel's god. The text itself commands the view that Yahweh is sovereign over other nations in a way that there's no reason to consider worshiping them even if they do exist. In fact, any acknowledgement of their existence is consistent with thinking of them as something like demonic beings whose existence and actions are all subject to divine sovereignty in the same way the human figures in these accounts are.

Now I'm well aware of the view in scholarship that takes some of these accounts to have been written from different theological perspectives. The idea is that earlier materials assume many gods, and later authors added stuff that assumes one sovereign God. Walsh indicates agreement with this elsewhere (e.g. in note 9 on p.112). But Walsh is a narrative commentator, committing to dealing with the final form of the text. Surely if the final compilers agreed with the orthodox view that there is just one sovereign God, they would not have meant the discussion of Solomon's sin to reflect henotheistic concerns but monotheistic concerns. Anyone who could endorse the understanding of Yahweh's sovereignty over foreign kings could not think of those kings as properly worshiping their own gods over Yahweh, since Yahweh is the supreme God. Such a compiler/narrator would therefore not accept the view Walsh attributes to the narrator, and this is true even if many in Israel did hold such a henotheistic view at the time these events are describing. (Since many actually held full-out polytheism, which is what the text is criticizing, it's not a major concession to think many were henotheists as well.)

So I think Walsh's contention is extremely hard to reconcile with what he himself recognizes about the narrator's theology, and that's even conceding for the sake of argument that the original narrator of some passages was a henotheist (which I don't think is true to begin with).

I noticed an interesting translation issue as I was reading Jerome Walsh's commentary on I Kings. The longstanding debate between favoring the grammatical form vs. favoring the sense of a text comes up full force in I Kings 11:1-4. Consider the NRSV translation of these verses:

King Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the Israelites, "You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you; for they will surely incline your heart to follow their gods"; Solomon clung to these in love. Among his wives were seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart was not true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of his father David.

Walsh makes the following comment in a footnote (p.134, n.2):

Hebrew uses the same word (nasim) where English has two different ones, "women" and "wives." The NRSV tries to capture the proper nuance to translate each case. My discussion tries to reflect the way nasim becomes a motif word in the Hebrew text.

Some people favor the sense over the form, most noticeable in translations sometimes called dynamic equivalence (e.g. in Bible translation, the NLT is a good example, and the NIV and TNIV tend in that direction often). One good thing about this kind of translation in cases like this is that you get to capture the nuance of the word in different contexts. The same Hebrew word can mean both "wife" and "woman". In different contexts, it might have the flavor of one of those rather than the other, and here it has each flavor a verse apart. If you translate them both the same way, that's harder to capture. In particular, if you talk about Solomon's women rather than Solomon's wives, in English you get the sense that it's talking about his harem. But then with Solomon you actually are talking about his harem, so maybe it's not that big a difference in his case. Still, one might argue for translating the word as "wives" in all of its occurrences so as to avoid that sense instead of translating it consistently as "women" the way Walsh does. You lose something either way, but you lose something if you translate it differently in different instances also.

I think it's easier to tell from the context what the sense might be, so it's less necessary in these verses to seek to distinguish between the senses the word can have by translating as the NRSV does, as one in one verse and the other in the other verse. What Walsh points out, though, is that you miss something important about this passage if you emphasize sense over form. The repetition of the word conveys something in the Hebrew that you lose in an English translation if it distinguishes between different senses the word can have throughout this passage. There's a literary element of the passage that the NRSV translates away.

This sort of thing often happens in the so-called dynamic translations. Translations that emphasize form, while sometimes missing elements that a sense-for-sense translation will convey, does capture some elements like this that you won't see in a translation like the NLT and often won't see even in the NIV or TNIV. There are those who regularly deride translations like the ESV or NASB as if they have no positive features as translations, seeing them as wooden artifacts of archaic language that barely make sense as English and are too hard for the average English speaker to understand. Whatever element of truth there is in that characterization, there are certainly things that the ESV and NASB preserve that you don't find in the sense-for-sense translations, and it's one reason I always like to have one around.

(The ESV does translate them the same way the NRSV does, as "women" and then "wives", I should note. This is a theoretical point about Bible translation, not an argument for a particular translation as a whole.)

I've been accused by some Christians of having skewed judgments because I've drunk deeply from the well of academia. I've also been accused by atheists of having skewed judgments because I'm too willing to let my religious views shape how I think about issues where an unbiased person would come to an obvious conclusion opposite my own. So maybe I'm just suspect from both ends, but I wonder if in some ways I'm in a more ideal position to be able to see through ways people in both sides have allowed their preferences, value judgments, and assumptions to shape their thinking in non-rational and perhaps even irrational ways.

I spent a good deal of time last summer in commentaries on Proverbs, and my daily Bible reading has taken me back to Proverbs again, so I've been thinking about the secular basis of this fairly large biblical book. Scholars have found similar collections of proverbial material in Babylon and Egypt, and it's pretty clear that both wisdom traditions predate the biblical proverbs. Some of these proverbial collections include material that's extremely close to particular proverbs in the biblical book. The biblical narratives about Solomon, one of the few places outside Proverbs to discuss the content of the book, seem to indicate that had access to the wisdom traditions of other nations.

Daniel reports the righteous behavior of Daniel and his three Hebrew friends who were exiled to Babylon. They refused to worship other gods and insisted on keeping Torah dietary restrictions as much as possible, even to the point of eating no meat at all since they couldn't guarantee any of it had been killed properly. One thing they didn't do is refuse to learn the Babylonian wisdom traditions.

On the other hand, the prophets roundly condemn pagan prophets as unedifying and full of lies about false gods. They're not worth listening to. Paul speaks of the philosophy that the Colossians had been listening to as empty and something to avoid (though it's not clear that he says this of philosophy as a discipline or field of study, as most translations wrongly convey). Pagans like Ruth are perfectly kosher for intermarriage when they convert but completely forbidden when they don't, as the concluding evaluation of Solomon in Kings makes clear. Rahab seems to be another example.

What should we conclude? There's a spiritual threat from listening to false statements that have a bearing on important spiritual matters. But the biblical picture is not to avoid that at all costs. There are certain settings where avoiding it is the only thing to do, but those settings involve marriage and worship. There are other settings where learning it and considering it, as long as it's with discretion, are presented as entirely unproblematic. There are even strong indications that an entire book of the Bible derives from material that includes a significant amount of secular reflections on life.

As with many things in Christian life, there's a tension here between two principles that are both morally important. God created humans with the ability to reason and to arrive at truths about life and reality, and fallen humanity has found ways to corrupt and avoid using that capacity, in some cases leading to an ability to see the truth at all. One case that's especially so is our ability to come to understand the good news of the salvation God offers to us in Jesus the Messiah. But even with an inability to appreciate the gospel message apart from the Holy Spirit, that doesn't mean we're incapable of coming to understand true things that are related to that issue, and we're also talking about Christians who do have the Holy Spirit, who can indeed and according to Jesus' teaching are in fact guided into truth by the Spirit.

So why the absolute prohibition on drinking from the well of academia, whose secular assumptions and goals can certainly be obstacles to the truth but whose God-given abilities and resources for understanding the truth are nonetheless present? Why even the extremely strong resistance, even if not absolute, that many Christians have? Surely there's a need for discernment, and for some people that discernment might require staying away entirely from certain kinds of things, as with anything. But it seems to me that a lot of the resistance I see is highly unbiblical, despite its appearance of piety.

Two prostitutes appear before Solomon, disputing over who was the mother of a certain child and who was the mother over the child who had died. There were no witnesses, so it was one's word against the other's. Solomon orders a sword brought in and commands his soldiers to divide the child in two to give half to each. The mother offers to give her child to the other woman, and the other woman says to kill the child so neither would have a baby.

I've never encountered anyone who thinks Solomon ever meant to kill the child. He expected that his bluff would reveal the mother, and it did. But it was a bluff nonetheless. This incident is held up by the narrator as an example of Solomon's great wisdom.

It never occurred to me before, but this passage has some striking similarities to passages where God desires to bring a certain response out of someone and says he'll do something but then goes back on it when a human being responds a certain way to what God says. For example, he says he'll destroy Israel and rebuild it from Moses in the aftermath of the golden calf incident, but when Moses intercedes on behalf of Israel God relents. He tells Hezekiah of his impending death, and Hezekiah's response brings extra years.

A common open theistic interpretation of such passages holds that God is not serious in his original statement if he never intended to do what he says. If God had known all along that Moses would respond as he did, then the passage doesn't seem to the open theist who makes this objection as if God's statement has the seriousness of what it actually says. It strikes me that the parallel passage of Solomon in his divinely-given wisdom, by the same reasoning, must have actually intended to cut the child in two. But I've never actually encountered anyone claiming this. It was a bluff. He didn't have divine insight that would guarantee his knowledge of how these two prostitutes would respond to his bluff, but he was wise enough to anticipate that this might be an effective way to decide the case.

So why couldn't God be doing the same thing but with infallible access to how people will respond, thus engaging in a similar bluff but one that God knows will not be called? Knowing how Moses would respond, God brought out exactly the response in Moses that occurred. If this is supposed to be somehow deceptive or immoral in some other way, as I think open theists who make this argument are saying of the traditional interpretation of these passages, then I think you have to say by the same reasoning that Solomon was being similarly immoral.

Now it's fine to say that Solomon was being immoral here, but it's difficult to make that claim if you want to hold up the moral teaching of the scriptures as divinely-inspired, since the narrator does seem to endorse Solomon's move as wise. That doesn't mean we who aren't as wise and don't have as much insight into people's character should always do the same thing in similar circumstances, but it does mean there's nothing wrong with someone sufficiently wise doing what Solomon does, and thus when God does it it's also not wrong. So you don't have to think God didn't know for sure what Moses would do.

In Colossians 3:5, Paul lists a bunch of things to put to death in oneself, ending with "covetousness, which is idolatry". He also links the two in a similar way in a parallel passage in Ephesians 5:5. The usual explanation for how covetousness is idolatry is to find elements of idolatry in covetousness. At root, idolatry in the Hebrew scriptures is the placing of anything above God or in the place of God. Having your priorities in the wrong order can be idolatry if it involves moving God to any place lower than the top. So if you're longing after something that's not yours, to the point where you place your desire for it above your desire for God, including the desire to be righteous and to be content with what God has given you, then you are in effect practicing a sort of idolatry.

I was reading John Oswalt's commentary on Isaiah recently (p.499 of his second volume, to be exact), and I discovered that he conceives of the relationship in the other direction, drawing on the self-centered features of pagan idolatry that seek to use religious ritual to get a god's attention for benefit to the person engaging in those rituals:

In what way is acquisitiveness the sum of all sins? Perhaps it is as an expression of all the others. The proud, unbridled self wishes to make the universe center on itself, to draw all things inward to itself, confident that it can amass enough of the power, comfort, security, and pleasure that money and possessions signify it will be secure. Idolatry exists to satisfy these desires, so it is not surprising that Paul should identify covetousness as idolatry (Col 3:5). This may also explain why the prohibition of covetousness is the last of the Ten Commandments. To break this commandment is to break the first, in effect.

So it's not just that covetousness is idolatry because covetousness has features of idolatry. Covetousness is idolatry because idolatry itself stems from covetousness to begin with. My first thought on reading Oswalt is that he had it backwards, but I wonder if what he's put his finger on is actually the more fundamental relation of the two.

Darrell Bock has responded to Bart Ehrman's latest book. One of the issues he tackles is one of the few things in Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus that I encountered for the first time when reading Ehrman, his odd claim that Luke's theology of Jesus' being in control during the passion doesn't allow for Jesus experiencing pain. I was happy to find someone dealing with that claim head-on, since the one recent book that I've seen that has any response to Ehrman left that issue out.

I had a friend who used to conclude from his conviction of God's sovereignty and the fact that a young woman he was attracted to happened to cross his path that day that God was sending him a message about his future with that young woman. It was hard to convince him that just because it was part of God's plan that he run across her path that doesn't mean it was for the reason he might think God had them cross paths. It could be because his running into her reminded her of something she needed to be reminded of that day. It could have been because of something unrelated to the two of them, though, for instance maybe because God wanted them each to be at separate locations shortly after that, and the best way to achieve that at the precise times he wanted them to arrive was for them to walk right by each other. It could have even been so that he could have this conversation with me and be reminded that it's not always about him and what he wants.

I Kings 20 is an interesting case study in a chapter we don't look at all that often. Ahab, the King of Israel, engages in continual conflict with Ben-Hadad, King of Syria. It goes on for a while until Ben-Hadad decides he can get the better of Ahab's forces by fighting in the valleys, claiming that the gods of Israel are gods of the hills, and the gods of Syria are gods of the valleys.

At that point God sends a prophet to Ahab to tell him that Ben-Hadad's statement is the reason he's going to hand him over to Ahab. Interestingly, he quotes it as a statement that God is a god just of the hills, where Ben-Hadad seems to have used a plural verb, indicating plural gods (the noun, I believe is the same in either case, so I believe you have to go by the verb to know which it is, because 'Elohim' is a plural name for God; someone who knows some Hebrew should correct me here if I'm wrong, but that's what I think is going on here). If that's right, then Ben-Hadad was referring to God even though he thought he was referring to several gods of Israel (and the evidence of the surrounding chapters is that Ahab did worship other gods), because there is only one God for Israel even if they pretend otherwise.

The result is sobering. Ahab is handed this amazing victory, basically because God thought it was a good time to bring Ben-Hadad down. It's not about Ahab at all. I think it's a natural human tendency to take things going well for us as a sign that God approves of what we're doing, but here's a clear counterexample to that. This has nothing to do with Ahab, and it's clear from the surrounding chapters that God absolutely disapproves of the defining characteristics of Ahab's life. This is about judging Ben-Hadad. Just as Rehoboam was judged by God via Jeroboam's rebellion and subsequent separation of more than half the kingdom, so here we have Ahab benefiting from God's judgment on Ben-Hadad, when it has nothing at all to do with Ahab.

In both these cases, the King of Israel was judged for something else later, Jeroboam for how he ruled once he had his own kingdom and Ahab most immediately for not completing the task and letting Ben-Hadad go, just as Saul had done with Agag and the Amalekites at the very beginning of the Israelite monarchy. Something similar occurs in Isaiah 10, where we see judgment on the God's for doing it for the wrong reason (in that case the king of Assyria gets judged for how he caries out judgment on Israel, since he does it for his own glory and while thinking it's his own power that achieves it).

One interesting part of all this is that God delivers a real blessing to Ahab, one of the wickedest of Israel's many wicked kings. God chose to give him victory with serious odds stacked up against him -- but the reasons God gives for this choice were very clearly nothing to do with Ahab. It's a nice instance of the general principle given to Israel at its founding. They were chosen not because they were large or strong but because God wanted to demonstrate something.

A passage in Thomas Aquinas' discussion of predestination often reminds me of this biblical principle. Aquinas wonders what basis God might use to single out particular people to be predestined for salvation or damned. He can't imagine God does it by something akin to flipping a coin or some such arbitrary method, because God isn't arbitrary, despite how a lot of Calvinists sometimes want to think of God. At the same time, it can't be based on the actions people do to deserve salvation, because everyone at the most basic level does not deserve grace, or it wouldn't be grace. It has to be an unearned gift. [For those stumbling over how a Catholic can say this, see the footnote. This is the official Roman Catholic doctrine, even if it doesn't sound like it to Protestant ears.] So whatever leads God to choose particular individuals to be saved must have nothing to do with their earning it in any sense. It must have to do with other things. In effect, he concludes that God's reasons for choosing certain people to be saved or damned would be for something like artistic reasons. It makes for a greater providential plan to choose someone like Paul, coming out of his Pharisaical training and resistance to the gospel and having his skills to be used in developing the canonical epistles. It makes for greater spread of the gospel for God to work through certain people. It shows God's mercy and grace in special ways. There's plenty of room for God to have purposes that aren't arbitrary that are in some sense about you but not in the sense of the title of this post. It's not about you in that sense.

It should catch our attention that this same pattern recurs in scripture. It's not just Saul, Jeroboam, and Ahab. You see it in different ways with Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson in the book of Judges, to name three other examples. People receive God's grace because of reasons having nothing to do with their own deserving, and in some of these cases having nothing to do with the person at all. They then proceed to take God's grace as a sign of God's favor, or at the very least they aren't grateful enough for God's blessing that they proceed to live in a way that honors the God whose blessing they've received without deserving it. In some of these cases, that vastly understates how significantly they slight God and insult his gracious bestowal of favor. It must be particularly fearsome to receive such blessing only to end up in a place of severe judgment, as Ahab certainly did.

But isn't this the story of the whole Bible? Humanity as a whole has continually rejected God's favor and spat in his face, and his patience and love is shown all the more for his willingness to pursue those he is bringing to salvation even amidst their constant rejection of many of the opportunities God gives to pursue holiness and reject inferior substitutes for God. We would do well to remember the lessons of these figures, because God will bring to completion the good work he started, and he calls us to participate in his transformation of our hearts and wills to serve him as we work out the salvation he's working out in us.

[Footnote: Aquinas does not hold the caricature of Roman Catholic theology that has Christians straightforwardly earning their salvation. Salvation is a gift of grace and totally unearned initially. He does think God, at the end of your life, evaluates the actions you did through the Holy Spirit as being righteous actions, and only in that sense is your salvation merited because the God-produced works you did do match up to what God wants of you in that they were produced by the Holy Spirit. But even this isn't meant to cancel his claim that you don't earn the initial grace that puts you in a position to be transformed by the Spirit to do good.]

Last Tuesday, after the Bible study I attend, several of us had a relatively heated discussion about Exodus 22:14:

If a man borrows anything of his neighbor, and it is injured or dies, the owner not being with it, he shall make full restitution. [ESV]

The context is a set of laws about how Israelites were to handle problems that occurred when one person was in possession of someone else's animal and something happened to it. Different circumstances involved different issues. If it was loaned at the request of the borrower, the borrower has more responsibility than if the borrower was holding it on request of the lender, since the lender had taken the initiative to institute the situation. But in the standard case of borrowing (and not renting) at the initiative of the borrower, if something were to happen to the animal not in the presence of the owner, it was the responsibility of the borrower to repay the full price of the animal (perhaps by simply repaying an animal of equal quality).

The question arose about whether someone today should derive the general moral principle that a borrower should repay the full price of damage if something should happen while borrowing something (not just an animal but anything). If I borrow your car and crash it, the principle should apply. I owe you for any cost to you in repairing it. But what if the transmission fails, and it's been on the fritz for over a month? It just happens to go when I have it in my possession. Even worse, what if you deliberately let me borrow that car rather than your other car in the hopes that it would die when I had it so the obligation would be mine, knowing I would take this text to apply that way today?

According to several people at the study last week, I have the moral obligation to pay the several thousand dollars that it costs for a new transmission. When I called that unjust, they said Jesus' death was unjust, so I should suck it up, as if God doesn't care about justice even though the very context of these laws is so obviously concerned with justice and getting the details of each situation right so that the hard cases can be handled fairly. I know no theory of the atonement that has the cross making me morally responsible for what I didn't do, just those that remove what I did do. This view seems to have the absurd conclusion that if you borrow my pen just as the ink has run out, you have the moral obligation to buy me a new pen when it runs out in your possession.

I think there's a fundamental mistake going on here, and it's not so much a new covenant vs. old covenant confusion, because I think whatever moral principles underlie these laws ought to apply in any context. I think what's going on could actually be a problem in the old covenant itself. What if a farmer decided to take advantage of his neighbor by lending him the ox that he knew was in poor health, hoping that it gave out in the possession of his neighbor when he wasn't present, knowing it would have a hard time handling the kind of work the neighbor wanted to borrow an ox to do? It seems unjust to hold the borrower accountable if the lender is deceptive in hiding this condition from the borrower. So the problem arises even in the setting immediate to the Torah if it's to be applied in the way that my conversation partners last week were taking it.

My suggestion is that we're thinking of case law wrongly when we derive that sort of conclusion. Case law in the Torah describes some hard cases to illustrate some general moral principles, principles the judges in any individual case might have to apply a little differently in a different case. Stealing an animal required payment of more than just what was stolen. If it was a sheep, it would be fourfold. An ox would be fivefold. What about a donkey? We're not told. The reasons behind the original law would then have to be applied thoughtfully by judges to determine a just repayment if a donkey got stolen. We see several instances of variations in circumstances determining a different outcome in this very chapter, but many probably occurred that it doesn't discuss. There would be exceptions for lots of possible situations, and the law wasn't intended to cover every details. It was meant to provide guidance for judges to figure out the just decision in some of the harder cases. If a farmer obviously abused the borrowing law in the way I just described, I'm pretty sure no judge would make the borrower pay. It's not a violation of v.14 to make such a call, unless you take case law in the Torah to be absolute in the way that we know it's not. We know this by the examples of exceptions that we do see and the knowledge that the exceptions listed in the Torah are not exhaustive.

Other relevant considerations might also come up in the car case. We're not dealing with an animal but a means of transportation that involves huge expenses with a lot of long-term wear-and-tear that could without notice cause a failure. There's a lot less of that, and certainly with less expense if it occurs, with farm animals. We also don't have a situation where I'm likely to have a transmission to give to someone else the way we would likely have with an agrarian society whose people mostly did have some animals. If it can be shown that I caused the problem, I'm responsible. If it can't, and there's good reason to think I'm not, I shouldn't be held responsible. It's only in the case where it could go either way that we've got a worry in how we apply it, but those are the hard cases. The case I imagine shouldn't be a hard case. It's just not the kind of case that v.14 has in mind. Other morally relevant factors are present, and case laws aren't intended to cover every case like the one described, just the most typical ones where other factors aren't present.

I've been looking a little at Gerald Wilson's NIV Application Commentary volume on Psalms 1-72, and in his discussion of the psalm I'm looking at he refers to his introduction's discussion of psalm titles, where I found the following curious argument. First, he explains the common view that the psalms themselves later came to have musical instructions, with authorship ascriptions added still later and then the historical notes providing a setting even later than that. It's the reasoning that struck me as interesting:

Several features of the psalm headings in the LXX add some weight to this suggestion. The Greek translation of the liturgical terms and notices evidence a degree of uncertainty and confusion. The rather standard instruction "To the director" is translated eis to telos ("To the end [of time]"). This and other equally awkward renderings suggest the translators had only an imperfect understanding of these liturgical terms. This likely means that the liturgical elements were early enough for their meaning to have been partially obscured by the time of the Greek translation -- at least those terms specifically related to temple worship.

By contrast, the LXX not only acknolwedges the author designations in the Hebrew psalm headings but adds to them considerably, increasing the number of Davidic psalms and including attributions to persons and historical contexts that do not appear in the Hebrew versions. This suggests that the author attributions and historical references were later than the liturgical elements and were still in a state of some fluidity. The appearance among the Qumran psalms scrolls and fragments of additional psalms, Davidic attributions, and historical notices not included in the canonical Paslter supports this developing view.

Maybe I just don't understand the argument or need more background information that Wilson doesn't provide, but I'm not fully following all of this. I'm not sure I have enough information here to evaluate the Greek translation of what commonly gets translated as "to the director". Is there a term in Hebrew similar to the one that's been passed down to us that could have caused this confusion? If so, why prefer the reading we've got rather than that one? If not, then do we have any explanation why the Greek translators made this mistake? Or could it be that they might have understood the Hebrew better than we do, and contemporary translations just have it wrong? A popular-level commentary need not get into these issues, but if you're going to be bring it up it might be worth presenting the argument more completely. As things stand, I see no reason in his argument for preferring our understanding of the Hebrew to that of the Greek translators 2100 years ago. If (as Wilson seems to be saying) it was that obscure to them, what reasons do we have for now thinking we've got a better understanding? For all I know, we do have such reasons, but it would have been nice to see what they are if they exist.

The curious part of all this is when you compare about with similar reasoning in other biblical books. This is an argument that something that's more extensive in the LXX is inferior and later than the Hebrew MT. Wilson treats this as the majority view among scholars. I know full well that the recent tendency among mainstream scholars in the early chapters of I Samuel is to treat the significant LXX expansions as earlier and more reliable than the traditional readings from the Hebrew MT. That makes me wonder if the people who say this sort of thing are also among those who do the opposite with I Samuel. The issues aren't always the same with two biblical books. Virtually all scholars agree that the LXX expansions to Daniel and Esther are much later than the original Hebrew works, and virtually all scholars accept some LXX readings as superior to the MT, especially if the LXX agrees with evidence in Hebrew texts that have been found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it makes me wonder what it is that leads scholars to have rejected these LXX additions but not the I Samuel ones. I've always been skeptical of the I Samuel ones myself, so I don't consider this an idle question.

I've recently discovered that an argument I've often seen and sometimes used is based on something untrue. Christians pacifists (and pacifists intending to win over Christians) often make the claim that, since one of the ten commandments says "do not kill", it must always be immoral to kill. I've also seen the sixth commandment come up in lists of supposed Bible contradictions. Most such lists are filled with mainly easily-resolved surface-language differences with the occasional serious difficulty that takes some real work to resolve (although I know of no such difficulties that don't have at least one possible solution, thus showing that it's not actually a contradiction).

One (among several) responses to both of these claims is that the word used for murder in the sixth commandment in fact does not mean killing but simply means murder, so the only kinds of killing that it could be talking about are those that are wrong, leaving it open that there are kinds of killing that are not wrong. It turns out that this isn't true. There are several words for killing in biblical Hebrew, and this term isn't the most common one. It's usually reserved for contexts of killing within the covenant community, usually used in cases where the killing is especially divisive, often with inter-tribal conflicts in mind.

Its most frequent occurrences are all in one chapter, though, and that chapter is Numbers 25, which provides the details of the city of refuge provision of the Mosaic law. The ancient near eastern method of bringing murders to justice was to have an appointed avenger within each extended family or clan unit, who would hunt down and kill anyone who killed one of their own. The city of refuge provision took several of the Levitical cities and made them safe havens from avengers until a trial could take place, thus ensuring justice could be pursued more carefully as long as the accused was willing to flee to one of those cities. If the person was not found guilty of deliberate murder, they could live in the Levitical city until the death of the current high priest atoned for their sin of negligence, but otherwise they could be put to death once convicted.

I don't remember all the details now, but after looking over this with someone who knows Hebrew I discovered that most or all of the occurrences of deliberate murder used the same word as in the sixth commandment, but the term also occurs two or three times of the killing by the avenger, which as far as I can determine is legally sanctioned killing. It's not used of outright death penalties for specific crimes in the Torah, but it is used of the avenger's killing of duly convicted criminals. So what was probably the easiest response to the difficulties I mentioned above doesn't seem to be correct. The pacifist may not be able to claim that what the commandment says not to do can cover every kind of killing, but they can claim that the word can be used for legalized killing. Also, you can't get out of the supposed contradiction simply by saying the word doesn't mean "kill" but means "murder", since the Torah seems to allow instances of killing that use this very word. But I don't think this puts a stop to the kind of view I would defend. It just makes one of the easier and quicker responses no longer as easy and quick as I would have liked.

There are several cases of vows with strange conditions in the Bible. Many of these are rash vows, often morally negligent or suspect. In Joshua 9, the Israelites make a covenant with Gibeon under the false pretense that they were from far away, when they had a command from God to wipe out any of the peoples of the land. Once they made the vow, they honored the covenant with Gibeon and didn't kill them rather than keeping the command of God to wipe them out. In Judges 11, Jephthah vows to sacrifice the first thing to come through his gate, expecting it to be an animal, and it turns out to be his daughter. In a very tragic move, he ends up fulfilling his vow and sacrificing her.

King Saul makes a similarly rash vow in I Samuel 14. He says that if any of his soldiers eat during their attack, they would be put to death. His son Jonathan wasn't present for that vow, and when he found honey in the woods he ate some. In this case, however, Saul's soldiers convince him not to keep the vow. You get the sense that he only did it because his men were able to calm him down and talk some reason into him.

In I Kings 2, Solomon makes a promise to Bathsheba to grant her a favor but then refuses once he finds out that the favor was to do something that would in effect give his older half-brother Adonijah a foothold toward claiming the throne that David had passed on to Solomon. Adonijah flees Solomon's wrath and in fact has him killed. Adonijah had already been spared once when he grabbed the horns of the altar, and Solomon had let him go on the condition that he shows himself to be worthy; otherwise, he'd die. His request to Bathsheba showed Solomon the latter.

In the gospels, King Herod makes a promise to his step-daughter that he'd give her anything, up to half his kingdom, and is shocked when she asks for the head of John the Baptist. He complies to save face but perhaps only for that reason.

It's worth thinking through the conflicting moral principles that arise in these cases. The most fundamental is the third commandment the third commandment (not to take God's name in vain), which Jesus interprets simply as a command to let your "yes" be "yes" and your "no" be "no". The third commandment says not to use God's name in a way that doesn't take into full account who God is and our place in God's universe. The most fundamental way that we can take God's name in vain is simply to ignore God, thus living in a way that ignores God is the most serious violation of the third commandment. This is especially important for a people called to represent God as his ambassadors to the world, since the representation is a fact, and thus representing God badly takes his name in vain and drags it through the mud. But uttering God's name when you don't have any intention of referring to God, particularly in a sinful act of verbal outrage over something not all that important. So the common view that using a name that normally refers to God in a sort of curse is indeed correct. It's a violation of the third commandment. It's just not the most fundamental way to do so.

Warner Brothers has announced a science fiction retelling of the Samson story in a futuristic context. SciFi Wire's description of Samson catches my interest:

Samson gives a futuristic twist to the story of the biblical strongman who was invincible until he was betrayed by Delilah, to whom he entrusted the secret that his strength came from his long hair.

I have no idea if they're just repeated something WB had given them or are going by their understanding of what the Samson story is about, but it strikes me as relying on a popular misconception of Samson, one that I've seen gotten right in pop culture only once that I can think of (and that was Veggie Tales' Minnesota Cuke: the Search for Samson's Hairbrush).

Samson's strength in the book of Judges doesn't derive from his hair at all. His hair is only mentioned twice. The first time is God's command to Samson's parents that he would be a Nazirite from birth, an exceptional situation given that a Nazirite vow was usually voluntary and temporary. Those who took the vow wouldn't cut their hair, among other restrictions, for the duration of their vow. Nothing is said there to tie the strength to the hair. His hair is simply part of his being a Nazarite. Nowhere else in the Samson narrative is his strength mentioned in the context of his hair until the Delilah account. His strength is simply something God gives him for use in judging those who are evil toward God's people. When Delilah presses him for an explanation, and he mentions his hair, with every reason to believe that she'd have it cut (given her past responses to his lies about the source of his strength), he in effect sets himself up to violate his vow. So God takes his strength away. But the narrative itself never endorses the view that his strength really did come from his hair.

Now it's possible that Samson himself really did think the hair was the source of the power, in which case the fact that he's willing to boil it down to his hair is a sign that he doesn't get it himself. That theme appears throughout Judges and the Samson narratives in particular. The judges get progressively less faithful and more mixed in motivation, culminating in Samson, who frequently shows little care for the Torah's stipulations, up to the point of putting himself in a position where his Nazirite status gets prematurely cut off (pun intended). But it's not clear that he really thought this, as far as I can tell, and the narrator never tells us this.

I can see how a scifi version of it can get some basic plot similarities, but it certainly loses the main point of the whole thing unless it's not replacing the religious elements with scifi ones but simply tells the story with that side intact but in a different context. I have a feeling they won't do that, though, since the point of doing a futuristic version of it is probably to have some science fiction explanation of how hair can contain within it the explanation for super-strength.

I've been reading through Joshua lately. When I got to the Gibeonite episode in chapter 9, I noticed something that I don't think had ever registered with me before. Several other examples have since occurred to me.

In Joshua, Israel had a divine mandate to carry out: God's judgment on the Amorites declared all the way back in Genesis 15. I think most Biblical scholars take the Genesis 15 reference to include all the people living in the land, not just ethnic Amorites, just as later texts use the term 'Canaanites' to refer to all of the people, even though several lists include Amorites and/or Canaanites among lots of other names (Hivites, Girgashites, Jebusites, Hittites, Perizzites; no list actually has exactly the same combination in the same order).

The Gibeonites were part of that mandate, but they deceived Israel into thinking they were from a far-away land and had come to Canaan to make a covenant with Israel to protect them. Israel bought the deception and made the covenant.

What I hadn't noticed before is that the text seems to assume Israel's responsibility to keep that covenant, even given the deception. It's common nowadays to assume that a promise is void if it's made under false pretenses, because your words didn't apply to exactly the thing you thought you were agreeing to. If I promise to pay off a debt you have that you tell me you accrued due to an oppressive landlord's cruel policies, and then I later discover that you have the debt merely because of gambling, the idea is that I don't have any obligation to pay the debt for you, because I didn't agree to pay off a gambling debt. I only agreed to pay off a debt caused by an unjust landlord. I know of one philosophical paper on the subject of consent that argues that someone hasn't given voluntary, informed consent to sex if they've given explicit consent but the person had been hiding the fact that the two were close relatives, because giving consent to sex doesn't amount to giving consent to incest if you don't know the person is a close relative and the other person does.

I'm seeing a several biblical accounts that seem to assume a contrary position. The Gibeonite case is just one instance among a few that have occurred to me, but it's a particularly vivid example of how fully in force this covenant is, even generations later, even to a king who had no idea that it was being violated until he inquired of God. By II Samuel 21, Israel's failure to keep that covenant in Saul's time (Saul had tried to wipe the Gibeonites out) had led to God causing a three-year famine as judgment. David, in his ignorance, was facing the famine in the kingdom as a consequence of not keeping that covenant. The covenant was made in ignorance, and it was continuing to be broken in ignorance, but that did not exempt Israel from their obligation to it. David was even ignorant of the cause of the famine, but he still bore responsibility for dealing with it. David remedied the problem and honored the covenant.

I can think of several other instances just in the book of Genesis. In Genesis 12, Abram visits Egypt and says that his wife Sarai is his sister (which he later says is technically true; see Gen 20:12, but it's still deception). Pharaoh gets upset when he discovers the deception, because he could have married her and thus married another man's wife. Even if he had done so in ignorance, the reason he gives for his outrage is that Abram could have caused him to sin ignorantly. A similar circumstance occurs later in Abraham's life in Genesis 20 but with Abimelek the king of Gerar instead of Pharaoh. A third instance of the same fault occurs with Abraham's son Isaac in Genesis 26, who also faces a similar situation with someone called Abimelek the king of Gerar (not necessarily the same figure, since it could be a title like 'Pharaoh'). It's possible in these cases that it's just an ethical framework shared by the Hebrews, Egyptians, and Gerarites. If so, it doesn't mean someone holding to the authority of scripture would have to say that God endorses it. It's the words of the Pharaoh or Abimelek that assume the principle.

But in Joshua and the subsequent Samuel text, it seems harder to say that. I think the narrator more clearly endorses the principle there. That also seems to me to be true of a couple more cases in Genesis, involving Jacob. First, In Genesis 27, Jacob deceives his father Isaac into giving his blessing to him rather than to his older twin brother Esau, who would normally have received it. Since this was not just a father's blessing but a passing on of the blessing bestowed on Isaac via the covenant with Abraham, there was only one blessing of this sort to give, and Isaac recognized that once the blessing was given, he'd passed on what had been entrusted to him by God. He couldn't undo it. That sacred trust had been given to Jacob now. The narrator seems to assume that as much as Isaac does when he explains to Esau that he can't now give his blessing to him also.

When I last hosted the Christian Carnival, I linked to Henry Neufeld's Interpreting the Bible III -- The Impact of Inerrancy. Henry does not hold to inerrancy, but he wants to point out how there's quite a variety among people who hold to a relatively high view of scripture. There's been an excellent discussion in the comments since I linked to it in the carnival, and I wanted to express some of what I've been saying there (much of which is simply modified from my comments).

My main claim is that the variety of views Henry is pointing to are not entirely but are largely available within inerrantist views. But I don't think that's because there are different views called inerrancy, as Henry's post seems to take it. There surely are different things people mean by calling a view inerrancy. But most of the variation doesn't come because people mean something different by 'inerrancy'. It's because they think the ultimate determiner of whether something counts as an error in the relevant way is the context and culture of the original human author, and disagreements often arise on that issue. That means two people can both be inerrantists in exactly the same sense but disagree about whether an inerrantist should accept a certain claim about a certain part of scripture.

There are some people who think inerrancy requires thinking of Ruth, Jonah, Daniel, and Esther (for example) as historical, and there are others who think inerrancy allows thinking of them as allegories or parables. I'm not sure it follows that these involve two different conceptions of the meaning of the term 'inerrancy'. After all, those who don't think Jonah is a parable but think it's an actual recounting of real events nevertheless have no problem thinking of Jesus' parables as parables that didn't really happen. So they have no problem with inerrancy allowing for parables. The dispute seems to me to involve books that seem on the surface just like the historical accounts elsewhere in the Old Testament, something not true of Jesus' parables. Some hold that the presumption is to take them as historical. Others do not. But they might believe the same thing about what inerrancy involves, given that a book is presumed to be historical.

I don't happen to think Jonah and the narrative portions of Daniel are parables. I don't think Isaiah 40-66 (often called Second Isaiah and Third Isaiah by scholars) were written by later authors. I think they were composed by the actual Isaiah. But I don't think you need to deny inerrancy to hold that Jonah is a parable or that Second Isaiah and Third Isaiah were written by later authors in the Isaianic tradition. I just think you have to make a mistake about the historical background and how such works could be taken in context. I'd say the same about pseudonymity in New Testament epistles. I hold that inerrancy, combined with an accurate view on historical matters, will lead to conservative positions on such issues. That means I often disagree with the majority view among scholars about questions of historicity. But it's not inerrancy itself that makes the difference. It's a judgment on such other issues. I should mention that Craig Blomberg and Tremper Longman have made similar points in published works, and they're both pretty conservative inerrantists.

One place this applies in my own thinking is that I don't think Genesis' early chapters give a chronological historical account, but I do think they teach what God did, and they do so without error. Six-day creationists claim my view is at odds with inerrancy, but it's not, and I don't think this is a different view of inerrancy. It's a different view of how inerrancy applies given of a different view about how genre works. I don't share the mainstream consensus about genre with respect to Jonah and Daniel, but I do on Genesis to some extent.

In the wake of same-sex marriage court decisions and legislation, many seek to define 'marriage' in terms that require a marriage to be between one man and one woman. Now I'm not on the bandwagon that says that, just because the term has always meant that, it must still mean that. A lot of people apparently think that's a good argument, but words change their meaning. It's never safe to base your ethical argument on what a term has meant in the past. Nevertheless, some of the responses to this sort of view are also pretty lame. One argument I've seen a handful of times showed up recently in a comment at Pharyngula:

Sure is funny how "God ordered each and all marriages [sic] to be between one man and one woman". Gosh, I guess Solomon missed that one. And others - I'm no bible student, help me out here.

Right, you're no Bible student. A Bible student would know that Solomon was criticized for his marriages within the very same book that sees his marriages as a sign of the prosperity God had blessed him with. So the biblical narrator's attitude toward Solomon's marriages is at least complex.

But you're apparently also no logic student. Think about polygamous marriages. Did Warren Jeffs have a group marriage? Were the women he was married to also married to each other? Or was it just a bunch of marriages, each one consisting of Jeffs and a woman? Did Solomon have all these wives who were married to each other as much as they were married to him? Or was he married to each one of them in a separate marriage? Maybe group marriages have occurred. I have no idea. But that's not polygamy. Polygamy is one man marrying separate women in multiple marriages, with each marriage involving one man-woman pair. Polygamy is no exception to the claim that marriage has always consisted of one man and one woman. It's just an exception to the claim that no one has more than one marriage at once.

A couple weeks ago, I finished Bart Ehrman's bestselling Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. I'm not going to do a full review of the book at this point, but I wanted to record some thoughts on what I see as Ehrman's master argument.

The bulk of the book is just standard textual criticism. Ehrman tends to be more radical on a few points than the average textual critics, but most of the book simply presents consensus views on the history of the discipline and gives examples that mainly do illustrate the points he wants to make. He's often criticized for the suggestion that the examples he picks are only the most extreme and thus give the impression that the textual changes are more common and more extreme than they really are. He responds that he does say that most changes are extremely minor and that the cases he's presenting are unusual. But what his response ignores is that his own master argument makes an explicit case for the point that his critics are only accusing him of suggesting, and he takes offense even at that accusation.

His master argument is presented in the introductory chapter and then again in his conclusion. The argument is basically as follows:

1. We know that there are textual changes in manuscript transmission.
2. Some of these are ideologically-motivated.
3. The earlier manuscripts have more diversity due to less-careful copying practices.
4. It's possible that there were changes in ideology from the original manuscripts that we no longer thus have any evidence of.
5. Therefore, we can't have much confidence about what the original New Testament manuscripts said. All we can do is give arguments for which of several existing readings were the earliest.

I think he overstates the ideological changes, although there indisputably are some. I didn't find myself agreeing with all his cases, several of which were extremely controversial among scholars (e.g. I Cor 14:34-35, which a few but only very few notable scholars think is an addition to the original text). I think the fact that there are more readings in earlier manuscripts makes it more likely that the original reading is among the surviving manuscripts in any given case, even if it also raises the possibility that we can't know if the original survives. So that same fact provides some support for opposite views.

But the main issue is really epistemological. Ehrman holds to a skeptical standard when it comes to being sure of original manuscript readings that would lead to hopeless conclusions about ordinary knowledge. Hardly anyone in epistemology accepts this kind of standard anymore, even if it has had firm support in the history of philosophy (perhaps most famously with Rene Descartes). The chance that any particular well-attested reading among the NT manuscripts is really the product of an ideological change from the original manuscript is extremely low.

A little while ago, I posted a criticism of an argument from Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. I said I had one other criticism to post and am now finally getting around to writing up my thoughts on it.

John 1:18 calls Jesus either "the unique Son" or "the unique God". Ehrman (on pp.161-162) argues that the former reading is more likely. He admits that the second reading is found in the Alexandrian manuscripts, which are generally regarded as closer to the original biblical texts. That would normally be a decisive enough argument for me, in lieu of some other consideration that would nevertheless make it less likely to be the original reading. Ehrman thinks he has such a consideration.

One interesting piece of evidence is that you don't find "the unique God" very much in non-Alexandrian manuscripts, which is some indication that it either came into the manuscript tradition after the Alexandrian branch diverged (Ehrman's view) or that the change to "the unique Son" was so early that it managed to get into most of the other manuscripts that survive. I certainly wouldn't rule that out (and its occasional presence does undermine this argument a little bit), but this is one piece of evidence against "the unique God" being original.

Even so, Ehrman raises some other arguments against "the unique God" that I can't agree with. He says John uses "the unique Son" elsewhere but never "the unique God". I suppose that counts for something, but there's nothing to rule out John using an expression in the very different prologue that never occurs elsewhere in the gospel.

The argument that really baffles me, though, is his claim that "the unique God" makes no sense when applied to Jesus. Only someone who isn't thinking in terms of classical Trinitarian theology could say such a thing. He says the term for "unique" in Greek means "one of a kind". So far so good, until he concludes that such an expression must therefore refer to the Father and not to Jesus. "But if the term refers to the Father, how can it be used of the Son?"

Obviously, the people he believes to have changed the text thought it meant something that they thought they understood, or they wouldn't have changed it for the ideological reasons he thinks they changed it for, so there's immediately something suspicious about his claim that both of the following are true:

1. It was changed for ideological reasons because the changed text better supports proto-orthodoxy.
2. What it was changed to makes no sense when applied to Jesus and violates proto-orthodoxy by applying something true only of the Father to Jesus.

Consider what the view he calls proto-orthdoxy holds. The classic Trinitarian view is that Jesus is God. There's only one God, and both the person called the Father and the person called the Son are that God. So any characteristic of that God, say his uniqueness, is true of both the person called the Father and the person called the Son. In light of that, doesn't Ehrman's argument sound very strange? He has to assume from the outset that classic Trinitarianism, the very proto-orthodoxy that he thinks this change was introduced to support, is not a viable view, or he couldn't claim that it makes no sense. It makes perfect sense according to that view, and it's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect someone holding the view to accept as true.

Finally, if "the unique God" is theologically puzzling, as it might be for a copyist who doesn't fully grasp classical Trinitarian theology, then we have a perfectly good explanation of how a copyist might have gone from "the unique God" to "the unique Son" if the latter is indeed more easily understood, as Ehrman says it is.

Maybe some of the other reasons might be good reason to withhold judgment on which reading is earlier or maybe even to favor "the unique Son". I'm not doing a comprehensive look into which reading is likely to be better. I just thought this particular argument is especially problematic, and yet it seems the one Ehrman takes to be most decisive.

I've been reading through Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. The best short evaluation of the book (as opposed to the several good book-length responses) is Craig Blomberg's review. My general sense so far is that it's a weird mix of:

1. a very readable and helpful overview of the history of textual criticism of the New Testament
2. an excellent guide to standard contemporary textual criticism
3. some particular views along that way that I find too critical for reasons that I find unmotivating (but Ehrman doesn't always admit when his conclusions are controversial, so it might sometimes be hard for a beginner, who will be the typical reader of the book, to separate out claims that derive from standard text-critical consensus and views that Ehrman holds idiosyncratically)
4. the occasional strange argument for a smaller claim that doesn't seem at all to support what he says it supports

I noticed a couple examples in the last category in the last chapter I read, and I wanted to blog about one of them now. The other will probably follow on another occasion.

Chapter 6 of the book deals with textual variants in the manuscript tradition that involve changes that copyists made in New Testament texts for ideological reasons. He highlights three controversies in the early church, and for each controversy he finds instances of changes in the manuscript tradition that were motivated by ideology, usually to prevent an original reading from possibly being misunderstood to teach the opposing view. I have no interest in denying that this happened, but one of the examples he gives seems to me to be very unlikely to have been ideologically motivated.

In I Timothy 3:16, one difference occurs in the manuscript traditions between "Christ, who was made manifest in the flesh" and "Christ, God made manifest in the flesh". Ehrman suggests that the change from the former to the latter was motivated by anti-adoptionist ideology. Adoptionists took Christ to be merely human but adopted by God as his Son due to his being sinless. Such a change would support the anti-adoptionist agenda of those Ehrman calls proto-orthodox. However, it's completely bizarre for him to say this particular change was "made to counter a claim that Jesus was fully human but not himself divine" (p,158), and the reason I say this is because what Ehrman himself says about the case two chapters earlier, a discussion he does refer to in the section at hand.

In chapter 4, Ehrman gives this example in his discussion of early textual critic Johann Wettstein, who apparently was the first modern textual critic to recognize it. What Wettstein observed is that the difference between the texts is a matter of two small marks. The 'hos' is an omicron followed by a sigma, with a rough breather mark before the omicron. The 'theos' is actually abbreviated to 'ths, which is a theta followed by a sigma, with a marker over the two letters indicating it's an abbreviation. So the rough breather becomes the abbreviation marker, and the omicron becomes a theta, which is an omicron with a line through the center. This could easily be explained by a misread rather than a deliberate change, and one piece of information Ehrman notes (on p.113) makes this even more probable. In one very old manuscript, the line making the omicron a theta is much fainter than the rest of the letter, and in fact it turns out to be a bleedthrough from the other side. It's extremely probable that the scribe simply misread the 'hos' as an abbreviation of 'theos'.

So Ehrman has given very good reason to think this was an unintentional copyist mistake due to someone misreading the word in question because of the bleedthrough. Why, then, does he give it as an example of an ideologically-motivated change to defend proto-orthodoxy against adoptionism? Why does he refer to it as "made to counter a claim that Jesus was fully human but not himself divine" when he's just referred to his earlier discussion, which gave every reason to think this was a completely accidental change. That's an extremely strange mistake for someone who is widely regarded as an excellent textual critic to make. Am I missing something here?

Until I saw this post by Chris Brooks at Homeward Bound, I'd never encountered any pro-choice use of Numbers 5. The passage describes a procedure for determining whether a woman accused of adultery was guilty or innocent. It's generated a lot of discussion for other reasons, and since I read two commentaries on Numbers a few years ago I remember a lot of the issues that occur in those discussions. But abortion wasn't one of them, as far as I remember.

The pro-choice use of this passage is as follows. The penalty for a divine determination of guilt is for the woman's stomach to swell and for her to become barren. Pro-choicers then say that if she's already pregnant as a result of her adulterous relationship (which would happen often enough that it's going to matter for a lot of cases over many years) then the punishment would mean the death of the fetus. That reveals God's attitude toward fetuses that they don't have the kind of moral status adults have.

Now there are a number of things to say about this argument. Chris said some of them. But one thing in particular makes me think of this argument as completely crazy, and it didn't occur to me until I saw commenter Vinny's response to a comment I had left. Suppose following this procedure would lead God to cause a miscarriage every time the woman was pregnant and really had been unfaithful. Why couldn't God just prevent conception in the cases where he knew he was going to judge someone in this way? Vinny is assuming God couldn't.

But that kind of response is even unnecessary. Think about all the people God causes to die throughout the pages of the Bible. Some of them are punished for outright sins, such as Uzzah's refusal to follow the prescribed manner of carrying the ark when he touches it, Ananias and Sapphira's willingness to lie about how much they'd given to appear to have given everything they'd gotten, or Aaron's two oldest sons' burning of strange fire in the early days of the tabernacle, contrary to God's command only to burn a certain mixture of incense with a specific recipe. On the other hand, some people die because of other people's sins, and sometimes this is directly decreed by God. David and Bathsheba's first child dies as a judgment for their sin, a nice parallel of an infant in the same circumstance as Numbers 5 would be describing for a fetus if it indeed implies a miscarriage. God's judgment for David's census involves a very large number of people dying, and the same is true of a few occasions during the wilderness wanderings in Exodus and Numbers, where likely not everyone who died was guilty.

So it may well be that Numbers 5 reveals God's attitude toward the unborn. I'll grant that as long as the pro-choicer grants that these other passages reveal God's attitude toward adult human beings, even ones innocent with regard to the crime being punished. Once that's clear, it's very hard to make this pro-choice argument without also claiming that it's ok to kill adult human beings because God does so. Murder is still forbidden, even if there cases where God kills a human being in judgment for someone else's sin. You can't infer a lower moral status of a fetus from Numbers 5, because you'd also have to infer the same lower moral status for adults based on other biblical passages.

This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post. This is not an exhaustive list, just the commentaries that I think are most worth paying attention to.

My first choice, hands down, is Darrell Bock's BECNT (1994, 1996). It's fairly comprehensive, well-reasoned, easy to read, aware of all the scholarship, and generally conservative. He handles theology more fully than most detailed commentaries (e.g. Marshall, Fitzmyer, Nolland below) and spends a little time on what Luke would have wanted us to take away from the text, which you won't get in very many academic commentaries. This commentary is strong on the flow of argument, taking larger blocks of text to comment on and explicitly thinking in terms of the larger flow at various points, although this usually stops short of what many think of as literary analysis (on which several commentaries below are very strong, sometimes at the expense of everything Bock does well). He does interact a little with Robert Tannehill's work in that area in volume 2, but it's still not a lot. Bock has also written the Acts commentary in this series, but his work on Luke is much more detailed, filling up two volumes, both bigger than the Acts volume. Bock is well-known for his work countering the claims of radicals and skeptics who write about the life of Jesus with the kind of scholarship liked by the History Channel. He's also been very influential in developing and defending progressive dispensationalism, a view that I think is still a little too far in the direction of dispensationalism but is really a different animal and is much more defensible than traditional dispensationalism. I place him solidly in the conservative evangelical camp, and he's taken some criticism for this in reviews, mainly from people who assume historicity and theological agendas are incompatible, something Bock spends a great deal of time arguing against. His scholarship is top-notch. If he's weak anywhere, it's in favoring commentaries over journal articles. Bock has also written the IVPNTC and NIVAC volumes on Luke, but I don't think there's any need to look at the shorter two if you have the BECNT, which you should.

Last Monday, while driving back from Pennsylvania, we were listening to a previously-recorded Diane Rehm Show episode with James Carse, an NYU professor emeritus of religion. You can listen to the show here.

Carse seemed to advocate a religion-without-God approach, or at least he didn't think we should be confident about the existence of God. This was the first time I've ever found Diane Rehm extending complete incredulity toward someone who was left of her on an issue, but she really gave the guy a hard time with some of his outlandish biblical interpretation and eventually his admission that he'd rather die ignorant than arrive at any knowledge about ultimate realities. After a while, he got frustrated with her and her callers continuing to call him on his pick-and-choose out-of-context methods of interpretation, and he decided to try a new tactic. He decided to call into question the idea of correct biblical interpretation to begin with, with the following argument.

He cited that at one point there were 15,000 members of the Society for Biblical Literature and claimed that they all have to have a Ph.D. and thus have to have argued for some new interpretation, because no one can get a Ph.D. in biblical studies without a novel interpretation. Such a large number of experts continue to produce novel interpretations, and so there's no reason to be confident of any interpretation (or perhaps he was suggesting something stronger, that there's no right interpretation to begin with; I'm not sure which, so I'll take the weaker claim as the more charitable one, since the argument is much more fallacious if it's the stronger one). He calls it very willful ignorance to claim that you understand something in the scriptures.

There are several problems with this argument:

1. The argument actually undermines itself, because it ignores the very fact it relies on. There's tremendous pressure in academia to come up with novel interpretations in order to have a career. So the multiplicity of interpretations tells you less about the subject matter than about the culture that produces those interpretations.

This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post. This is not an exhaustive list, just the commentaries that I think are most worth paying attention to.

Pride of place goes to the NIGTC volume on I Corinthians by Anthony Thiselton (2000). This is now the most in-depth recent commentary on this book. It's based on the Greek text, and it includes a number of long excurses on difficult issues, so this isn't an easy read, but it's not mainly the Greek that's the issue. It's just a very dense, scholarly work, and it's hard to capture that in popular-level writing (although I think Thiselton is clearer most of the time than most academics are). Thiselton gives close attention to the Greek lexical and grammatical issues, the social background of the letter, Paul's rhetoric, and other elements commonly found in commentaries. Thiselton is also an expert in hermeneutics. One unsual thing about this commentary is that he also includes a lot more of the history of interpretation than is typical, since one of his strengths is the history of theology. I've read some lengthy enough sections of it to know that it's tough-going if you're not up on your Greek, and the excursus I read (on gender issues) was so detailed that it was difficult to get a clear sense of what Thiselton's conclusions amount to. The wealth of information and close attention to detail make it an excellent resource for consultation, even if it might be more difficult to read the whole book cover-to-cover the way I like to. I expect this to be an important scholarly standard for some time, even if Ellis has a good chance of eventually take that place (see forthcoming commentaries below). I also very much appreciate Thiselton's application of speech-act theory (from my own field of philosophy) in biblical studies. Thiselton's philosophical background also makes him more trustworthy on the moral philosophical background of the Greco-Roman world.

David Garland's BECNT (2003) is very good. I've looked at it less than I have some of the other volumes here, but it was enough to see that this is now the first place to look for a more readable treatment than Thiselton. Garland is widely respected by scholars across the spectrum. He left a Southern Baptist seminary because of his egalitarian stance, but on most other issues he's fairly conservative. He has ten years of additional scholarship to influence him and to respond to when compared with Fee below. Fee has such a high reputation that it was difficult to put Garland ahead, but I think I'd actually give up Fee if I were forced to choose. Garland's NAC on II Corinthians was very good, and I think this BECNT is even better. He's also done work on Matthew and the NIVAC volumes on Mark and Colossians/Philemon. He's currently contracted to write commentaries on Luke (ZEC) and Thessalonians (NCC).

Gordon Fee's NICNT (1987) was for a long time the commentary to buy on I Corinthians, but Garland and Thiselton have interacted with a lot of recent scholarship since Fee's commentary was published, and they are at least as good on enough issues that I recommend them slightly higher than Fee. I would prefer not to be without any of them, however. Fee is an excellent commentator in so many ways, including matters of language, historical and cultural background, flow of the argument, and textual criticism. But this very scholarly work doesn't come across as mere scholarship but as the work of someone with a vital relationship with God thinking through the scriptures in a way that will be profitable for his audience. He ends each section with contemporary application issues, but even throughout the commentary you'll frequently find him passionately engaging with Paul's thought or reflecting on the relevance for daily life of the principles he derives from Paul's letter. Fee is one of the most respected Pauline scholars of our time, having now written or planning to write commentaries on Galatians (PC), Philippians (NICNT), Thessalonians (NICNT), and the Pastoral Epistles (NIBC), along with a Pauline theology of the Holy Spirit and an excellent NT Christology. [He's planning Revelation for NCC, so he'll finally be verging into something outside the Pauline corpus.] Most people consider him a moderate Pentecostal. His views are actually not too far from some Reformed charismatics and non-cessationist non-charismatics. I wish most Pentecostals would read this commentary or God's Empowering Spirit to see how someone can be Pentecostal without flatly contradicting scripture in their practice of the so-called sign gifts. One of Fee's most controversial moves in this commentary is his rejection all of the egalitarian approaches toward I Cor 14 as exegetically impossible, leading him to conclude, against all evidence, that the short passage in question is an interpolation by another author despite its being in every manuscript.

This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post. This is not an exhaustive list, just the commentaries that I think are most worth paying attention to.

Gordon Wenham's WBC (1987, 1994) receives the best all-around reviews of any commentary on Genesis and from a wide range of people. Wenham is a moderate to conservative evangelical. He spends some time on source-critical issues, generally taking a skeptical stance toward those who think they can delineate sources and identify different time periods for different parts of the book. Wenham is good at historical background, often defending the plausibility of the narratives, particularly in the patriarchal section. He spends more time than most academic commentaries dealing with matters of theology and even Christian application. Of the Genesis commentaries that are accessible enough for someone like me (i.e. someone not knowing any Hebrew) to read, Wenham's is the most detailed on textual criticism. One strength is his proportionally-greater treatment of the structure of individual passages, although some might think it's a bit much. I did think the commentary was a bit briefer than I expected once you get through the literary and source-critical issues. His structural analysis shows a tightly-woven narrative by a single mind, which undermines the credence he shows to the general source-critical approach (as skeptical as he is of particular proposals in source criticism). Wenham has an absolutely stellar NICOT on Leviticus and a pretty good exposition in TOTC on Numbers. He also has done a lot of more general work on the Pentateuch and is generally seen as one of the top Pentateuch scholars of our time.

Victor Hamilton's NICOT (1990, 1995) is about at the same level. He is a conservative evangelical, and the series is generally seen as being more conservative than WBC, which is probably the reason he gets a little less attention from the less-conservative end of scholarship. I think the commentaries are about equivalent in quality, with Wenham perhaps winning out a little more often in terms of incisive exegesis but Hamilton giving a little more depth on more issues, especially in his introduction. Hamilton is particularly better on linguistic issues such as grammar and close analysis of particular words, but I think he may sometimes overdo it chasing lexical rabbit trails, and he's perhaps less strong on big-picture thinking. He takes the time throughout his commentary to look at the New Testament use of Genesis. I would say that Hamilton and Wenham balance each other pretty well as a pair. Hamilton is also known for his Handbook on the Pentateuch.

Bruce Waltke had a set of exegetical notes he would distribute to his Genesis seminary classes, and one of his former students, Cathi J. Fredericks, talked him into letting her edit them for publication in this 2001 volume. He did expand on them in places, but these are mostly brief exegetical notes with theological summaries for each unit he discusses. I generally find his exegesis to be the best of any of the Genesis commentaries I've looked at, but there isn't a lot of detail here on historical background, language, and many other things you might expect to look to a commentary to help you understand. The book is uneven, having much more discussion on the parts he chose to expand on and much less of insight on the notes he chose to leave as they were. It makes it hard to tell the intended audience also, since it doesn't have enough depth on every matter for academic work, has a bit much on structural and rhetorical elements for the average paster, and isn't evenly balanced in amount of detail across the whole book to be a first choice for any purpose. Nevertheless, I recommend it with Hamilton and Wenham as an excellent supplement to their more detailed work. Waltke is a conservative evangelical, and he's also known for excellent commentaries on Proverbs (NICOT) and Micah (Eerdmans) as well as an oft-cited Hebrew grammar.

There are those who think there's something immoral about translating the measurements in the Bible into contemporary units (e.g. miles or gallons). They claim that it's anachronistic, because the writer of the passage wouldn't have had a clue what a pound or an inch is. I can accept this argument with respect to passages where the numeric values are clearly symbolic, as in the temple measurements in Revelation. Translations that remove that by using contemporary units and thus different numbers are removing a key enough feature of the text that it's worth keeping the original values and units. But some people think it's changing the Bible to use contemporary units anywhere.

When I was reading Andrew Hill's commentary on Chronicles, it occurred to me that the Chronicler does exactly the thing such people spend so much effort calling evil. He translates units used in the early Kings text into the Persian units of his own day. People who make this claim are almost all inerrantists. If they were to remain consistent, they would have to admit that the Chronicler was inspired by God to do something they think is immoral, and thus they'd have to give up inerrancy, at least about Chronicles, or give up their view that this kind of translation is always bad.

I came across an oblique reference to this while scanning my file of unblogged things that I've thought about blogging, but I don't have any references. I thought it was an interesting enough point that I figured it deserved a blog entry, even if I couldn't remember what part of the book this occurred in.

In his section on the so-called curse of Ham (which is really the curse on Canaan, Ham's son), Daniel Hays [in From every People and Nation: A biblical theology of race] presents a little bit of information on biblical mmentators and scholars whose works are still available who present outdated and exegetically-unsound positions about that passage. He wants to make the point that it's easy to walk into a Christian bookstore and come out with a book that furthers ridiculous claims about the passage in question, and I'm glad to see someone complaining about that.

One author he picks on is A.W. Pink, whose Gleanings in Genesis offers one such outdated and exegetically-unsupportable interpretation. Pink assumes the traditional view and then tries to explain how the curse on Ham has indeed been fulfilled in some ways, thus defending the statement as a true prophecy:

The whole of Africa was peopled by the descendants of Ham, and for many centuries the greater part of that continent lay under the domination of the Romans, Saracens, and Turks. And, as is well known, the Negroes who were for so long the slaves of Europeans and Americans also claim Ham as their progenitor.[from 1950 Moody edition, p.126, as quoted in Hays, p.53]

He goes on to discuss C.F. Keil's comments (but attributes them to Keil and Delitzsch even though the Genesis commentary in the Keil-Delitzsch series was written just by Keil; Delitzsch did write a commentary on Genesis, but it's not included in that series):

In the sin of Ham there lies the great stain of the whole Hamitic race, whose chief characteristic is sexual sin; and the curse which Noah pronounced upon this sin still rests upon the race ... the remainder of the Hamitic tribes either shared the same fate, or sigh still, like the Negroes, for example, and other African tribes, beneath the yoke of the most crushing slavery.

Hays notes in a footnote that this statement is even worse, since it takes the peoples who most significantly dominated the ancient near east to have been slaves. I would have thought that the main reason it's worse is that it seems to attribute sexual sin as the chief characteristic of the whole Hamitic race. That is indeed racist in the extreme. Hays then cites a third, multi-author commentary that explains the curse as being fulfilled by the European trade in African slaves. He then says something that doesn't seem at all to be justified about Pink or the third commentary:

Woe to the one who says to his father, "What will you engender?" or to a woman, "What will you writhe over in labor?" [Isaiah 45:10]

John Oswalt (Isaiah 40-66: New International Commentary on the Old Testament) comments on the last part of the above verse as follows:

Commentators have questioned why woman is used in the second bicolon instead of the expected parallel, "mother." The solutions offered have generally been inconclusive, but this may be another example of the Bible's careful refusal to give even the appearance of labeling God as Mother. Once that equation is permitted to stand it becomes all but impossible to maintain the doctrine of transcendence on which all biblical revelation stands or falls. This is so for two reasons: (1) because there is a physical continuity between mother and child, and (2) because of the total association of mother goddesses in the ancient Near East with fertility and reproduction.

I think Oswalt is right that the biblical authors are reluctant to make explicit statements about God as mother. This is worth contrasting with using clear feminine imagery about God, which they certainly do, albeit not as often as they use masculine imagery. But they don't speak of God as mother.

I'm curious what it means if Oswalt is right about the reasons for avoiding such a conclusion. Oswalt's reasoning seems to me to be friendly to some feminist views, in at least one respect. The reason for not using explicit mother language is at least in part culturally-conditioned, since his second explanation involves something true only of the immediately surrounding cultures.

But it does also involve something universal, even if it is contingent. The close physical continuity between mother and child is not culturally-relative. Only in science fiction scenarios with artificial wombs can you minimize that continuity, and even then it doesn't remove it entirely, since an egg has a little more connection with a mother than a sperm cell does with a father, and the fertilized egg has more connection with the egg than the sperm cell that fertilized it.

Yet both explanations do not rely on any sense of God being male, and thus the usual view that God is neither male nor female but has chosen male language to be more revealing of his nature seems to make sense on Oswalt's account.

Consider the following passage:

He then said to me: "Son of man, go now to the house of Israel and speak my words to them. You are not being sent to a people of obscure speech and difficult language, but to the house of Israel -- not to many peoples of obscure speech and difficult language, whose words you cannot understand. Surely if I had sent you to them, they would have listened to you. But the house of Israel is not willing to listen to you because they are not willing to listen to me, for the whole house of Israel is hardened and obstinate. But I will make you as unyielding and hardened as they are. I will make your forehead like the hardest stone, harder than flint. Do not be afraid of them or terrified by them, though they are a rebellious house." [Ezekiel 2:4-9, NIV]

When I read through the book of Ezekiel a little while back, several things struck me about this passage:

1. God seems to indicate that Ezekiel's message would have received a better response if he'd been preaching it to people who didn't even understand the words he was saying. That's a pretty serious hardening of the heart, if anyone who doesn't even understand the message being said will give a better response than Israel would.

2. It seems like an interesting example of God's knowledge of what people would do in some non-actual scenario. Jesus says something similar about how Sodom and Gomorrah would have responded had they seen the miracles Jesus performed. In both cases it's a strong statement against God's people's unwillingness to believe. In both cases, if it's meant literally (rather than sarcastic exaggeration), it's an example of God knowing how people would respond if things had been different, indeed of something pretty unexpected that God seems to be saying would have happened if things were otherwise.

3. There's such a clear statement of Israel's unwillingness to listen to God. It doesn't say afterward that they didn't believe. It doesn't say simultaneously that they aren't believing but might. It says before he's preached anything that they are not willing to listen. The kind of hardening that's true of them is not the sort where it's unclear what will result. God is telling Ezekiel now that they're not going to respond favorably and not to fear. This does seem to suggest a pretty strong view of God's understanding of how people will respond to something.

4. There's still an acknowledgment that some will listen. Earlier in 2:7, and later in 3:11, God tells Ezekiel that his task is the same whether they listen or not. It doesn't say that some will nonetheless listen, even if most don't. It doesn't say that there's a chance they might listen, and God doesn't know for sure. This would have been a perfect opportunity to say either. What is says is to preach the message regardless of their response. Their response is irrelevant to whether Ezekiel preaches. I have a feeling open theists would want to read this statement as leaving the wiggle room they need for there being no guarantee of God's prediction being true. But I don't see that. I see God saying that they won't believe and that Ezekiel should preach no matter how they respond, not saying that anyone might or will respond favorably.

I've heard it said that the Levitical requirement for priests to marry virgins is a sign of an assumption that virgins are more pure, which implies that sex is in itself impure. Here is the relevant passage:

And he shall take a wife in her virginity. A widow, or a divorced woman, or a woman who has been defiled, or a prostitute, these he shall not marry. But he shall take as his wife a virgin of his own people, that he may not profane his offspring among his people, for I am the Lord who sanctifies him." (Leviticus 21:13-15, ESV)

There are several things wrong with this argument. One is that the priest is supposed to be pure after marriage too, and if sex is impure then how is he going to remain pure if he has sex with his wife? Another is that there's a reason give, one that doesn't have to do with the purity of the bride but with the offspring. I suppose it's possible to take that as assuming the offspring will be polluted because the mother is polluted, but I don't think that's what's going on here. One of the priestly requirements during Ezekiel's vision of a renewed temple in the last chapters of his prophecy sheds some light on this issue:

They shall not marry a widow or a divorced woman, but only virgins of the offspring of the house of Israel, or a widow who is the widow of a priest. (Ezekiel 44:22, ESV)

If the issue were some animus against people who had had sex, then why would a widow of a priest be ok? Presumably if pollution from sex itself transferred pollution to any offspring, then wouldn't the widow of a priest be just as problematic as the widow of anyone else? This suggests some other reason why priests needed to marry virgins in Leviticus, a reason that must be consistent with marrying widows of priests in Ezekiel. It's unlikely that there's different reasoning involved in the two cases, even if you don't accept divine inspiration behind the two passages.

A much more likely explanation is that the issue with offspring is that virgins raise no problem for offspring having been fathered by someone else prior to the marriage. If a priest marries a virgin, any child she gives birth to will be of the priestly line. If he marries someone who is not a virgin, there is always the possibility that any offspring might have been fathered by someone who is not a priest. At least that's true if her previous sexual activity was with someone who was not a priest. If she was married to a priest, her offspring would still be assumed to be of priestly descent. So this interpretation makes sense of the second allowable condition in Ezekiel, in keeping with the spirit of the Leviticus passage.

Those who begin with the assumption that the Bible is anti-sex like to come up with these implausible claims, and someone who doesn't think carefully about the biblical passages in context can easily come away with the conclusion that these charges have some foundation. Biblical passages certainly do assume a sexual morality that differs from popular views today, but it doesn't follow that the assumptions behind that sexual ethic are anti-sex. Even ignoring the celebration of sex in the Song of Songs and Paul's insistence in I Corinthians 7 that sex should be a normal and regular part of marriage, you still can't easily get the conclusion that sex itself is impure unless you ignore much of the ancient context and often even the literary context of biblical statements.

I've long wondered what idiot first came up with the idea that a curse on Canaan in Genesis 9 someone was supposed to justify mistreatment of black Africans, who have little association with Canaan anywhere in the Bible. Most scholars today don't see Genesis 10's table of nations as showing geneaological connections to begin with, given how such language is often used in ancient near eastern cultures for political and cultural connections of vassalship without geneaological connections (and most of the names are place names and ethnic groups without the usual indications that appear with proper names). However, even if you do take it the way it sounds if you take what's in the English translations literally, the curse is on Ham's son Canaan, not on Ham himself. Black Africans are connected with other sons of Ham, not the one who was cursed. The view is completely at odds with what the text actually says.

So I've long wondered who first came up with the view this curse on Canaan justified enslaving the descendants of Canaan's brothers, Ham's other sons. I'm wondering no longer. It turns out that it wasn't a Jewish or Christian interpreter at all, and the view is actually a lot older than I thought. I figured it appeared at the earliest in the late medieval period. It actually doesn't appear in Europe until the slave trade was well under way, so I was partly right. Medieval Europe (Spain and other Muslim-influenced parts aside) was actually opposed to slavery for the most part (at least if you don't count serfdom as slavery; I do, but I also consider modern employment a kind of slavery, and that's not the kind of slavery this view was trying to justify).

The people who first came up with this justification for slavery of Africans were very early Muslims, and that view was dominant within the Islamic world (but not outside it) for 100 years until it spread to Europeans via contact with the Spanish and their treatment of Moors. Then Europeans and eventually colonial Americans began to adopt it. So it wasn't even initially a misreading of the Bible. The relevant parts of the Qur'an don't mention Ham at all, so it's not even a misreading of the Qur'an. It's simply a fabrication in order to justify the kind of slavery Muslims had been imposing on black Africans.

It was an early Muslims who first (as far as we know) developed the idea that Ham was cursed. I found a quote in Edwin Yamauchi's Africa and the Bible from a Muslim who wrote in the late 7th to early 8th centuries, and the whole view is right there. Noah cursed Ham (not Canaan) by imposing slavery on Africans whenever the descendants of Shem would come across them. It attributes their hair type to the curse as well (but not, interestingly, their skin color, though it does mention their skin color). A 9th century Muslim does bring in a change of skin color because of the curse, and Yamauchi mentions other sources attributing natural slavery to black Africans because of this curse, a view that I'm pretty sure doesn't become entrenched in Europe or the Americas until the slave trade was well under way.

Its first appearance in the colonies isn't long after the British occupied American territory and started importing slaves, but it had been in Europe before that. Various versions of it appear even before the Reformation, as early as the mid-15th century, but that was in formerly-Muslim Portugal regarding the now-enslaved Moors. European theologians generally resisted the idea, and it probably didn't take serious hold until the modern concept of race came into existence through the work of Immanuel Kant and his contemporaries who sought to explain differences in physical features by means of biological essences of different races.

So Muslims, a very dominant form of which has an awful lot of problems with human rights even today, seem to be the initial impetus behind one of the key justifications of European and American slavery of blacks. This doesn't excuse the Europeans and Americans who did it, but Muslim writers were originally responsible for the idea, and it came to the colonies and Europeans via the cotton trade. I think it's time to stop blaming this on Christianity even if there were plenty of Christians who have held this view that originated in Islamic slavery. It's silly enough to blame Christianity for a view that hasn't held sway for most of Christian history but only appeared late and lasted only a couple hundred years before going the way of the dodo except in offshoot groups like Mormons. But if the view originally came from another religion entirely and has been dominant in the members of that religion's justification of slavery, while Christians steadfastly resisted it for centuries before falling sway to it for a few hundred years, I think it's justifiable to claim that those who blame this on Christianity are relying on historical ignorance.

The Bible study group that I attend has been studying Exodus, and we're nearing the end of the plagues. I've been thinking anew about Pharaoh and the hardening of his heart. People holding to a libertarian view of freedom like to point out that Pharaoh hardens his own heart before the first time it says God hardens it. It isn't a simple progression. Sometimes his heart is simply hardened in the passive, and I don't think there's a neat order to it. The passive formulation occurs in what I believe is even the first instance (Exodus 7:21), and that occurs three times in ch.7 before 8:21, where Pharaoh is first said to harden his own heart. But it is true that Pharaoh is said to harden his own heart before God is said to harden it.

On the other hand, compatibilists about freedom and predetermination notice that God predicted long before the encounter even happens, when Moses hadn't even returned to Egypt, that he would harden Pharaoh's heart and that Pharaoh wouldn't let him go. (Exodus 4:21) This may not require a compatibilist view, but there's one view that I think doesn't fit well at all with this whole sequence, and that's open theism.

First, God predicted that Pharaoh would not to let them go. He even predicted that he would harden Pharaoh's heart. He told Moses to ask for a three days' journey to sacrifice and return. But he promised to Moses that Pharaoh wouldn't let them go and that it would lead to their permanent freedom from Egypt. What needed to happen for God's prediction to come true? Pharaoh needed to resist Moses, something open theism doesn't allow God to predict. Yet God had predicted it, and it was at least in part dependent on Pharaoh's hardening of his own heart.

As libertarians like to point out, God hardens Pharaoh's heart only later in the series of plagues. God nevertheless predicts that he'll do it to Pharaoh before Pharaoh even hardens his own heart. There's only one way I can make sense of this is open theism is true, and that's that Pharaoh is one unusual exception of someone who simply isn't free. In order to predict that Pharaoh would refuse to let them go, God must have forced him to do what he did. Why, then, does Pharaoh harden his own heart before God hardens it?

Open theists often go the Exodus narrative because of Moses' interaction with God after the golden calf incident, saying that the classical view of divine foreknowledge doesn't fit well with the plain sense of that text and others like it (although there are problems even with that claim). But it seems to me that open theists are the ones that have a problem with the plain meaning of this narrative.

A lot of people are discussing Barack Obama's recent off-the-cuff remarks about the Bible and same-sex civil unions. I want to delve a little bit into the contrast he draws between the Sermon on the Mount and Romans 1. The gist of his statement is (1) the Sermon on the Mount is more central to Christian faith than an "obscure" passage in Romans, and (2) the Sermon on the Mount should influence our attitudes toward civil unions in some positive way.

1. I don't think Romans 1 is all that obscure. I think he means that it's difficult to interpret, but there actually isn't all that much disagreement among serious biblical commentators who have bothered to connect their exegesis with a serious study of the whole book. Virtually everyone in that category acknowledges that Paul saw male-male and female-female sexual acts as bad and as the consequence of sin, and most recognize that he saw them as immoral. That doesn't count as obscure in my book, even if a few of the details in the passage might be debated. It's certainly no more obscure than the Sermon on the Mount, which has plenty of contested questions.

2. Romans 1 is not the only passage relevant to homosexuality. The Torah expressly forbids the same thing Romans 1 discusses, and it does so in pretty clear terms in two places in Leviticus and by implication in Genesis 19. I think the prophets may refer to it once or twice, too. In any case, just dismissing Romans 1 wouldn't be enough, but he treats it as sufficient.

3. Romans 1 isn't even the only New Testament passage relevant to this issue. Terms used for the passive and active partners in male-male sex appear in a vice list in I Corinthians (and one of those words appears in I Timothy). Jude 7 also assumes the Torah background.

4. What in the Sermon on the Mount does he mean? His argument seems to be that he's more willing to go with a passage he sees as more important over one that's "obscure" (and thus less important?). But what important passage in the Sermon on the Mount does he mean? It has to be a clear enough implication from what Jesus says that it's strong enough to outweigh all these other parts of scripture. Does any part of the Sermon on the Mount have such a clear implication for the issue of civil unions?

Some have suggested that he means the command not to judge, which of course is not a command not to call wrong things wrong, or else the biblical authors would all violate it repeatedly.

Others have put forth the many aspects of the Sermon on the Mount that have to do with loving your neighbor. I wonder if that would be question-begging. Some of the people he is taking issue with do not consider it loving to support same-sex unions, because they see such support as endorsing something immoral and in fact against the well-being of all involved.

There's an ongoing debate between two false views. Some Christians think love is a command (after all the two great commandments are to love God and to love others) and therefore doesn't involve feelings. The other view is that love is obviously a feeling and thus isn't really something we can be responsible for. We can't be commanded to love if it's something that happens to us, as feelings do. On the latter view, those who fall in love are just lucky, and there's no room for choosing to love someone. On the former view, as long as you do the right actions you're loving, and it doesn't matter if you feel the right feelings.

I've resisted both views before. See the comments on my Christian Hedonism post from a few years ago and Wink's Love is not a Choice post from a couple months later. (By the way, I'm not saying Wink commits one of the two errors, His denial of love as a choice isn't to remove ourselves from being responsible for our feelings. Rather, the reverse -- he sees love as involving feelings that we're obligated to feel.)

I've been reading a commentary on Proverbs, and I came to Proverbs 5 last week. It struck me as a particularly nice example of what I said in those comment sections. In this passage, it's even stronger in one sense. It isn't just love that's commanded here. It's utter delight and intoxication, the height of positive emotional responses. It's so clearly a feeling that I don't know how anyone could try to claim otherwise. Yet it's also so obviously a command in context that it would take extracting the passage from its literary surroundings and reading the grammar extremely woodenly to deny that..

Drink water from your own cistern,
flowing water from your own well.
Should your springs be scattered abroad,
streams of water in the streets?
Let them be for yourself alone,
and not for strangers with you.
Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;
be intoxicated always in her love.
Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman
and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? [Proverbs 5:15-20, ESV]

It is technically true that some of the verbs are not grammatically commands but are actually blessing formulas (often translated in other translations as "may you be..."), but in context the entire section is contrasted with getting tangled up in adultery, which the father commands the son to avoid. Part of the remedy for the son's temptation toward adultery is to take delight in his wife. It has the force of a command even when it technically invokes a divine blessing to provide this for the son. In other words, it's a lot like many passages throughout the Bible that assume full human participation and moral responsibility in living the righteous life despite the need for God to provide grace to enable the righteous to be righteous.

April DeConick, a scholar of biblical studies at Rice University, has published The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says, criticizing the National Geographic translation of The Gospel of Judas for getting the role of Jesus entirely backwards. She has an op-ed in The New York Times summarizing some of her arguments. [hat tip: Jollyblogger]

According to DeConick, Judas isn't in fact the hero of this late Gnostic "gospel". He's a demon sent to betray Jesus and have him killed. The intent is still to undermine orthodox Christianity. It just isn't by making Judas the hero who frees Jesus from his physical body and then rewarded for it in heaven. It's by making Judas a demon whose plot to kill Jesus makes fun of the historic doctrines of the atonement through Jesus' death, and Judas is punished with no place in heaven.

In the midst of a song Moses has Israel sing on the eve of their entrance to the land, there's a speech by God about how Israel deserves judgment. In it, God gives an explanation why that judgment isn't as complete as it could have been:

I would have said, “I will cut them to pieces;
I will wipe them from human memory,”
had I not feared provocation by the enemy,
lest their adversaries should misunderstand,
lest they should say, “Our hand is triumphant,
it was not the LORD who did all this.”’ [Deuteronomy 32:26-27, ESV]

If I just had to take this at face value, I would read it as saying that the only reason God doesn't spare them is because that would lead other nations into thinking that they were victors over these people in their own strength. There's nothing here about Israel deserving being spared, because that's the whole point. When judgment is deserved, mercy is not. But if you took this as the only reason God spared them, it's hard to see how God's doing this is supposed to fit into a plan for what would happen perhaps 1500 years or so later.

Now it's easy to see this as not saying exactly that. It's easy to see it as a kind of shorthand for saying that God's reasons didn't have to do with their deserving mercy, giving one example. Other examples related to Israel's enemies abound, including in passages relating to these very events. In the mouth of Moses, we have a larger statement of what Israel's enemies would think of God after freeing his people from Egypt only to abandon them in the wilderness, not keeping his promises to them. So I wouldn't say that this is giving a smaller justification than elsewhere, just giving one instance of the larger reasoning, none of which has anything to do with their deserving it.

Now imagine you're working on a document during the twilight of the Davidic kings, with an aim to capture what you see as true righteous living, seeking to indicate that what's gone on since the time of Solomon has been a rejection of the kind of living the Mosaic law requires. You want to give some hope for those who will still follow God truly, but you want judgment represented in the document as well for those who don't. This is pretty much what the majority view in Deuteronomy scholarship thinks about the book. It's thought by many to have been written as an apology for Josiah's temple reform movement and only pretended to have been discovered in the temple as a long-lost final speech by Moses.

If you were doing this, would you write a song like this, or would you even leave it as is if you adopted an already-existing song? Or would you build a lot more into the explanation for why God spared them, all the while not saying they deserved it? Wouldn't you be insistent on explaining that God had a plan for a continuing Israel, that they would become a great nation, and his promise to make them that nation, while dependent on their continued behavior upon entering the land, nonetheless is a promise that God will bring them to be able to fulfill? I'd expect at least something other than what the nationsare going to think of God, even if that could easily be part of it.

So I'm not sure I'd call this a compelling argument, but it does seem to be at least some evidence, for thinking that Deuteronomy comes from a time when there wasn't this long history of kings who end up with this somewhat messianic figure Josiah leading a reform movement. It actually fits better with the original situation when they didn't know what would happen upon entering the land except that God said they'd be blessed if they follow him and cursed if they don't. At least it strikes me as the kind of thing that would more likely come from someone at such a time than at such a time near Josiah's revival.

IIn Genesis 46:4, God speaks to Jacob to reassure him when he's about to go down to Egypt to see his long-lost son Joseph after about 22 years of thinking he was dead. Part of this reassurance includes a point-black statement by God, "I will bring you back."

Jacob dies in Egypt. His body gets brought back. Assuming the author and/or final editors of the text weren't complete idiots, they had to be aware that Jacob didn't go back to the land while he was still alive. So complex theories of different sources being conglomerated seem unlikely if we're to give even a modicum of charity to ancient Hebrew reporting.

What do we make of this, then? If we take the text at face value, then Jacob's bones being brough back to the promised land counts as Jacob being brought back. Does that mean Jacob's bones are Jacob? Can this fit with Paul's view in II Corinthians 5:1ff that we are naked until we get our heavenly tent? It's unclear if Paul is saying that there's an intermediate, disembodied state in which we are naked or if our current state is what's naked, and we will be clothed with the resurrection body. But either way it seems that our body is a tent.

Another thought worth considering is that God might have meant something more spiritual. God would bring Jacob back to the spiritual fulfillment of the promised land. But that seems to go against the natural reading of the text in light of what happens in Exodus, which is that God's statement would be fulfilled when Jacob's bones were brought back with the Israelites 400 years later. So even if there's some spiritualized meaning on top of the more obvious immediate one, it still seems as if there should be something to the more fundamental meaning.

So here is the question. Can we read any metaphysics of the human person off God's statement to Jacob? If not, why not? If so, what sort of metaphysics is at work, and how is it consistent with Paul's statements (because the metaphysics that seems most natural for Genesis 46:1 is a materialist one that seems flat-out inconsistent with Paul's statements).

Consider the city of refuge law in Deuteronomy 19:

Here is the law concerning a case of someone who kills a person and flees there to save his life, having killed his neighbor accidentally without previously hating him: If he goes into the forest with his neighbor to cut timber, and his hand swings the ax to chop down a tree, but the blade flies off the handle and strikes his neighbor so that he dies, that person may flee to one of these cities and live. Otherwise, the avenger of blood in the heat of his anger might pursue the one who committed manslaughter, overtake him because the distance is great, and strike him dead. yet he did not deserve to die, since he did not previously hate his neighbor. [Deuteronomy 19:4-6, HCSB]

Compare Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount:

You have heard that it was said to our ancestorys, Do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you, everyone who says to his brother, 'Fool!' will be subject to the Sanhedrin. But whoever says, 'You moron!' will be subject to hellfire. [Matthew 6:21-22, HCSB]

Jesus' sequence of "You've heard that it is said" statements and their corresponding "But I say" statements are sometimes taken to be revisions of the Torah or at least revelations of the hidden meaning behind the Torah, which readers couldn't have seen very easily without his aid. Not so. When he refers to the spirit of the law, he doesn't mean just some hard-to-see intent. He means the basic fundamental principles that undergird the specific teachings, and these are usually explicitly taught clearly within the Torah, some of them over and over again.

I just noticed this particular statement yesterday, but it's pretty clear in the Deuteronomy passage that the difference between the murderer and the manslaughterer is that the murderer hates their neighbor. The reason the manslaughterer doesn't deserve death (and by implication the reason the murderer does) is that the manslaughterer doesn't hate (and the murderer does). So it's actually hate, in Deuteronomy 19, deserves death. When Jesus says that anyone who hates deserves hellfire and judgment, he's not going deeper than the Torah's own criterion, which is the heart attitude. There are probably lots of cases of this kind of thing, but this particular one struck me yesterday when reading Deuteronomy 19. I don't think I'd ever noticed it before.

This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post.

I don't usually give NIVAC volumes pride of place, but Bill Arnold's (2003) really is my favorite commentary on Samuel. He has a great sense of the narrative flow of the book, and he gives arguments for his conclusions, something not all the authors of this series do as well as he does.

The series' strength, when it's done well, is to present the original meaning of the passage, often giving it the length a brief, popular-level commentary will usually give, followed by two further sections. Bridging Contexts looks at the theological, existential, and moral principles behind the text in its original setting in order to abstract away from that setting, which allows the author to move to Contemporary Application to apply those principles in our day. Some authors in this series do not make good use of the format, using the different sections to talk about whatever they feel like but without ever using the format the way it was intended. Others are not careful in their abstracting from the original text or not very thoughtful in how to apply the text.

Arnold is among the best writers I've read for this series so far. (Karen Jobes, who did Esther, and Craig Keener, who did Revelation, are in the same league. Craig Blomberg's I Corinthians would have been if his hadn't been one of the earliest volumes and thus not allowed as much room as the series tended to allow as it went on.) Arnold has a great sense for the narrative flow of the text, and his theological and moral reflections strike me as honest, careful, insightful, and aware of scholarship in not just theology but also ethics, which several authors in the series lack. In other words, he isn't just a linguist or historian, as many biblical scholars are.

I particularly liked his treatment of the problem of lying and the problem of war in Samuel. He raises questions many commentators ignore, and he doesn't try to get around the text but simply faces it. He brings in background work by theologians who have engaged with a larger philosophical tradition on these ethical and theological issues. Several commentators on this book disappointed me greatly in how easily they would avoid what the text says in certain places just so their favored ethical theory might come out true, which strikes me as just eisegesis.

A few years ago I wrote about the rare occasions when it's legitimate to represent your opponents unfairly, using a passage from Isaiah as an illustration. I thought of a similar issue yesterday in reading the first chapter of Deuteronomy. In the early chapters of Deuteronomy, Moses recounts the events of Exodus through Numbers once again to the Israelites on the eve of their entrance into the promised land. But there are differences, just as there are with the different reports of Jesus' life in the four gospels, the different accounts of the history of the kings of Israel and Judah in Samuel-Kings and Chronicles (as weel as the occasional narratives in the prophets), and the three different accounts of Paul's conversion in Acts.

It's one thing to reorder the events so they aren't chronological but thematic. The order of contact with the nations east of the promised land is different. In the latter chapters of Numbers it looks chronological, and in Deuteronomy 2-3 the nations Israel actually fought end up at the end to be treated together, whereas they probably weren't encountered in that order. But you might argue that anyone aware of the geography would know that this wasn't ordered chronologically or geographically.

But what about the spy report in Deuteronomy 1? It leaves out some important information that Numbers is very up-front about. It's the sort of thing that we might call selective reporting in our day. If you just read Deuteronomy, you'd get the sense that the spies came back with an entirely positive report. All it says is that the spies reported the land to be good and full of good fruit. There's nothing in the report about their being scared of giants or unwilling to go into the land. The only mention of that comes later, when Moses recounts the people's opposition.

Now I think there are some good reasons (which would take too long to list here) for thinking that Deuteronomy's narrative assumes the background knowledge someone who has read Numbers would know. So I'm not inclined to accept that it's all that plausible that a contrary ideology is behind Deuteronomy. Besides, there isn't a huge theological difference between recognizing a bad spy report (representing the majority of the tribes with one person per tribe) and recognizing a bad response from the people as a whole. So I don't accept a source-critical solution to this problem (which I'm not sure would be a solution anyway).

Here's what I propose is going on. I do think there's a theological reason for Moses' reporting things differently in Deuteronomy 1. In Numbers, the concern is largely getting down what happened in order. But in Deuteronomy, Moses is giving a speech to the people on the eve of their entrance to the land. Moses' overall point is that the good report is all they needed, and the false report (not given here as a report by the spies but given in Numbers as exactly that) is irrelevant. Moses' leaving it out in this speech would be glaringly obvious to the Israelites, who had just spent 40 years wandering around because their parents and grandparents had heeded that report.

Numbers 30 deals with Israelite vows to God, i.e. declaring something to be dedicated to God. This would usually involve vowing something to God that one would give to the tabernacle or temple system much later, e.g. a certain percentage of the harvest that hasn't arrive yet or something of that nature. Some of the Pharisees in Jesus' time abused this system by vowing things to God that were necessary for caring for their parents, and thus they used these laws to get out of more important ones like honoring father and mother.

Jephthah in Judges 11 vowed whatever first came through his door, and it turned out to be his daughter. In that case, he tragically honored his vow when he shouldn't have done so, although if he had broken it he would have needed to make atonement. But other vows could be rash and should never have been made that nonetheless have to be honored. Typically if a man made a vow, he would have to honor it even if it was rashly made and burdensome to honor.

The regulations in Numbers 30 relate to girls and women making vows when under the authority of someone else. Normally a man would be responsible for his own vows. A girl under her father's authority would also normally be responsible for her own vows, provided that her father, when hearing about it, said nothing. But he did have the authority to cancel her vow. The same is true of a husband of a married woman. The father or husband would have to cancel the vow immediately when hearing about it, but the authority to cancel the vow came with being the father of a minor girl or the husband of a wife.

What interested me in reading this chapter recently was how it treats widows and divorced women. There were cases of widows and divorced women going back to live with their father, but there were also cases of widows retaining the property their husbands had inherited and serving as a head of household. These cases would have to have involved children, since otherwise the property might leave the clan, and property ties to tribes and clans was a very big deal in ancient Israel. But what's notably absent in this chapter is any statement about such women being under the authority of their father in terms of vows. As far as this chapter is concerned, a widow or divorced woman was simply responsible for her vows, and no one had the authority to cancel them.

This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post.

This post in particular is heavily reliant on my earlier reviews of commentaries on Habakkuk and Zephaniah, since most commentaries on each of these books include all three. One Nahum-specific commentary appears here, just as there were some Zephaniah-specific and Nahum-specific commentaries in the other posts. Where possible, I have tried to key my discussion of each commentary here to the Nahum section in the commentaries that deal with more than one book.

Waylon Bailey's NAC (1999) is probably my favorite of all the commentaries I looked at. It isn't so detailed that it's hard to wade through, but he addresses most issues most people might ask of the text unless they're working on an academic paper. He deals with historical, theological and linguistic matters fairly well, and he's also concerned about connections with the New Testament. He's coming from a conservative evangelical perspective, but he's also good at presenting various views. This is my all-around recommendation for seeking the best balance of what I look for in a commentary. It doesn't shirk anything I consider truly important.

 

O. Palmer Robertson's NICOT (1990) is probably my favorite Nahum commentary in terms of theology. His theological reflections are probing and get enough time to explore the issues, with more time than any of the other commentaries on the list given to the task of simply reflecting on what the text means for Nahum's view of God and its implications for life. It's much weaker on linguistic matters, sometimes not even addressing important issues that most of the other commentaries will spend some time on. It doesn't get first place primarily for that reason.

His perspective is conservative, evangelical, and explicitly Reformed. His expertise is in covenant theology, and he has a keen eye for seeing New Testament connections, although on occasion I think he reads a NT perspective into a text that may not have originally gone quite so far. It's a shame that Eerdmans has contracted a replacement for his commentary in this series this early, though Thomas Renz will probably produce a good commentary that will give more detail on the things Robertson doesn't focus much on. See my more detailed review of Robertson here.

Mark Goodacre points to the attention Deirdre Good's new book Jesus' Family Values is getting. Her argument is basically that Jesus had no family values, on the following ground:

1. Jesus challenged some of the societal expectations people in his cultural context had about families.
2. Jesus doesn't spend a lot of time on some of the moral perspectives assumed by all first-century Jews because of the background of the Hebrew scriptures, i.e. he focuses on where the people of his time were misinterpreting or violating the spirit of the Hebrew scriptures.
3. Jesus predicts that families will divide over him, without ever saying that those who reject his followers in this way and put them to death are right to cause such division.
4. We see no sign of Jesus calling his foster father Joseph by the name he reserved for his heavenly Father.

She also says (falsely) that the word 'family' never appears in the New Testament. Now the English word never appears in the Greek, but a simple online search would have shown her that many English translations use the word regularly (see the ESV, NIV, HCSB, TNIV, NLT). Maybe she got some not quite true information about the KJV not having the word in the NT (it does have it once), but that has nothing to do with the content of the Greek NT itself but more to do with the English language at the time the KJV was translated (or rather the English language of a couple centuries earlier, which is what the KJV translators were translating the Bible into). [Update: see the comments for a more careful presentation of her view, why it's a little better than this, and why I still disagree with it.]

Now maybe the bulk of her argumentation is good, and maybe her conclusions aren't as radical as this presentation makes it look, but the impression of what I'm getting is that she's trying to send a message that pretty much everything those who speak of "family values" consider to fall under that would have been foreign to Jesus, and he'd in fact take the opposite views on many of those issues. The implicature is that those who say they derive their moral and political views from the Bible on these issues are in fact making them up whole cloth.

As I said in the comments on Mark's post, this is a very strange argument. For one thing, Jesus did speak about family values. He lambasted the Pharisees for taking the money they should have been using to care for their parents and dedicating it to God with a vow so they could use it now and not have to support their parents. He gives his mother to John to take care of her. He treats the love of the father for the prodigal son as an image of perfect, divine love, which affirms such love for wayward children.

Craig Blomberg reviews the new Pillar New Testament Commentary on II Peter and Jude, by Peter Davids. I just got my copy and haven't had time to look at it much, but I'm looking forward to spending a little time in it when we study II Peter in our congregation in August and September.

From what Blomberg says, there's a lot to look forward to. I tend to agree with the few criticisms he offers. I don't know why you would need to think of Jude seeing a writing as canonical for him to quote it, and I'm certainly with Blomberg on the eternal security point. But I don't expect that sort of thing to be the norm.

I should note that, while Blomberg says at the bottom of his review that Davids gets his asterisk for "top pick among detailed but not overly technical commentaries on the English text of these two little epistles", a quick glance at the page he's referring to shows that it doesn't occupy that position alone. Thomas Schreiner's NAC on both epistles to Peter and Jude is still asterisked. I've spent some time in Schreiner's commentary, mostly on I Peter, and it's absolutely excellent. His work on the other two epistles will no doubt be equally good.

D.A. Carson has reviewed N.T. Wright's new book on evil and God's justice. You can read the review here. Carson has authored what is hands-down my favorite book on evil from a biblical (as opposed to philosophical) perspective. I'm currently reading through the second edition of that book, but you can read my review of the first edition here. I have read his review of Wright, and it's definitely worth reading whether you've looked at Wright on this issue or not. Beware that it's ten pages long, so reserve some time for it.

For more discussion of Wright, who has been getting some play in the Christian blogosphere lately, see

• Jollyblogger's post on the penal substitution discussion in the UK (where it's clear that Wright affirms penal substitution and denounces some who are denying it, from Wright's quotes in this article).
• Adrian Warnock's discussion of Wright's critique of both sides in the UK debate
  
• Justin Taylor's post on the Carson review
• Jollyblogger's followup on Wright and penal substitution
• Justin Taylor's discussion of Wright's defense of Steve Chalke, whom he amazingly doesn't think denies penal substitution
• But perhaps the best thing to do is to read what Wright has to say about the penal substitution debate and then to examine the other posts in the light of Wright's own carefully prepared thoughts.
• Update: Justin Taylor has some choice quotes from Wright very clearly defending something that most people would count as penal substitution (and that Wright himself clearly does count as penal substitution, given some of his above-mentioned quotes against those he does believe to deny it). Perhaps Wink would quibble here on whether Wright's view is truly substitutionary. I suspect Wright would accept substitution and union on that issue. But it's very clearly penal, and that's the main issue under debate here.
• Update 2: Alastair Roberts has some helpful distinctions between different models of the atonement. One position worth considering is that none of them is wrong, but what would be wrong would be denying any of them. (Or perhaps most of them are correct, and it would be wrong to deny any of those number.) Heresy, of course, is another matter. Being wrong does not always line up with being heretical, and I'm not sure I've thought about this long enough to have a sure view on that.

Theologian and biblical scholar Meredith Kline died last night, according to Justin Taylor. It seems he had been sick for a while, and he died peacefully. I actually know two of his grandsons, who were both (at different times) part of our congregation in Syracuse when they were in college, but I haven't really been in touch with either since they graduated except at a couple weddings.

I've never had the opportunity to read anything directly by Kline, but I've regularly seen his name in footnotes on all manner of subjects, and his work has influenced a number of people I have read, particularly in understanding the significance of the covenant treaty form of Deuteronomy and in furthering the framework interpretation of Genesis 1. His theopedia entry is currently uneditable, or I would have updated it, but it does have some nice information about his contributions to biblical theology and Old Testament studies, with a few links to further sources.

Update: Some tributes.

This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post.

This post in particular is heavily reliant on my earlier review of Zephaniah commentaries, since most commentaries on either of these books include the other. One Habakkuk-specific commentary appears here, just as there were some Zephaniah-specific commentaries in that post. I have tried to key my discussion of each commentary here to the Habakkuk section in the commentaries that deal with more than one book.

Waylon Bailey's NAC is probably my favorite of all the commentaries I looked at. It isn't so detailed that it's hard to wade through, but he addresses most issues most people might ask of the text unless they're working on an academic paper. He deals with historical, theological and linguistic matters fairly well, and he's also concerned about connections with the New Testament. He's coming from a conservative evangelical perspective, but he's also good at presenting various views. This is my all-around recommendation for seeking the best balance of what I look for in a commentary. It doesn't shirk anything I consider truly important.

 

O. Palmer Robertson's NICOT is probably my favorite Habakkuk commentary in terms of theology. His theological reflections are probing and get enough time to explore the issues, with more time than any of the other commentaries on the list given to the task of simply reflecting on what the text means for Habakkuk's view of God and Habakkuk's view of faith in God. It's much weaker on linguistic matters, sometimes not even addressing important issues that most of the other commentaries will spend some time on. It doesn't get first place primarily for that reason.

His perspective is conservative, evangelical, and explicitly Reformed. His expertise is in covenant theology, and he has a keen eye for seeing New Testament connections, although on occasion I think he reads a NT perspective into a text that may not have originally gone quite so far. I appreciated his willingness to defend Paul's appropriation of the justification by faith text in ch.2, although I found him too eager to rule out the possibility that faith and faithfulness are both in mind. It's a shame that Eerdmans has contracted a replacement for his commentary in this series this early, though Thomas Renz will probably produce a good commentary that will give more detail on the things Robertson doesn't focus much on. See my more detailed review of Robertson here.

This is a list of the current and forthcoming commentaries in the New American Commentary (NAC). For a chronological list according to publication date, see here. For more series, see my post on commentary series. This series is published by Broadman and Holman, and thus its commitments will reflect those of the current people behind that publisher, who are conservative Southern Baptists. Not every commentator in the series is a dispensationalist SBC type (e.g. a few are Reformed Baptists with other eschatological perspectives), but all volumes can be expected to affirm inerrancy and to have contemporary relevance in mind. The aim is to be mid-level, less depth than the New International Commentary series (and even a little less than the Pillar New Testament Commentary) but much more expansive than the Tyndale series and most other expositional commentaries. Some of the volumes seem to leave much of the scholarship in footnotes and just give a running exposition. Others are more detailed in exegetical rigor in the main text. All are fairly readable to those without strong seminary training, and some are quite excellent. Most of them spend more time on theology than is common in more detailed series. The series is mostly complete now, with Psalms, Isaiah, Zechariah, I Corinthians, Ephesians, Hebrews, and Revelation left to be published. Here are the volumes that are out:

The commentary on the irresponsible documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus continues after its airing. See here for links to some of the pre-game discussion. Mark Goodacre liveblogged the Discovery Channel special, and Jim West also treats the documentary segment by segment.

Ben Witherington has a nice summary of the problems with it. Andreas Kostenberger has a similar evaluation, including a Q&A format about the documentary based on questions he'd asked ahead of time about what they'd be willing to include that might count against their case. Craig Evans responds , and Bruce Chilton comments here and here. Chris Weimer has a very clear presentation of difficulties in the argument and presentation of issues in the film.

Matt Jones gives a seminary student's perspective on the documentary and the Ted Koppel debate afterward. Other responses to the Koppel aftershow include Mark Goodacre's and Kevin Wilson's.

For more links, see Tyler Williams' roundup.

O. Palmer Robertson's Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah has put together an excellent treatment of these three minor prophets. He defends views typical among conservative evangelicals, placing the books in the 7th century and defending the unity of composition, each by the single author they claim to be about. His treatment of the theology of these books is probably one of the best among contemporary commentaries.

Robertson tends to emphasize New Testament and later Christian interpretations, usually in a way that I find convincing but occasionally going a little beyond the text. Consider the following example. Coming from a Reformed theological tradition, Robertson defends the Reformation interpretation of justification by faith in Habakkuk, something several of the more mainstream commentaries have sought to undermine. He so emphasizes faith (over faithfulness) that I think he underemphasizes the connection between faith and repentance that some other commentaries seemed to me to get more clearly, but I welcome his attempt to see genuine justification by faith in Habakkuk's prophecy. I didn't notice anything particular to covenant theology as opposed to new covenant theology (the differences between Reformed covenant theologians and Reformed Baptists), though his expertise is in covenant theology.

I'm a bit late with this, but Bruce Metzger managed to survive about week after his 93rd birthday last month, right during the time my computer died, so I couldn't put together the kind of post I wanted to. The nice thing is that I could now go back and read what everyone else said before saying anything myself.

Several things stick out to me Dr. Metzger's contribution to biblical studies in general and textual criticism in particular, but it's his effect on the popular level that I'm most grateful for, so I'll say a couple things about that before including some wonderful anecdotes from people's interaction with him. I'm not going to link to all the writeups in the blogosphere since his death. The Princeton Seminary writeup does a good job of capturing some of his achievements, and you can follow the links below from where I took the anecdotes for a number of other writeups and accounts. Instead, I'll mention two things I'm grateful for from his work that have had an impact at the popular level, even if his most important work was fairly technical scholarship in textual criticism.

1. Metzger was one of the Christian scholars interviewed for the fictional interview format of Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ. Strobel presents the book as first-person reports of an investigative reporter's interviews with Christian biblical scholars in a way that increases the reporter's confidence about Christian claims. He begins with textual criticism, discussing with Metzger whether we can take the Bible as a reliable source in terms of our current texts reflecting what the original said. It's one of the strongest chapters in the book. After all, Metzger was widely viewed as the most important scholar in the field of New Testament textual criticism. I'm less pleased with some chapters in that book, but several of them are top-notch, and the one based on what Metzger has to say is perhaps the most careful of them all.

2. It was almost entirely due to Metzger's insistence that the NRSV committee refrained from using gender-inclusive language for God. The NRSV is the most academically respected translation and is usually the translation of choice for most university courses on the Bible. I very much doubt it would have the same credibility if Metzger hadn't won over the translation committee to an understanding of why their original intention would have been such a bad idea. I think there is room for good translations that use different policies on gender-neutral language when referring to humans. I don't think the same is true for language about God.

Also, some excellent anecdotes have come up in bloggers' tributes. Several have stuck out to me as indicative of Metzger's personality and temperament.

A lot of hay is being made about the forthcoming documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus. Apparently a tomb has been found that has some names from the family of Jesus, and some people are making some pretty strong claims about how improbable it could be that it's any other family. Oh, and Jesus' bones are supposed to be present, which (if true) means not only that Jesus not only died and wasn't resurrected (or at least that after his resurrection he died and didn't ascend) but that we now have access to his DNA! See the links from Sam's post for more on the popular-level discussion of this.

There's a lot being said by people who actually have some biblical scholarship and first-century Palestinian history credentials. Tyler Williams has a good roundup of what different people are saying. I'm particularly recommending what Darrell Bock has to say, since he was involved with the documentary, and he's not very impressed with their evidence. Ben Witherington has a more detailed response. Andreas Kostenberger's is also probably worth looking at. I love Kostenberger's first sentence. Michael Pahl has further thoughts, including on what relevance the James ossuary might have to this (basically none that helps their case and perhaps some that hurts it if the ossuary is authentic.

My first impression is that this is an old story that is finding new life because a big name (James Cameron) is associated with it, and it's a story that scholars have already looked into carefully and dismissed as not really showing very much. There are all sorts of assumptions being made for the probability claim that this is resting on, a number of which are probably unlikely assumptions (that we should expect Jesus' parents to be buried in Jerusalem to begin with, never mind in a location that very clearly is not where Jesus was buried after the crucifixion, that we should expect to find a tomb of Jesus' family with only one of the three brothers of his mentioned in the gospels but some other male we know nothing of named Matthew).

Update: Several more excellent responses have appeared. Richard Bauckham's is probably the best I've seen so far, and it covers some of the most important issues that some of the others have only really gestured at. For problems related to the DNA issue, see Chris Heard and Mark Goodacre. Mark also looks at the statistical claim. I was a little disappointed at some of the earlier discussions of this, including Ben Witherington's, which I thought had argued too much in several places, but Mark's post is much better and doesn't try to claim as much while still making the statistical claim look unwarranted because of its reliance on a number of possible but perhaps unlikely assumptions, which would then lower the probability considerably. The paragraph beginning "perhaps this is labouring the point" is actually one of the most helpful for seeing one of his main points in brief.

Gnu at Wildebeest's Wardrobe reflects on the relationship between philosophy and faith in the scriptures in Philosophy and Canon.

I don't agree with his take on Ecclesiastes, because I see the positive elements throughout the book and the narrator simply framing it and putting it all in perspective, without there being anything really false about the statements of Solomon within the main text.

I'd also change his (3) to "The OT explains how authentic divine predestination is compatible with authentic moral responsibility." That's what it doesn't do. I think it does implicitly affirm that the two are compatible by affirming them both, even in the same breath in some instances (e.g. in Isaiah 10).

But those are minor quibbles. His overall point is worth considering, particularly the way that an intelligent reading of the Bible leads to seeing the Christian's approach to the scriptures as challenging the views of the reader in the same kind of thoughtful way that philosophy at its best will do.

Tyler Williams reviews commentaries on Genesis. Tyler is a bit more positive about Walton that I'd want to be. I'm a bit disappointed with Walton's NIVAC in terms of the series' general strength, which is supposed to be contemporary application (and bridging the context from original meaning to contemporary application). Walton seems to have a very strained view of how much contemporary relevance Genesis has. Other than that, I think I agree with pretty much everything else Tyler says.

If you're interested in commentaries and haven't seen his Old Testament Commentary survey, you should take a look at that too. His Genesis post is basically an update to his entry on Genesis in that survey.

Update: Tyler has a followup post that adds a few more commentaries and then offers some thoughts in forthcoming commentaries on Genesis, including some information on when some of them are likely to be out.

Tyler Williams posts some highlights from biblical studies blogs from 2006. Check out my appearance during the month of June.

The 13th Biblical Studies Carnival is at Codex, covering posts from the month of December. I don't post a lot that I think is worth submitting to this carnival, and I have a very strict policy of not linking to carnivals I'm not in so as not to undermine the gratitude links I give to ones that I am in. I recommend it every month, but this time I can link to it. If you want to keep up with the Biblical Studies Carnival in general, just remember that each one appears in the first week of the month containing posts from throughout the previous month, and you can always check Tyler's main page for it for the link to the most recent one.

Brian Weatherson links to the Unsuggestor, which uses Amazon personal profiles to match up books people have with books they're not likely to have. It's sort of the inverse of Amazon's engine for recommending books based on what other people who bought what you bought have bought. I tried a few books I've got, and I discovered some disturbing things. Consider the following sets of unrecommendations:

They have the second Harry Potter book opposed to The Gospel According to John, by Leon Morris, a fairly respected evangelical commentary on the fourth gospel. I have both books and like them both very much. Most of the Harry Potter books have several John Piper books turning up in the top five, mostly some of his newer books (which I don't have), but his earlier Desiring God turned up with some of novels by Terry Brooks, one of my favorite fantasy authors. This would again be a case of two books I pretty much like (even if I criticize Piper on a few issues here and there). Some books in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series are put up against John Piper, Josh Harris, Wayne Grudem, A.W. Tozer, J.I. Packer, and other books by evangelicals, including several books I've got or have at least spent time looking through. Pratchett's Reaper Man isn't my favorite of the Discworld series, but a lot of it is funny. Its opposite is Doug Stuart and Gordon Fee's How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, one of the best popular introductions to biblical interpretation ever written. Pratchett's much better Lords and Ladies is opposed to Knowing God by J.I. Packer, one of the most important popular introductions to theology in print. While I don't think Grudem's Systematic Theology is well-argued on the level of detailed exegesis (as in the classic tradition of Reformed systematic theologies like Hodge's), it's an excellent reference work, and I think his positions are largely correct on most issues. It's opposed to Pratchett's Pyramids, a Discworld book I very much loved. D.A. Carson's guide to New Testament commentaries, something I use all the time, lists Harry Potter book 6 as its opposite, a book that is next on my list to read. Carson's How Long, O Lord?, the best book I've seen on the problem of evil, also lists Potter book 6 as its first unsuggestion.

This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post.

I have a hard time deciding between Thomas Schreiner's NAC (2003) and Karen Jobes's BECNT (2005) as my first choice on I Peter. I think Schreiner's is the best NT volume in the NAC series. Jobes has a good deal more space in her commentary, and it's a little more recent and thus has an edge in terms of having more scholarship to interact with. Schreiner includes II Peter and Jude and thus is more limited in scope in his I Peter portion. Both seem to me to be excellent both in exegesis and in sorting through the contemporary scholarship, but Jobes has more space to interact with other scholars. Both are well-written and easy to read, although Schreiner will be slightly more easy-going for those without Greek. Jobes comments directly on the Greek text, although she transliterates and translates every time she gives an expression in the Greek. Schreiner works in transliteration and translation entirely.

Both come from a theologically Reformed background, but Schreiner presses those issues a little more firmly (not a bad thing, as far as I'm concerned, and I don't think he goes overboard as some do). He connects his comments up with broader, systematic theology categories. I count both as theological conservatives, even on less central matters such as gender issues (both are complementarians, although Jobes doesn't think I Peter itself deals with the general issue of male headship in marriage, as she thinks Ephesians and Colossians do, but rather just deals with women submitting to unbelieving husbands for the sake of evangelism).

When I let a friend borrow some of my commentaries for a sermon on I Peter, he told me Schreiner's was the most useful of the bunch and an enjoyable commentary to read, although several others were helpful to him. He didn't get to read Jobes, however, so I'm not sure how he'd compare the two. On Schreiner, see also Craig Blomberg's review. Surprisingly to me (given how much I like Blomberg), I think I agree with Schreiner in most of the places Blomberg takes issue with him.

Jobes contributes three things in her work that are worth mentioning. First, her treatment of the Old Testament in this letter spends a good more time than usual in looking at how the fact that OT quotations are from the LXX should affect how we interpret their use here. This is a welcome feature that I think will affect future I Peter scholarship will have to take into account.

Kenny Pearce has an excellent post about some of the biblical passages dealing with issues related to homosexuality. He also deals with political relevance as well, but it's his careful treatment of what the biblical passages actually say that I thought made it worth a link.

Baker's commentary is very brief. This would be an excellent guide for a Bible study leader or pastor without much training in biblical studies. For more detailed exegesis, I recommend O. Palmer Robertson's NICOT or Waylon Bailey's NAC. This commentary would provide a nice supplement to those volumes.

Baker takes a conservative, evangelical approach to these three minor prophets, selecting what he considers to be the most important information for the basic interpretation of the books. He defends the unity of each book, along with the traditionally ascribed authorship, dating all three books to the traditional period of the 7th century.

Baker is broadly Wesleyan in his theology, and I am more Reformed, but I did not find much in this commentary that I disagreed with theologically. At most, and in only a few places, I would have worded things slightly differently. Baker thus does well at capturing the theological message of these books without trying to score points for his particular theological viewpoint. He simply discusses what the text is saying. He has room for enough linguistic, textual, and background issues to show the general sense of what the text is saying, even if he does not always give full details on matters that have a smaller effect on the overall message. A more detailed commentary would be required for that.

I know of no work at this level that does as good a job, even if it turns out to be not even as detailed as a number of other volumes in the Tyndale series, even the other minor prophets volumes. I would not prefer to have to teach these books with just Baker's commentary, and there are a lot of good commentaries on these books, but this is one of the ones I want on my shelf. This may well be the lowest price-to-information ratio among the evangelical commentaries.

The 11th Biblical Studies Carnival is up at the stuff of earth. My post on Numbers Commentaries is included. (Since my submission for last month's biblical studies carnival, a review of commentaries on John's gospel, somehow never made it into the carnival, I'm especially grateful for being included this time around.)

This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post.

Timothy Ashley's NICOT (1993) is an excellent commentary by a fairly conservative evangelical. It has more detail than some of the older commentaries in this series (e.g. Wenham on Leviticus, Craigie on Deuteronomy), though not quite as much as some of the massive two-volume works in the series (such as Waltke on Proverbs, Block on Ezekiel, or Hamilton on Genesis). I have read this commentary in its entirety, and I enjoyed it very much. The most unfortunate thing about it is that it was published just after Milgrom's JPS commentary (see immediately below) came out. Ashley had access to Milgrom's published papers on Numbers but not the commentary itself. He had enough time after its publication to mention his regrets about this in the introduction but not enough time for it to affect the body of the work. Still, Ashley handles well the historical, theological, and linguistic issues that arise in this book. He tends to avoid authorship issues but treats the book as a unity.

The NAC by R. Dennis Cole (2000) is more recent than Ashley's, but I've heard more mixed reviews. Cole interacts with the scholarship a little more than some volumes in this series, giving plenty of citations of other authors. He argues that Moses is largely responsible for the book. Cole has received favorable comments from reviewers on his handling of theological issues and his analysis of the unified structure of Numbers despite the variety of material in the book. Some of his critics find him somewhat less helpful in biblical theology and narrative criticism. He sometimes spends time on literary observations without making any connection to the interpretation of the book or its theology. Some reviewers consider Cole a better first-choice evangelical commentary than Ashley. Cole does have some stronger points than Ashley, but Ashley is a bit more detailed (although some might prefer a little less detail). What clinches it for me is that I haven't seen the kinds of complaints about Ashley that I've seen about Cole, and thus Ashley gets the nod for my first choice.

For those who pay attention to my recommendations for commentaries on biblical books, I have been updating my list of recommendations over the last month. I'd almost finished several weeks ago up through I Corinthians in my advanced commentaries list. A discussion on another blog reminded me to finish that list, which I finally did earlier today. I've also updated my recommended forthcoming commentaries list from that series (as opposed to my more comprehensive forthcoming commentaries list, which I have been updating regularly) to take into account the much larger information base I now have, to remove commentaries that have been published, and to add indications of what level of detail I expect each forthcoming commentary in the list to be. I've also added in links to each post from the first one, so you don't have to scroll to the bottom of each post to get to the next one.

I am in the process of working on an entry on Numbers to my series of posts of more in-depth reviews of commentaries on each book of the Bible. My congregation is about to finish our sermon series on I Peter this Sunday, and I'm expecting to do that after Numbers.

Linda Belleville's II Corinthians commentary in the IVP New Testament Commentary series is one of the best of the briefer treatements of this important but often underemphasized letter. I would say that the only close rival at this level of detail is Scott Hafemann's NIVAC, which has the advantage of being a little later (and thus could benefit from Belleville's work and the scholarship since) and with more emphasis on applicational issues, whereas Belleville has a little more focus on the exegesis itself.

I like Belleville's approach for the most part. She seems to me to be much more balanced than some of the more detailed academic commentaries. She argues for Pauline authorship of the entire letter. She tends to favor seeing the letter as a unity, with some caution that certainty is impossible. She finds no absolutely convincing explanation about why the last few chapters seem very different, but she nonetheless does not take the differences to demonstrate their being taken from some other letter, and we should give the letter in its current form the benefit of the doubt in the absence of clear evidence. Overall, her exposition captures well the basic themes of this letter and how it ties in with I Corinthians and demonstrates both a familiarity with the literature on the epistle and an eye for how to interpret and apply its message in our contemporary setting.

Her goal seems to be to provide enough information from the best scholarship on the book to understand what Paul is up to in this letter without getting too bogged down in some of the more thorny problems. Sometimes she just refers to other scholarship when the details are tricky and the importance of the disagreement is less significant. She does give exegetical and text-critical notes at the bottom of the page, with a running exposition (not always verse by verse) taking up most of the space on most pages. It's hard to read both in order, however, since she does not use the notes at the bottom as footnotes. Since the commentary proper is not always verse-by-verse, it's difficult to figure out when to read the notes at the bottom. Other than that, the commentary does not seem like a scholarly reference work but feels like a book you can read.

For detailed scholarly work on this book on the level of the Greek text, try Murray J. Harris' NIGTC, and for a more detailed exegetical work without the detailed Greek I recommend the NAC by David Garland. But for this level of detail Belleville is excellent.

Mark Roberts is doing a series called What is a Church? Biblical Basics for Christian Community. I especially like the four posts he's written so far under the title "When a Church is not a Church?" These look at the Greek word usually translated as "church" in the New Testament, 'ekklesia', which means "assembly" or "gathering" (and not "called out ones", as many erroneously claim because of some bad arguments from etymology).

The fourth post in that series within the series raises a point very much worth emphasizing. It makes no sense to say that you're part of a gathering that you don't show up for. In a sense any Christian is a member of the gathering around the throne of God in heaven, but we also speak of ourselves as members of local congregations. The average congregation has about 60-70% of its membership regularly attending. Does it make sense to call the others members of a gathering that they don't ever gather with? Treating a church like an organization with a membership list does have this particularly unfortunate consequence, even if there are legal reasons (and perhaps other reasons) to do so.

There's lots of other good stuff in Mark's series, but that struck me as a pointed observation about this attitude about what the church is among a large enough population in contemporary evangelicalism.

As I've done with several other of my lists of commentary series, I've put together a chronological listing of the Hermeneia commentaries. For the canonical order and a brief review of the series, see here.

This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post.

Duane Garrett's NAC is usually the first place I loook on Hosea. It's toward the more in-depth end of the mid-level commentaries, a little more in-depth than most volumes in the series. It's the most recent of the evangelical works on this book, and I find his judgments to be sane and reasoned yet without dogmatism when the issues are less clear. Garrett has also done Song of Songs for WBC and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs (all in another volume), and Joel (in this volume) for NAC. His Rethinking Genesis is one of the more reasonable defenses of conservative views on the authorship of Genesis (and the Pentateuch in general). It's not surprising, then, that he is a conservative evangelical. His strengths include philology and a good sense of the literary features of the book, and he offers lots of detailed excurses on exploring some particular issues in more depth.

Douglas Stuart's WBC is the classic evangelical treatment. It's getting pretty dated now, but Stuart is revising it for publication next year (according to Thomas Nelson). Several reviewers I've read have said they Stuart is their favorite on Hosea. His work on Hosea and Jonah in this volume generally get placed as the best of the commentaries on the five books it treats (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah). He is especially strong on theology but handles other matters judiciously also. One key strength is his tying the prophetic oracles back to covenant blessings and curses in the Torah, with his conception of prophets as enforcers of the covenant. One reviewer wishes Stuart spent more time explaining alternative views and thinks he's a little too willing to emend the MT. Stuart has also written the NAC on Exodus, the Preacher's Commentary (formerly Communicator's Commentary) on Ezekiel, and a commentary on Malachi in the same series as McComiskey's Hosea (see below). He is currently working on a second WBC volume to replace the current one on Micah-Malachi. Stuart is also a conservative evangelical. I don't like the format of this series, but I do think it's easier to read than McComiskey below, and Stuart is usually a clear writer. I look forward to the revised edition, which may well replace Garrett as my first choice on this book. [add link to Thomas Nelson site]

I've been reading through Isaiah, and I've just started the second half of the book (chs.40-66). Contemporary scholarship generally assumes these chapters are not written by the 8th century prophet Isaiah, despite the book's seeming attribution of the book to him. The main reason is that they seem to be about a time much later, the return from exile in the 6th century. Stylistic considerations are also cited, but this turns out to be a bit of ad hoc special pleading, since the same stylistic features are present throughout the first half of the book, and these scholars then pull themselves up on their own bootstraps by insisting that those earlier chapters must also be later additions. At some points this gets even as ridiculous as to minimize the contributions of Isaiah to only a very small component of the overall material even of chapters 1-35. It's taken rather to be the additions of this great school Isaiah must have founded, and thus it gets attached to his book because it's in the Isaianic prophetic school. All this makes me wonder what was so great about Isaiah to have merited this great school attributing all these great prophecies to him if what he actually did was only this tiny amount of material, none of it resembling in content most of the stuff that somehow ended up getting attributed to him.

Suffice it to say that I'm not even close to convinced that Isaiah did not write these chapters. He may not have delivered them as addresses, as he did the earlier chapters in the book, but the argument that he couldn't have written the second half of the book doesn't leave me very convinced, which leaves me taking the text's claim as the most important evidence available, and all the text does is introduce the book as the prophecy of Isaiah, with no new introduction of a new unit with other author information once you hit this second major section.

As I was reading chapter 42 this morning, something occurred to me that I hadn't thought of before.

Since I don't really have the time today (or the ability to focus) for putting a post together out of any of the several things I want to blog about, I'll just share an interesting piece of information I picked up from Karen Jobes's Esther commentary.

Apparently the Persian emperors had a special method of coming up with ideas for imperial policies. They would gather together their closest advisors, all get drunk, and then start tossing out ideas. If they still agreed with the policies after they'd sobered up, they would implement them. This isn't just the way some of their policies came about. According to Jobes, this was their usual method of figuring out how to deal with difficult policy decisions. This isn't unheard of in our day, either. I know several philosophers who come up with their best stuff when drunk. Since they have to wait until they're sober to write it up, I'm sure that allows some good quality control.

Of course, there's also the following corollary. If you have any ideas while you're sober, you should wait until you see what you think about them when you're drunk before implementing them.

About a month ago, I was going to blog about Ben Witherington's Justification by Doubt, but I got distracted, forgot, and it got off the first screen of my blogging file. I remembered it last night as I was going to bed and thought I should post a link to it before I forget again. Witherington points out a very strange standard in mainstream biblical scholarship. It's as if the word 'critical' has become a synonym for the word 'scholarly', when calling something critical actually amounts to speaking of a person or work's willingness to doubt positive claims. Somehow it's become a virtue not to believe anything you see but to think that some more complex conspiracy theory about the text underlies it rather than what might be seen as a more straightforward reading of the only information we have, which is what the text itself says.

Then this skeptical approach is called objective, as if it's less biased to assume from the outset that someone is misreporting the information but without any evidence that there's any deception. I have to agree that much of biblical scholarship is like this, and I cannot see how this constitutes critical thinking in the way that philosophers encourage us to submit our views and arguments to careful scrutiny. It seems to me that the push toward doubt is at least an attitude and plausibly a view, and there ought to be an argument for doing so if it means moving away from what the key evidence we have (the text itself) actually says. Such arguments should themselves be submitted to careful scrutiny, i.e. critical thinking, and they should not simply be presumed. Maybe there are good arguments, and if so maybe we should accept them, but this equation of doubt and skepticism with critical thinking and careful scrutiny seems to me to be a thoroughly uncritical acceptance of a bias.

A commenter on the Philosophy et cetera cross-posting of my Moral Pollution post says the following:

I don't feel that embryos are "persons" at all, in fact the only reasons I've seen to be against stem-cell research are religious ones. I admit, I haven't comprehensively studied the issue, but from what I have read, that seems to be the case.

I decided that my response was worthy of a post, which I've cross-posted at Philosophy et cetera. You don't need to know much of the abortion literature to know that this is wrong. All you need to do is pick up any of a number of standard applied ethics anthologies to know the most common argument for embryonic personhood. Most of them contain John Noonan's paper defending the traditional pro-life view, and that is indeed a philosophical argument, no matter how bad you might think the argument is.

This post is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post.

D.A. Carson's PNTC is easily my favorite commentary on John. I consider Carson to be one of the most balanced theological interpreters of scripture. Those more skeptical might just think that's because I tend to agree with him, but I think it's because we've independently arrived at similar enough views that I happen to think he's just gotten it right much of the time. This is clearly a favorite among most evangelicals. Carson operates at an academically sophisticated enough level that serious research ought to interact with him far more than actually happens. He defends traditional Johannine authorship as the most likely explanation of the data we have without insisting on it as a point of orthodoxy. His theological perspective is mainstream evangelical and broadly Reformed.

Herman Ridderbos' mostly theological commentary (English translation 1997) is very widely appreciated across the theological spectrum despite its distinctively conservative conclusions. It's a little light on what's usually called introductory matters (i.e. date, authorship, and other issues usually covered in the introduction), but that's because its focus is on the theological meaning of the text. At this task, Ridderbos excels. On some issues, Ridderbos' moderately conservative views come through, but it's not usually front and center. The original commentary was published in two volumes, one in the late 80s and the other in the early 90s. Like other commentaries translated into English, the date might fool you into thinking it interacts with scholarship later than what the author actually had access to. His first volume was prior to Carson's, and his second was shortly after Carson's.

One of the bigger difficulties of an old-earth view of the early chapters of Genesis is how to deal with what seems to to be the biblical teaching that death came into the world through sin, since old-earth views usually involve lots of animals dying, eating each other, and even extinction of species long before humans even existed, never mind sinned. David Heddle has some very interesting thoughts on what old-earthers can say about death, some of them entirely new to me.

The most important suggestion is perhaps that death was already around before the human fall because of the earlier angelic fall, but this was not death for humans. That's what made Eden special. What separates Eden from the rest of the world on the young-earth view? If there's no good answer to that (and there are some answers in the comments, but nothing as huge as death), then this problem, originally against old-earth views, one of the few that I consider serious enough to worry about) actually favors old-earth views on one score rather than undermining them.

Henry Imler posts some arguments from N.T. Wright in favor of the historicity of the virgin birth accounts. I don't think I've seen these arguments before. He lists three. The first is more an argument against arguments against the virginal conception. The other two actually support the historicity of the virgin birth passages in Matthew and Luke, and those are what caught my interest:

2. Isaiah 7 was never part of any pre-Christian Jewish view of the Messiah being born of someone who was still a virgin by the time of the conception. Everyone who read the passage took it in the way that an ordinary person would. It says that a virgin would engage in sexual relations, conceive, and then give birth. In its immediate context about the children whose names are mentioned in that very passage, it had to mean exactly that. So no one thought of this as a messianic passage about someone who would conceive and then give birth, all while remaining a virgin. But what that means is that it's extremely unlikely that someone would concoct this legend about Jesus being born of a virgin to fit a prophecy that no one interpreted that way. When people invent circumstances to fit a prophecy, they don't usually recast an already existing prophecy in a way that no one interpreted it. It would be one thing to look back on Isaiah 7 if a virginal conception happened. It would be quite another thing to interpret it anew without any such an event. Why insist on taking a passage in a way no one had before if it's not to explain an event that makes much more sense with the newfangled interpretation?

2. Matthew and Luke record two very different sets of traditions about the birth of Jesus. If they were importing a pagan myth because of some theological value, it would be surprising to find no theological hay made of it in either of the two very different literary traditions. But yet that's what we have. Even if the authors of the two accounts didn't think it was a pagan importation but believed it, it would be strange that this was done earlier for theological purposes and yet neither account would actually include such reasons or any sign that there ever were any. What would be more likely is that they didn't believe it because of its theological significance but believed it simply because it had its basis in actual events.

For those who are interested in upcoming biblical commentaries who don't regularly check my posts on those (and I know some of my readers do check in on those posts fairly often), I wanted to make it known that there have been lots of updates to them recently. [You can look at the same information organized in two different ways: by book of the Bible and by commentary series.] In this post I'll give several highlights and major updates among a lot of smaller changes that I won't mention here but are at the main posts. As always, the main posts just linked to will be updated when there is new information, and they include much that's changed that's not here. I will not be updating this post. This is just to draw attention to changes that have occurred on the other posts for those who don't check them regularly.

I'm perhaps most excited about this first item, which I haven't included in the other posts since it's not new commentaries but new books about commentaries. Baker is releasing new editions of Longman's OT commentary survey and Carson's NT one in January. Also, John Glynn is expecting the new edition of his own commentary review to be published by the end of the year. I've already ordered Longman and Carson at Amazon. I couldn't find them there by searching, but you can use the Baker links above to get the ISBNs and then type them into the Amazon search box. I don't believe they have the new Glynn edition listed at Amazon yet.

Andreas Kostenberger has a thoughtful post on singleness in the Bible. I especially found one observation noteworthy. He finds a trajectory across salvation history with regard to singleness and marriage. Marriage is part of the creation order, part of God's original intent before the fall. It isn't until Jesus comes along to initiate the new covenant that you get any sense at all that there's anything but marriage as the norm, with singleness as an extraordinary exception (e.g. widows, serious illness). But Jesus indicates that some will be single by choice, and Paul even argues that the kingdom is more greatly served (in certain kinds of situations?) by those who are single, and therefore what was once the exception becomes something especially useful.

But Jesus also indicates that there will be no marriage in the resurrection. That means the intermediate phase between the initiation of the new covenant and its ultimate fulfillment in the resurrection is in tension between the marriage norm of the old covenant and the singleness norm of the resurrection. Seeing this according to a trajectory makes so much sense of how Paul can have such a high view of marriage and yet also view singleness as something for some to strive for. This doesn't (as some have argued) imply a lower view of marriage but simply reflects the tension between these two norms, one eventually to be replaced by the other but both having value in the in-between time. But Kostenberger does take marriage as a sort of norm even in this age, citing Matthew 19 as evidence. It's just not a norm in the fuller sense of when most everyone would be expected to get married.

From one of the recent Christian Carnivals: Ecclesiastes and Joy at Thinking Christian. A number of scholars go to one extreme or the other on how pessimistic Ecclesiastes is, and Tom Gilson seems to me to get the balance right.

This is a list of the current and forthcoming commentaries in the Hermeneia series. For more series, see my post on commentary series. For a listing in alphabetical order, see this post.

The Hermeneia series is noted especially for its comprehensive attention to parallels in other literature. This will almost invariably involve many speculative connections with literature not necessary for interpreting the biblical text and just amounts to distraction. A number of these commentaries are absolutely excellent and in fact the scholarly standards on their respective books (e.g. Psalms 51-100, Song of Songs, Amos, I Peter. Others are outdated or eccentric (most notably John and the earlier Bultmann I-III John), and such books might be better served by other commentaries. It uses the original language and will be harder to read by those unschooled in Hebrew and Greek, but there is usually a translation of any non-English, which makes it much easier than some other series. Even though it's more detail than necessary in most cases, some of these volumes really are the best detailed exegesis of the book they cover, and I'll indicate some of those when I do the review of commentaries for each book. In most cases, scholars will need to refer to them, but expositors will not. The series is still very much in process in the Old Testament, with only one volume on the historical works in print, and that was just this year. The prophets and wisdom literature have much better coverage, and the NT is much further along. Non-canonical books also appear in this series.

One misleading element of the following lists is that many volumes are translations of German or French works, and the delay between the original and the Hermeneia translation is sometimes more than a decade. Some of these are much older than they seem to be from the date given, which is the date of its release in English translation in this series . Others were new works produced in English.

Volumes out so far:

Biblical scholar Leon Morris died last week at age 92. I have a lot of respect for Morris' work, defending traditional doctrines in times when the majority of biblical scholars had rejected them, in some cases leading to a resurgence in the scholarship of the traditional view (e.g. on propitiation as opposed to expiation). During during the months between New Years and Easter of the last five years, our congregation has been studying John, with one more quarter to go to finish up chapters 18-21. I've appreciated his commentary on John a great deal as we've been doing this lengthy study. I dont know which chapters he wrote in the original Carson/Morris/Moo Introduction to the New Testament (now revised by Carson and Moo without Morris), but I read the whole book with much profit. I've also spent a smaller amount of time in some of his other commentaries. My overwhelming sense of his contribution to biblical studies is that he was one of the most influential evangelical biblical scholars of the last generation, and I think evangelical scholars of our day owe a good deal to his work in a time when evangelical scholarship was only just beginning to be recognized as legitimate work among mainstream biblical studies circles.

The Anglican newsletter for Melbourne has an obituary. See also posts at Rebecca Writes, Between Two Worlds, Boar's Head Tavern, American Anglican, and Jesus Creed.

Update: See also D.A.. Carson's tribute. [Hat tip: Cafe Apocalypsis]

The 8th Biblical Studies Carnival is up at Biblicalia, featuring some of the best posts in the blogosophere from last month in the general area of biblical studies.

Mark Roberts gives an argument that hadn't occurred to me. Some people doubt the traditional authorship of the gospels. One thing that's strange about that view is that we have no explanation of why someone would choose the minor characters of John Mark and Luke, even if they did have some connection with Peter and Paul. Wouldn't it make more sense to choose someone who had actually met Jesus to serve as the invented author of gospels that are pretty much accounts of Jesus' life? If you're going to be inventing the authorship of the book we now call Mark, and you're going to say that the author who wrote it was Mark, who got his information from Peter, why not just say that it came from Peter? There was no Gospel of Peter at the time, so it wasn't as if the name was taken? Even if it made sense to choose a companion of someone who knew Jesus, it would be silly to choose a companion of someone who as far as we know didn't. That makes the choice of Luke extremely strange.

What Mark then goes on to argue is that this makes it far more likely than otherwise that the attributions to Matthew and John are accurate. Even if it seems really silly to question the tradition on Mark and Luke, it doesn't automatically follow that the tradition on Matthew and John is inaccurate. But it is the same tradition. These listings appear together generally, all around the same time, and we shouldn't expect it to be right on two of the four gospels but drastically wrong on the other two. That does increase the plausibility factor for Matthew and John a little.

Now I don't think much stands of falls on this issue. The only gospel of the four that makes any claim relevant to its authorship is John, and that's not exactly unambiguous (though I do think the most plausible expanation is that John is its author). But if we found out for sure that all four gospels were written by people we've never heard of, it wouldn't threaten conservative views on scripture's authority. It's just that this is a real difficulty for those who want to suspect that the tradition is unreliable. This is at least one reason for thinking of it as more reliable than many scholars, even some evangelicals, are willing to admit.

A common urban legend in evangelical circles (and probably elsewhere too) is that 'ekklesia' in the New Testament (the word usually translated as "church") means "called out ones". This is simply false. It means "assembly" or "congregation". Its etymology derives from the sense that you can call together or call forth a group of people to gather for a purpose, but its meaning in the time of the Hellenistic period, when the NT was written, is simply a group of people gathered together. The literal translation should be "gathering" rather than "called out ones". See Jollyblogger's recent post on this for more information, with some careful nuance about various ways this etymological fallacy can occur. Note carefully his point that this has some relevance to George Barna's "assembly that never assembles" movement. He also makes several other nice little points in the process.

This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post. You can see my annotated Amazon Listmania! list of Leviticus commentaries if you want a quick overview of what I think are the most important commentaries (or at least what I thought when I made the list) before looking more deeply at this more detailed review.

Gordon Wenham (NICOT, 1979) has my favorite commentary on this difficult book. Wenham is especially strong on understanding the theological significance of cleanness/uncleanness, holiness, and other ritual matters. It's not as detailed as some of the following commentaries, but I think it's the best starting place for a pastor or Bible teacher. He's got a good sense of the symbolism behind most of the laws that sound very strange to the modern ear and what they would have meant to Israel. He ends each section with some reflections on connecting the material he's just discussed with the New Testament. Especially helpful are his explanations of how the New Testament authors would consider the various festivals and sacrifices as fulfilled in Christ in different ways. I thoroughly enjoyed working through this commentary. Wenham spends little time speculating on source critical issues, due to the circularity of most such arguments and the wide divergence of source reconstructions among those who spend their time making what flimsy consensus there is even less of a consensus.

The seventh Biblical Studies Carnival is at Daily Hebrew. I hadn't sent anything to this particular carnival for several months, but I finally managed to have something that I thought was worth submitting, my post on Zadok and Eleazar.

In the Torah, Aaron is the first high priest of the Levitical order of priests. He had four sons: Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar. The first two died in Leviticus 10, leaving Eleazar as the eldest inheritor of the high priestly line. We see in Joshua that Eleazar's son Phinehas had become the high priest by the time of the conquering of the land. Then we lose any record of what was going on with tabernacle worship until we get to Samuel, where there seems to be a fixed temple structure built up around the tabernacle implements of worship from the end of Exodus. Perhaps the most surprising feature of the priestly situation at the beginning of the book of Samuel is that the high priest Eli was not descended from Eleazar but his younger brother Ithamar. Where are the descendants of Eleazar, then? What happened after Phinehas?

This surprising fact in the Samuel history has led a number of scholars to propose a skeptical reconstruction of what really happened. On this view, the high priestly family has always been descended from Ithamar, and Eli's family in Samuel was the original high priestly family. With David we get the insertion of a priest named Zadok alongside the final remaining Elide priest Abiathar/Ahimilech. I Chronicles 24 tells us that Zadok is the head of the the Eleazar clan of priests, which Ahimelech (perhaps the same man called Abiathar in Samuel, perhaps his son) was head of the Ithamar clan of priests. The revisionist theory takes Zadok to be a complete outsider from the conquered Jebusite city of Jerusalem. David allowed him to continue his priestly duties, casting him as a priest under the order of Melchizedek, the original priest-king of Salem (which became Jerusalem) from Genesis 14. This allowed David to assert his legitimacy to be king in the Jebusite city, and then Chronicles and the other places that list him as a descendant of Eleazar are just reworking the tradition to make him fit the Israelite origin story, casting Zadok as a son of an older brother of the ancestor of the Elide priests. Thus no sign was left of the Jebusite origin of Zadok.

Great D.A. Carson quote:

When I was a boy of about nine or ten, my father called me over to listen to him reading an editorial or a letter to the editor (I cannot remember which) in The Montreal Star, one of the leading papers in eastern Canada at the time. The writer was inveighing against all those stupid Christians who believe the Bible is the Word of God, when it speaks so ignorantly of the sun "rising" in the east: any schoolboy knows that the sun does not rise, but that the earth rotates on its axis. My father asked me what I thought of the argument. I looked at him rather nonplused. He grinned, and calmly turned to the front page of the paper, and drew my attention to the line, "Sunrise: 6:36 am."

[The formatting and spelling may be affected by the process of scanning the article, as is often the case at this site, so I wouldn't assume he really misspelled 'nonplussed' or that he didn't italicize the name of the newspaper.]

The book review this comes from starts here. It's very long. The particular location of this quote is on this page.

A couple months ago, something I was reading referred in a footnote to an extended note by Joyce Baldwin in her Zechariah commentary on jealousy. Baldwin's discussion was excellent, as her work usually is, but one thing stood out. I'll quote the two relevant paragraphs and then comment further. Some of the formatting on her Hebrew transliterations isn't exact, but I've tried to do the best I could with the tools at my disposal.

The Hebrew word qin'a is translated in RSV by 'jealousy', 'zeal', and 'fury'. Its root is probably connected with an Arabic word meaning to become intensely red (or black) with dye, and so by derivation it draws attention to the colour produced in the face by deep emotion. The Greek zeloo, 'to be jealous', derived from zeo, 'to boil', also expresses deep feeling. From it the English words 'zeal' and 'jealousy' are both derived, so indicating that the emotion can be directed to good or bad ends. When it is self-regarding it results in intense hatred, but when it is concerned for others it becomes a power capable of accomplishing the most noble deeds.

It is significant that God is first spoken of as 'jealous' at the giving of the covenant code (Ex. 20:5; 34:14; Dt 5:9), when the special relationship was established between the Lord and His people, Israel. Because they are His, they can belong to no-one else, hence the prohibition of idolatry and the sanctions against it in the third commandment; but these are followed by assurances of 'steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments' (Ex 20:6). God's jealousy is a measure of the intensity of His love towards those with whom He has entered in covenant. So great is His love that He cannot be indifferent if they spurn Him by disobedience or sheet carelessness. [Joyce Baldwin, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, pp.101-102]

Chris Tessone has a nice post examining and evaluating the content of the Gospel of Judas. He isn't just pointing out where this book differs from orthodox Christian belief. He focuses in on several ethical issues where the Gospel of Judas is clearly inferior to the canonical gospels. His conclusion: like other gnostic writings, it's misogynistic, anti-body, exclusionary, and arrogant, not to mention anti-semitic. In some ways it's much worse than the more moderately gnostic Gospel of Thomas (though that one does have Jesus telling women that they should seek to become men). I asked some pointed questions of some top bibliobloggers to this kind of analysis, and no one probed to this level, so I was glad to see this.

It's somewhat unusual to see a complementarian arguing for women deacons, but see Andreas Köstenberger's arguments here. I'm earnestly awaiting his commentary on the pastoral epistles. Two of the most important academic commentaries on those books are by complementarians (George W. Knight in the NIGTC and William Mounce in the WBC), but the best introductory level commentaries have largely been by egalitarians who seem to me to take positions at odds with the text (e.g. Gordon Fee's NIBC, Philip Towner's IVPNTC, the forthcoming Cornerstone by Linda Belleville; I must admit that what I read from Walter Liefeld's NIVAC does justice to the complementarian position and doesn't push egalitarianism very strongly). John Stott (BST) and Kent Hughes and Brian Chapell (PTW) are the exceptions, but they aren't primarily scholars but pastors, and these works are more sermonic/homiletic than commentary. Köstenberger is really on the forefront of the scholarly debate, and I think he's done some of the best work on the issue.

John Glynn has posted his study notes for Ephesians, which will be appearing in the forthcoming HCSB Study Bible. For some reason the number of quality study Bibles is increasing. I've heard about several study Bibles that have just come out or are in process right now that look to be on the same scholarly level as the NIV Study Bible or the Reformation Study Bible. Given that most study Bibles are simply marketing ploys to get people to think they need something directed specifically to their particular demographi rather than simply to promote actual study of the Bible for its own sake, I think this is great.

This is a list of the current and forthcoming commentaries in the Tyndale Old and New Testament Commentaries. For more series, see my post on commentary series.

The Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (TOTC) and Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (TNTC) are some of the best basic level commentaries out there. The perspective is fairly conservative and clearly evangelical, and the intent is to package careful research into a popular-level commentary that can be read cover to cover fairly easily by someone with no background in academic work in biblical studies. It's not as basic as the NIVAC or BST series, but that just means it's more helpful to someone seeking a little more reasoning behind the exegesis and interpretation taken in the commentary. Many of the authors are top scholars who have also written detailed commentaries, usually on other books.

A few volumes stand out as particularly excellent. All of the ones by Joyce Baldwin are great (Samuel, Esther, Daniel, Haggai-Zechariah-Malachi). Selman's two volumes on Chronicles and Hubbard's lengthy volume on Hosea were allowed far more space than normally happens in this series. Colin Kruse's new one on John is the best basic level commentary on John, and John Stott's volume on I-III John is probably the same for that book. I've seen some refer to I. Howard Marshall on Acts as the best commentary in the series, though I think I'd reserve that for Stott's. Derek Kidner did some fine work for this series too (Genesis, Ezra-Nehemiah, Psalms, Proverbs), though his are probably among the most dated in the series.

The following list is in canonical order. If you prefer to see the volumes in their chronological release order (as best as I can reconstruct), see here.

This is a list of the current and forthcoming commentaries in the NIV Application Commentary. For more series, see my post on commentary series.

The NIV Application Commentaries (NIVAC) are truly of their own category. After what's usually a fairly brief exposition of what the text says in its original context, there's a section raising considerations on how we should bridge from that context to our own, and then a third section presents some ways to apply the text in our own context. This is an admirable aim, since it gives a model for how each person should be reading the Bible with an aim to applying it in our own contexts. The downside is that the author isn't in exactly our context, and we have to do that kind of work ourselves and not allow a commentary to do it for us, or else we won't have truly bridged the contextual gap from the text to our own context. But the model presented in these volumes is often very helpful to begin that work.

There's much of value in these commentaries, even if the exposition itself is fairly brief, since it's not really much briefer than most basic level commentaries, but the additional portions are extra help in matters that commentaries don't often deal with. With caution, they can be quite helpful. The NT is finished, with the OT coming along pretty quickly.

Volumes released:

Ben Witherington now has two more Judas posts. He discusses yesterday's NPR discussion of the Gospel of Judas, which I missed and now will have to try to listen to from their website when I get the chance. Several issues come up in the post. I think the two most notable points are his further discussion of whether this Coptic text had a Greek antecedent and his claim about the moral content of this work. He particularly frowns on its portrayal of Jews. I left a comment wondering what he meant. Is the Gospel of Judas is anti-semitic in a way that the canonical gospels are not? I doubt he accepts the claims of many scholars that the internal criticism of Jesus and his followers of their fellow Jews counts as anti-semitism. Is just a further development in the direction that isn't really anti-semitism but that scholars have pretended is anti-semitism, or is it really anti-semitic in a way that the canonical gospels aren't? I'd be reluctant to consider it anti-semitic simply because it says some things that Jews didn't agree with, but that's all he mentions. If it can be established that the motivation was hatred of Jews, then I could see it, but simply having a different cosmology from the Hebrew one doesn't seem to me in itself to be anti-semitic. I'm still awaiting his response on this.

Witherington also has a discussion of what the canonical gospels say about Judas. I'm a little more confident that Judas never repented than he is (I think the suicide is a pretty good sign that he didn't), but he doesn't think we have any reason to think Judas did repent. What he does think is clear is that Judas did wrong in betraying Jesus and that this was really just a continuation of his character all along.

Andreas Kostenberger also posts on this. I don't think he's saying much that wasn't in any of the other various things I've linked to except one point that I partially disagree with. The Gospel of Judas is bad for several reasons, one of which is that viewpoint it expresses. Gnosticism treats the body as unimportant and thus devalues one aspect of how God created us. It's not really a gospel, because it's message isn't good news but in fact bad news. I agree. But he adds one further thing that makes me hesitate. He says the Gospel of Judas is morally dangerous because it promotes betrayal as good. I don't think it's exactly fair to say that the Gospel of Judas portrays betrayal as virtuous. What it does is say that Judas didn't betray Jesus but was carrying out his instructions. In effect, it exonerates someone who in reality was a traitor by saying something false about what he did. But it doesn't take the moral stance that betrayal is virtuous. I think the author would have agreed that Judas would have been doing wrong if he had betrayed Jesus. But the book doesn't portray Judas as having done that.

I've been watching National Geographic's special on the Gospel of Judas (see here for my first post with links to all sorts of information on this work). I'm trying to catalogue all the unscholarly things they've been saying. I think I missed at least one, but there's plenty here to criticize.

First of all, they selected mostly scholars known for Gnostic sympathies or more radical reconstructions of the history of the development of Christianity. Many of these were not mainstream scholars but fringe elements like Bart Ehrman (see the links here for evaluation of his latest popular work) or Elaine Pagels (best known for minority views about Gnosticism that most scholars reject). Craig Evans was the one voice of reason in the whole production, and it felt to me as if they were excerpting him most of the time to fit with what they wanted to get across, putting his rejection of any historical value in this work regarding the actual Judas immediately before a fallacious argument of Elaine Pagels that ignores much historical information about the differences between what we know about the gospels and what we know about this work (see 6 below). My conclusion is that the people who put this together absolutely failed in terms of their journalistic integrity. But what else is new? That usually happens in these specials. There was much that I found enjoyable and interesting in this special, but I'm disgusted enough with the negatives that I'll have to refer you to Mark Goodacre for the positive elements.

On to the specific criticisms:

I wish I had the time to comment on the media failure about the Gospel of Judas, but enough people have already done so that I can just link to them.

David Kopel at The Volokh Conspiracy has The Judas Gospel, which mainly refutes the ridiculous sorts of claims being made by most of the major media outlets who have been suggesting that anything in the Gospel of Judas has some bearing on scholarship on the historical Judas and will force everyone to reevaluate this man.

Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping has Judas Gospel a Yawner at Winds of Change (he also has it at his personal blog, but he's got comments and trackbacks at Winds of Change), which fills in more details on the apostolic origins of the NT canon and the rejection of non-apostolic works like the Gospel of Judas.

Ben Witherington has The Gospel of Judas et. al. -- Part One, which has some inside information about the process that has led to the publication of this new English translation of the Coptic translation that scholars we have had for years but has been unreadable by most NT scholars who know no Coptic (and the original Greek, if there ever was one, has not been found). He says he intends to follow up on this more.

Mark Roberts focuses more on the actual content of the Gospel of Judas in Excursus: The Gospel of Judas -- A Special Report, in an extended aside in the midst of a series evaluating the claims made by characters in The Da Vinci Code. It's not wholly off-topic, since both works raise issues related to Gnosticism, but this post is a stand-alone treatment of the Judas "gospel".

I've been thinking through the ethics of deceit with respect to April Fools jokes and other kinds of false statements that may or may not be considered lying. The Jill Carroll case has raised an important further sort of case that I hadn't been thinking about. What about when someone says something they don't believe to be true under duress? For background on the details of her case and her deliberate statements (under threat) of things she didn't agree with, see the Moderate Voice's excellent roundup. There seem to me to be at least three issues that may have a moral bearing on how we should evaluate such false statements, and I think the end result is much more messy than we would generally like moral issues to be.

Andreas Koestenberger is now blogging. I've been wondering when the more conservative biblical scholars would begin to have a presence in the blogosphere. We've got some top-notch moderate conservatives in Ben Witherington and Scot McKnight, but both have views that I have serious reservations about, despite their stalwart defense of conservative positions on other matters. I consider Koestenberger a solid conservative on most issues I care about being conservative about, and I welcome him to the blogosphere. Now if only he could figure out how to have permalinks for his individual posts...

Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus : The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why has become quite a publishing success since it came out in November. Those who know biblical studies will recognize it as mostly a good popularization of standard textual criticism (comparing the various manuscripts of biblical books to try to reconstruct with the text originally said). Those who don't know the subject will take it as a strong argument against the integrity of the Bible, but any familiarity with text criticism will demolish that impression rather quickly. Ehrman's conclusions on such matter simply don't follow from his arguments. I've not looked too much at the book itself, but I've read several reviews over the last few weeks:

Craig Blomberg in Denver Journal
Daniel Wallace at bible.org
Ben Witherington at his blog (which includes Wallace's comments with his own thoughts surrounding it)

All three scholars conclude that Ehrman's presentation of the actual data is excellent as an introduction at the popular level to a difficult field but that he paints his conclusions to suggest something way beyond what the data show. For instance, he handpicks the very worst cases of textual corruption and then acts as if those are fairly representative, when in reality hardly anything is on that level. I could go on, but I'd rather you just read what the biblical scholars say.

This is a list of the current and forthcoming commentaries in the Anchor Bible commentary series. For more series, see my post on commentary series.

The Anchor Bible (AB) commentaries are among the most academically respectable scholarly commentaries, though the quality and level of detail can vary from volume to volume. They transliterate the Greek and Hebrew, which helps for someone who doesn't know the original languages, but sometimes the level of detail isn't all that helpful for someone who just wants a little background and doesn't want to wade through pages of scholarship to find that the kind of theological question they're worrying about is hardly treated by a scholar who cares more about the linguistic, historical, and text-critical issues. Not all volumes are like this, but many are. The level of detail will also vary greatly from volume to volume, with later publication dates often signaling much more depth, and some (though certainly not all) older ones are all but useless given what else is out there. Textual criticism, exegetical notes and expositional commentary are separated into separate sections. This makes it difficult to find anything, but it also keeps separate kinds of work separate. I'd rather not have these separated, but some people prefer it.

As with most critical series, evangelicals will be troubled by some of the conclusions of most of the scholars writing in this series (except for the few evangelical contributors). Though evangelicals can supplement the kind of information in these commentaries with what I consider to be much better theological sense and a much higher appreciation of scripture, many evangelical commentaries simply can't compete with the best volumes in this series, at least with respect to historical and sociological background information, lexical study, text criticism, archaeology. etc. Theology is often given short shrift. The series is mostly done, with only Nahum and Philippians not covered and only Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Ezekiel still only partially covered, though some volumes are being replaced (I know of Genesis, II Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Psalms, Proverbs 10-31, Matthew, the second half of Mark, and Revelation).

Volumes released so far:

After looking through the many volumes and replacements of NICOT and NICNT volumes, going back to 1951, I decided to put together a list of the whole series in order to date, including the next two announced volumes, which should be out this year.

In three of the years I have no idea which of two volumes released that year was first. Those years are 1953, 1954, 1959, and 1965. Twice I found that two volumes were released in the same month (Galatians and the Acts revision in 1988 and then Philippians and the John revision in 1995). I don't know for sure if they were released the same day, because Amazon just reports the month for these (not its usual practice). Other than those uncertainties, assuming Amazon is reporting the months accurately, the following is the order the NICNT and NICOT volumes have appeared, first for the whole series and then separately for the OT and NT.

Free Money Finance argues that the old covenant tithe command applies to Christians. I was going to leave a comment, but I decided I might as well make it a post. The topic has come up here before. Wink tried to get a discussion going on tithing last summer. Also, much of what I'm going to say has a background much more carefully drawn out in Christians and the Sabbath and More Sabbath Stuff.

One of the arguments in the post is that Abraham gave a tithe long before the law of Moses. From this it is concluded that the tithe principle must be eternal and thus not just a particular command to the people of Israel in the Mosaic law. There are a number of things that someone could say about Abraham's tithe, but one thing you can't say is that he was following any command from God that he give 10% of his income to God. He wasn't giving it to God, for one, and we have no information about any command he was following, never mind a command as to the exact amount. A gift of 10% to a benefactor was probably just a common ancient near eastern practice that the Torah adopts because the symbolism of giving firstfruits to God as representative of everything you have belonging to God needed some amount. For the particular command to the particular people of Israel to give some amount as firstfruits, God seems to have chosen the amount that for whatever reason had already been standard in that part of the world at that time, as evidenced by Abraham's gift to Melchizedek. The more important principle is that everything we have is God's, with the firstfruits we give to him standing for that.

10% isn't some magical amount. The Torah uses different percentages to determine the firstfruits amount for other things. With the tithe of time, it's 1/7 of all the days in the week rather than 1/10. With the tithe of the firstborn, it's one out of however many children there end up being, which is 100% when there's only one but less than 10% if there are more than ten).

Tyler Williams' Love Poetry for Biblical Literalists is hilarious. I just can't get over that picture.

For an encapsulation of the Song that does transfer nicely into a contemporary context, see Michael Card's "Arise My Love", which I sang to Sam at our wedding.

The second Biblical Studies Carnival is at Codex Blogspot. The first was ten months ago, so I was allowed to submit a pretty old post, Chronology in I Samuel 16:1-18:5. This carnival is expected to be monthly now that it's been resumed. I probably won't have something serious enough in biblical studies to submit every month, but I'll link to it when (and only when) I have a post in it, as is generally my practice with carnivals. You should always be able to find up-to-date information on the next carnival here. Do take a look at the carnival if you're at all interested in biblical studies. There's a huge variety of posts there.

This is a list of the current and forthcoming commentaries in the New International Commentaries on the New Testament (NICNT) and on the Old Testament (NICOT). For more series, see my post on commentary series. For the list of this series in the chronological order of their release, see this post.

This is another of my favorite series. Almost all the contributors are what I would consider conservative evangelicals, though occasionally some will take views that do seem only moderately conservative to some (e.g. Leslie Allen on Jonah argues that Jonah didn't happen historically but affirms inerrancy because he believes the book is a parable), but that's not standard for the series. I might consider some of the commentaries in this series to be the best out there on the book in question, e.g. Hubbard on Ruth, Waltke on Proverbs, Block on Ezekiel, Moo on Romans, and others are excellent as well, including Hamilton on Genesis, Wenham on Leviticus, and Fee on I Corinthians and Philippians. Some forthcoming volumes should also be outstanding.

This series isn't quite as detailed as the most academic series, but it's fairly detailed, at least in the newer volumes. You might call it semi-technical. The footnotes often have the kind of detail you'd find in a more exclusively academic commentary. They try to restrict the text to transliteration of Hebrew and Greek for the sake of readability, and I think someone sufficiently committed to learning a lot about one book of the Bible might read through these cover to cover. I've read the volumes on Leviticus, Numbers, and Isaiah 1-39 myself, and I've read half of the Ruth volume and large sections of others. Of course I'll also read even more technical commentaries straight through, but I think these are a lot easier to handle for those accustomed to reading commentaries who still wouldn't read through the more detailed ones of other series.

This review is adapted from my Amazon review.

This is an excellent book. Ashley is well-informed about what people of differing viewpoints have to say, and this is the most in-depth evangelical commentary on the book of Numbers. He doesn't accept all the conservative positions easily, but he is fairly conservative in the end.

He convincingly argues for the unity of the canonical book and undermines many source-critical "solutions" to some of the problems of interpretation. However, this doesn't mean he thinks the entire book was written by one person or during or immediately after the time of Moses (not least because the Pentateuch never suggests that it was wholly authored by Moses,and nor does any New Testament book, though Jesus does refer to them as the books of Moses the same way he refers to the Psalms as David, who clearly didn't write all of them). Ashley does think much of it goes back to Moses in some form, and he takes its own claims of its origins as genuine. He occasionally gives arguments for this about certain passages. He makes no bones about being an evangelical and seeing scripture as God's word, wholly inspired (and I assume without error in its original form, which we no longer have 100%, though he doesn't focus on the details of his views on inspiration). He doesn't take a view on problems related to large numbers in the Hebrew scriptures, but hardly anyone, evangelical or not, has a satisfying and all-encompassing view about that thorny problem.

Ashley doesn't constantly focus on theology and ties to the New Testament, but he does do a fair amount of excellent reflection on such matters in almost as much detail as his historical, linguistic, and sociological reflection.

For a more mainstream commentary, the best is Jacob Milgrom's JPS Torah commentary (which isn't just the old classic liberal viewpoint but has covered new ground, undermining lots of now-old-fashioned views still taught at the undergraduate level). Ashley had some access to Milgrom's work before revising his manuscript into the final draft, but he had little time to take into account Milgrom's whole commentary. Milgrom's thought has influenced Ashley's from his many papers and earlier books. Gordon Wenham's Tyndale volume is quite good but getting dated, and it's extremely short. Katherine Sakenfeld's International Theological Commentary and Dennis Olson's Interpretation are more recent popular level commentaries, but they're from a more critical direction. R. Dennis Cole's New American Commentary volume is more recent but isn't as detailed as Ashley's. I look forward to John Sailhamer's replacement of the Word Biblical Commentary volume by Philip Budd, but until then Ashley will be the standard for evangelicals at this level of detail. His is the most in-depth of the recent evangelical commentaries on this book, though that doesn't mean these other commentaries wouldn't complement it nicely.

When I took my first class in biblical studies, I was a little surprised to find that scholars generally don't call the Old Testament the Old Testament. My Jewish professor (Saul Olyan for those who care) preferred not to bring in the connotations Christians associate with that term and simply called it the Hebrew Bible. I was fine with this for the sake of that class, though I preferred to use the standard Christian term in most contexts. I didn't like the term 'Greek Bible' for the New Testament, though, because no one thinks of the New Testament as a whole Bible. It's not the Christian Bible either, because that's both testaments.

I did know that some Christians didn't like the standard 'Old Testament' and 'New Testament' descriptors because of things they seemed to convey that might not be accurate. I didn't know that anyone had proposed replacing them with 'First Testament' and 'Second Testament'. If anything I would have preferred 'Old Covenant' and 'New Covenant', since 'testament' is generally a mistranslation (in contemporary English anyway) of the term for covenant in the New Testament. But I'm generally the sort to prefer the names we have already, because once something becomes a name it's really ceased to be a description at all, as evidenced by the countless inaccurate titles we use all the time that nonetheless succeed in referring to their intended designee (e.g. 'driveway' and 'parkway' are not descriptions but names of categories that seem to have reversed their etymological meaning, and 'the United States of America' no longer refers to a collection of nation-states but a bunch of provinces that we inaccurately call states).

Anyway, Tyler Williams has a great post on this: Old Testament/First Testament/Hebrew Bible/Tanak: What's in a Name? Quite a Bit Actually! He summarizes the different terms and the reasons offered for and against all of them in a way that I think is pretty fair to all parties.

Bruce Meyer left the following comment:

Hi Jeremy (and others, is that right?). I was reading some parts of the Bible today that caught my eye, and I wondered what's going on here. Since you're the resident expert on All Things Commentaried, I thought I would run them by you.

Proverb 25:23 says, a backbiting tongue brings forth angry looks. My reaction is, ooh, I'm scared, not. What else is going on here? Maybe it's the Evil Eye, a virtually effective curse?

The other one is Revelation 3:18, Jesus says "I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich..." OK, it's not literal. Assuming it's not trivial, perhaps Christ is urging the comfortably lukewarm to dig deeper, and get the real thing, not the minimally acceptable qualities that a baptized Christian needs to not get kicked out. But is there more here, do you think? Thanks.

I responded in the same comment thread, but I've moved my response now to this post.

This is a list of the current and forthcoming commentaries in the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (BECNT) series. For more series, see my post on commentary series.

This is one of my favorite series now. It's got a ways to go before it's complete, but what's out is mostly excellent. In some ways this is a technical series. They use Greek font and address most of the issues a full-scale commentary will deal with, offering plenty of detail. I think Darrell Bock's two volumes on Luke are now the most helpful commentary on that book, and Andreas Koestenberger on John almost rivals that of D.A. Carson, my personal favorite commentator on scripture.

At the same time, all Greek is transliterated and translated, so readers unfamiliar with the language won't be slowed down by the Greek font. Also, the format and organization of the series is one of the best I've ever seen. It looks like a cutting edge college textbook, something you never see in a serious academic work, but the content is exactly the latter. It's not of the kind of reference-work detail as some other series, so you can more easily actually read through a whole commentary in this series if you're the sort who likes to read the more scholarly commentaries (as I do). It's also thoroughly evangelical but with much higher standards for contributors than some evangelical series. The editors have by and large chosen extremely responsible biblical scholars for what will become one of the best detailed commentary series on the New Testament.

This is a list of the current and forthcoming commentaries in the Pillar New Testament Commentary (PNTC) series. For more series, see my post on commentary series. This series is one of my favorites. It started as a collection of independent commentaries with similar covers: Matthew and Romans by Leon Morris, John by D.A. Carson, and Revelation by Philip Edgcumbe Hughes. The Hughes volume was later discontinued, and Carson is planning to contribute his own Revelation commentary at some point to replace it. Morris' Romans is also scheduled for replacement by Colin Kruse. The covers have now drastically improved as well. I'll probably end up with at least 75% of the series by the time they're done.

I'd place the series generally around the upper-mid level. Some of them aren't quite as detailed as the NICNT series (though some of the older NICOT volumes are about the same level. A few are detailed enough for me to count as good enough for full academic commentaries, though they're much more readable than most and nowhere near as detailed as the most detailed academic works. Much of the more technical material will be in footnotes even in those volumes, and Greek fonts are used only in footnotes by the authors who insist on using them (which is probably a minority of those who contribute to the series so far). The perspective is solidly evangelical, and there's an insistence on real interaction with the best of scholarship, evangelical or not. Contributors are fairly conservative theologically, and most refuse to give theology short shrift as in many academic commentaries. Inerrancy is assumed, but in many cases interpretations inconsistent with inerrancy will be presented (and usually responded to) just because such interpretations are common.

As I was catching up on some old posts that I'd saved in my RSS reader to come back to later, I stumbled upon a fun and informative post by Tyler Williams called Dogs, Urine, and Bible Translations: On the Importance of Translating Connotative Meaning. It involves Jesus giving attitude to his mother, dentistry in Amos, and pissing in the KJV. See also his earlier post Going Potty in Ancient Times that isn't about language.

(For those unfamiliar with the reference, the title of this post comes straight out of the KJV. Read Tyler's post for the context and for what it amounts to. I have to wonder what KJV-onlies who think 'piss' is a dirty word think about this one. Or maybe they just aren't reading their Bibles.)

This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post. You can see my annotated Amazon Listmania! list of Psalms commentaries if you want a quick overview of what I think are the most important commentaries before looking more deeply at this more detailed review.

Gerald Wilson's NIVAC on Psalms 1-72 is my favorite of all the Psalms commentaries. It's technically a popular-level commentary, but it's a good deal more in-depth than most NIVAC volumes in the area of Original Meaning, and it's even got a fairly significant introduction, something very uncommon for this series. As with most of them it's very good in its Bridging Contexts and Contemporary Application sections. The main point is to move from the original setting to contemporary application through deriving the general principles behind what the text says in its original setting. Unfortunately, the commentary is incomplete. It really is the first place I look for anything on the first 72 psalms. This one seems to be especially good with theology, and it's got a much greater degree of exegetical detail than some other popular-audience commentaries. [Update: Wilson has died. I'm guessing that this volume will be reassigned (or perhaps completed by someone else as a co-author if Wilson has made enough progress for the publisher to want to use his work).]

The WBC on Psalms is in three volumes. Volume 1 on Psalms 1-50 is by Peter Craigie. It's recently been updated by Marvin Tate, who did the second volume on 51-100, but you can still get the original by Craigie. I haven't looked at the updated version yet, but I imagine it strengthened the weaknesses in Craigie's volume in ways that the series' later volumes tended to improve upon. Volume 3 on 101-150 by Leslie Allen is now in its second edition, with exactly the sort of improvements that I'm expecting Tate did for Craigie. These three commentaries as a set form my favorite detailed treatment of the Psalms. There's some variation among the contributors. Craigie tends to be more theological than the others and is my favorite of the three. He is also strong on comparative linguistics, especially Ugaritic, and practices a moderate form criticism. Tate offers the most detail and is the heftiest of the three volumes (even after the other two have been revised), but he's less theological. Allen is somewhere in between. None of them draw enough connections with the New Testament for my preferences. Craigie's work is also the most dated, though the update by Tate should remedy that. With that update and the revision to Allen, those two volumes are very recent in their current form, and Tate is only 15 years old. All three start with a strong text-critical section and conclude with a summary of the basic meaning, with detailed commentary on each verse in between. There's some contemporary significance in the last section. The original versions of volumes 1 and 3 had much less of that, but the revised versions have a lot more than the originals did. One distracting feature of some Psalms commentaries is over-speculation about which ritual settings each psalm might have originated in, and these volumes focus more on what scholars can say with some confidence.

This is just about the most recent, complete, in-depth commentary on this book. The longest book in the Bible doesn't draw many full-length commentaries very often. There's only one complete academic commentary on Psalms that I know of that's more recent (Terrien), and that's nowhere near as detailed in terms of actual commentary. All three authors stand within the evangelical tradition, somewhat broadly construed. All three of them take views that I'm not willing to endorse in terms of historicity (though I'm not sure I'd deny most of those statements either), but they're all more conservative than you'll find in any other recent academic commentary on the Psalms. Allen is probably the least conservative of the bunch. But this is as conservative as you'll get for now at this level of detail. The forthcoming NICOT by Rolf Jacobsen, Nancy deClaisse-Walford, and Beth LaNeel Tanner might remedy that, but I know very little about the theological perspectives of any of those authors.

1. A few years ago I found an excellent commentary review site that really helped me get going with building a commentary library. A few months later, it disappeared. I don't remember the name of the guy who put it together, but I've just discovered John Turner's Commentary Reviews, which seems very close to the style of the site that disappeared. I suspect it's the same person putting his material back online. Unfortunately, only Genesis is up so far, and a few features are still incomplete, but a little exploration indicates that he's got material he's already written that he just hasn't put up yet. If it is the same site, it was never complete to begin with, but it went through the gospels, and the dead links here do the same. I hope the rest of this gets put up quickly, because it really was a great resource. Update: John seems to have a new website with some of his commentary reviews. It doesn't have Genesis, but it does have Ruth, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. He told me the original commentary review site was hosted by his denomination, and they took his reviews down without any explanation.

2. I've updated my Forthcoming Commentaries post a good deal recently. I've added the Blackwell Bible Commentaries (which is actually a misnomer, because this series aims to comment on later comments on the Bible without ever focusing on the text itself), and just this morning I received word of a few ICC volumes I didn't know about, along with a NICNT Mark replacement volume. Since the summer, which was the last time I posted something new indicating updates on the post, I've added the Brazos Theological Commentary, the revisions to the Expositor's Bible Commentary due out shortly, a whole bunch of Hermeneias, a new series by Kregel, a number of volumes for the New Cambridge series, the immoral Smith & Helwys series that scholarly-level prices (think ICC, Hermeneia) for what amounts to a popular-level commentary (think Interpretation, Tyndale), a new in-depth series by Zondervan, and various isolated commentaries scattered throughout the original series I had listed before all the updates. I've also just added full titles for series whose names I had just abbreviated with the common designations (e.g. NICOT, BECNT, WBC, NIGTC).

"A fool's tongue is long enough to cut his own throat." -- Bruce Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1-15 (2004), p.102.

Waltke is summarizing a bunch of statements from Proverbs on wise use of words, and right in the middle of his summaries (usually followed by a bunch of verse references) he has this one proverb of his own (with no verse references). I guess when you write a 1200+ page commentary on the book of Proverbs, you begin to think in proverbial form. I have to say that it's quite an image.

There's a slightly cheesy but still funny passage two pages later that doesn't fit the same description, but I thought I'd include it while I'm quoting Waltke:

As these means of obtaining wealth show, it is a matter of character, not of method. Proverbs is a "how to be book," not a "how to" book. Solomon is a better theologian than Frank Sinatra: Sinatra sang, "Do-be, do-be, do"; Solomon sings, "Be-do; be-do; be."

Those who opposed invading Iraq in 2003 have often been accused of not being patriotic. I think it's a slimy complaint. Some of them surely are not patriotic. Some have demonstrated by their actions and statements that they prefer al Qaeda to succeed if that's what it takes for Bush to fail. I'm convinced that such a view is much more mainstream than some people think. But many people opposed the war because they considered it immoral and didn't want their country doing immoral things. That's patriotism. This is all old news, though. Why am I talking about it now?

Well, it occurred to me recently that this is the same general phenomenon that I've also talked about a number of times on this blog with respect to accusations of anti-semitism in the gospels (and in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ). I've elsewhere argued that the gospels are Jewish works engaging in self-criticism of their own culture, much as the Hebrew prophets were. Jesus was particularly hard on his own people, but that didn't make him anti-semitic, and it doesn't make the recordings of his life and sayings in the gospels anti-semitic. They do indeed record harsh statements against the Jewish leaders, and John even directs these statements to what he calls the Jews (which careful scholars realize amounts to exactly the same thing). What was funny to me was realizing that those who are so inflamed at those who claim anti-war demonstrators to be undemocratic might well be exactly the same people accusing the gospels or Mel Gibson's use of them (which amounted pretty much to direct quotes of them) as being anti-semitic. It's the same error in reasoning in both cases. (Incidentally, it occurred to me after writing this post that this probably also applies to those who say someone is self-hating for criticizing the behavior of a contingent of their own ethnic or racial group, e.g. Bill Cosby.)

If you can be patriotic while engaging in self-criticism of your own culture, then it isn't anti-semitic to engage in self-criticism of your own culture if you're Jewish. But that's exactly what the gospels do when making the sorts of claims about the Jews of the time that the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and a few more liberal contemporary gospel scholars declare to be anti-semitic. People on the left make this sort of blunder as easily as people on the right do.

Christian Carnival XCVI is at Jordan's View.

Have you heard about the 18-year-old elected mayor as a write-in candidate? [Hat tip: Mark Olson]

Ben Witherington reviews Anne Rice's new novel about Jesus' childhood. I can't help but mention that he also gives Firefly and Serenity a thumbs up.

Here's Ethan a few years ago looking like his ducky (that's old ducky, which his mean aunties lost at the store 723 days ago; the new one has a much bigger bill, which I hope his mouth never looks like).

Christian Carnival XCV is at Eternal Revolution.

Mark Roberts has finished his 30-part series Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable? I mentioned it before, when he started it. I haven't gotten through the whole thing yet, but what I've read so far has been excellent. I highly recommend it.

Here's an interesting study on the differences between men and women's responses to humor. Not at all what I would have expected. [Hat tip: Orin Kerr]

Eugene Volokh takes on the suggestion that Judge Alito thinks private ownership of machine guns should be legal. The best part is where the same line of reasoning makes Justice O'Connor out to favor violence against women.

Finally, Sam's put up a host of pictures since the last time I pointed any out. There's the salamander in the driveway. Sophia meets spaghetti. It's been warm, so we've still got some excellent fall foliage. Isaiah's still dodging cameras. Ethan enjoys the weather. Finally, Sophia's beginning to look a lot like Ethan did at her age.

Christian Carnival XCIV is at Wittenberg Gate. Dory is in need of future hosts, so if you're interested follow her link at the top of the post. The Bible Archive is doing a series on Genesis. I especially want to direct your attention to his nice post on what Genesis 1 does say. All the debates about how to interpret the days and whether it's consistent with evolution easily distract from what the passage is about to begin with, and Rey brings our attention back to that. If you want to see his summary on those other issues, it's here, but why is our focus so often not what the focus of the text is? Walter Snyder has a good explanation of how it is that Bible publishers can justify charging royalties for the use of what is God's word (and thus should be free). [Hat tip: ESV Bible Blog] Belgium declares names and titles to be no longer capitalized. Well, I guess it's just politically incorrect names and titles. Actually, they've just singled out 'christ' and 'jew'* just to show how arbitrary they can be. Or is this arbitrary? [Hat tip: Sam] *Well, for 'Jew' it's only when the reference is religious rather than ethnic; if ethnic, it's still capitalized.

At Real Clear Theology, you can find excerpts of D.A. Carson and Douglas Moo's section on the New Perspective on Paul in their new edition of An Introduction to the New Testament, a book I would wholeheartedly recommend. [Hat tip: Rebecca]

Tyler Williams looks at witches in the Bible and traces out the origin of our modern conception of a witch. The first comment (the only one so far) is priceless.

Ed Feser at Right Reason takes apart Simon Blackburn's critique of Elizabeth Anscombe's natural law theory. [Hat tip: Philosophers' Carnival XXI] Standout quote:

Blackburn appears to be the sort of philosopher who, as an undergraduate, read a few excerpts from Anselm and Aquinas in some textbook, along with the standard potted “refutations� deriving from Hume and Kant, and never looked back – assuming ever since that no one could seriously believe that the existence of God could be demonstrated philosophically. He shows no awareness of the extent to which many of these standard objections are based on caricatures or oversimplifications of the traditional theistic arguments, nor any appreciation of the work done in defense of them by contemporary philosophers of religion like Plantinga and Swinburne, much less by analytical Thomists like John Haldane, whose work is most relevant to the matters presently at issue.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. It doesn't seem good for those who have insisted that Bush really wanted a war no matter what.

Senators Lindsey Graham (SC) and Mike DeWine (OH) were among the seven Republicans in the Gang of 14 who conspired to prevent Democrats from filibustering President Bush's judicial nominees and Republicans from using what's been called the nuclear option to remove the ability to filibuster judicial nominees. Since there are 55 Republicans, and 50 (+ Vice President Cheney's tie-breaking vote) would be needed to change the filibuster rule, only 6 Republicans were needed for the Gang of 14. They had 7. They now have at most 5, at least with respect to Samuel Alito's nomination for the Supreme Court. Graham and DeWine have indicated that they would not allow a filibuster on this nomination. It remains to be seen if the 44 Democrats (plus independent Senator Jim Jeffords of VT) would have enough votes to filibuster to begin with. The Gang of 14 again needs 6 votes to oppose the filibuster. As far as I know, not one of them has indicated anything on how they will approach Alito's nomination.

I've run across statements at least a few times now claiming that evangelical biblical scholar Tremper Longman is "weak on inerrancy" or simply not an inerrantist. I've never seen anyone give any evidence of this. I've read all or most of the Introduction to the Old Testament that he did with Raymond Dillard, and there's nothing in there remotely resembling a denial of inerrancy. In fact, he argues that certain positions often viewed as liberal in some way are consistent with inerrancy, which makes me think he clearly is an inerrantist who doesn't want to give up that view. He defends particularly unpopular views among the mainstream, largely because he does seem to be an inerrantist (e.g. an early date for Daniel with a historical basis for everything in the book, which he defends both in the OT Intro and in a Daniel commentary). The Dillard-Longman chapter on Jonah argues that Jonah probably was intended to be taken as a historical account, but it makes it clear that taking it as a parable is just as consistent with inerrancy as taking Jesus' parables as parables is consistent with inerrancy. In his commentaries, he argues carefully why he thinks an inerrantist can think Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs weren't written by Solomon. So what is it that leads people to question his commitment to inerrancy? Did he change his mind after he wrote all these things, is there something I'm simply not seeing, or are these claims just based on uncareful reading? I'm asking this because I really want to know where people are coming from when they say this about Longman. I really have no idea where this is coming from.

Lots of people have written criticisms of the Jesus Seminar, but one of the best short ones I've seen is the series Mark Roberts just finished on his blog, entitled Unmasking the Jesus Seminar. I know some of these issues pretty well, and I learned a few things in just about every post, so it's not just a rehash of some of the things I've seen before. Mark is typically one of the fairest and most congenial bloggers when it comes to engaging with those he disagrees with, but this time he's not really pulling his punches. The Jesus Seminar is an embarassment to some of the genuine scholars who were part of it, and Mark is pretty clear about why, giving a few examples that stand for wider tendencies. He's about to launch into a more thoroughgoing defense of the historicity of the gospels in a new series, so stay tuned for that.

There's almost nothing in the gospels about circumcision. Jesus was circumcised. There's one appearance besides that, I believe, and it's almost a side issue to a much more specific discussion about something else. Jesus didn't seem very interested in it. That's interesting for a number of reasons, but I want to suggest one thing that we should conclude that may not be as obvious.

A number of modern scholars seek to explain most of the material in the gospels, particular Matthew, Luke, and especially John, as later developments in Christian thought that don't trace back to Jesus, with the evangelists placing these words in Jesus' mouth in order to give them more authority. In Matthew in particular, they frequently will find something Jesus is saying as being more about the situations Christians were facing with Pharisees in the post-70 Jewish world without a sacrificial system. The key distinctive of Jews without the sacrificial system was a distinctive beforehand, but it became even more significant after the temple was destroyed. That distinctive is circumcision.

Why do the gospels contain so little about circumcision? If this view of modern scholars is correct, and the gospels are primarily about what Christians and non-Christian Jews were fighting over post-70, then wouldn't circumcision play a great role in the gospels? Or is it rather that the gospels more accurately reflect Jesus' own concerns in his own time, and he just wasn't all that concerned with circumcision? There are many other reasons to reject (or at least be skeptical about) the view that the gospels are really about concerns that came much later, but I think this one alone is almost decisive against it.

Biblical Studies Bulletin is a good resource for recent developments in biblical studies, mostly from a moderately conservative outlook. I was surprised to see the following comment in the June issue, which was just posted online, from a short section on problematic translations:

One reading that really baffles me (and is particularly important in the Church of England at the moment) is the translation of 1 Tim 2.12. The key word 'authenthein' is a hapax, that is, it occurs only here in the New Testament. The more usual word for 'exercise authority' is 'exousiazein' and the commentators agree that 'authenthein' has the sense of 'misusing authority' or 'usurping authority.' So why is it that modern translations, almost without exception, translate this simply as 'have authority'? The AV correctly used the phrase 'usurping authority' and the only modern translation I could find on BibleGateway.com that continues this is something called the '21st Century King James.' I had never heard of this before, but here it is more faithful to its predecessor than the New King James.

Here is the response I sent them:

This is part two of my commentary recommendations post. I'm separating it out into four parts because of its length. Part one is here. None of this is new. It's just a new post so I don't have it all in one long post.

This post is the list of intermediate level commentaries, what I would recommend for experienced Bible study group leaders, with more detail than some of the basic commentaries give but not necessarily requiring seminary or Bible school training (as a fully technical commentary might).

David Howard is the author of the New American Commentary volume on Joshua and of the forthcoming New International Commentary volume on Kings, along with An Introduction to the Old Testament Historical Books. His thoughts on commentaries and their use are thus worth reading. I've added this to my list of resources on commentaries.

This is from my Amazon review of Edmund Clowney's The Message of I Peter: The Way of the Cross in The Bible Speaks Today series.

Clowney gives a straightforward and helpful exposition of this significant epistle. This series is highly readable, and Clowney's contribution on I Peter is no different. He has clearly thought long and hard about most of what he says, even if some of the argumentation for his views is left out of the book.

For a more serious exegetical commentary, look to Paul Achtemeier's Hermeneia volume, J. Ramsay Michaels' work in the Word Biblical Commentary series, or Peter Davids' NIC volume. I probably would agree more with Clowney's conclusions than any of Achtemeier, Michaels, or Davids, but the reality is that he's giving more of an exposition without always giving the scholarly details to back up those conclusions. When he does give arguments, they're often not detailed enough for someone who can handle the more detailed commentaries to be satisfied with. So even if I'm attracted by his conclusions, I can't always see how to respond to the others' arguments at the level they're dealing with.

This is my Amazon review of Jerome Neyrey's 2 Peter, Jude in the Anchor Bible series. The review was first posted on 15 November 2002.

2 Peter and Jude are some of the most ignored books in the entire Bible, probably in large measure due to the significant culture gap between the contemporary reader and the authors and their immediate audiences. One way to make such writing come alive is to understand the conceptual framework, theological presuppositions, and social structure of the community surrounding the letters. Jerome Neyrey has produced a very interesting socio-cultural analysis of these letters that begins such a venture. He is at his best when explaining Hellenistic Greek and 1st Century Hebrew life and culture in terms a contemporary sociologist might use.

This is from my Amazon review of J. Alec Motyer, The Message of James: The Tests of Faith (Bible Speaks Today) from 15 November 2002.

Alec Motyer is one of the best biblical expositors out there. His greatest strength in biblical scholarship has been in the structure of biblical works, something most people have found entirely lacking in James. Motyer reconstructs what may well have been the connections in the mind of James between seemingly unrelated teachings. In this book, James no longer seems to be a collection of miscellaneous proverbs but is more a summary of a thought process that moved from one thought to the other very quickly and without explicitly tracing the connections, but Motyer shows the connections behind such moves.

The unity of the book of James thus comes out very strongly, and Motyer's thesis that James is a summary of a sermon or series of sermons makes much sense. On the level of details, Motyer does a great job explaining the text and its significance for daily life. He explains the theology behind James's thinking, something many scholars have assumed is not present in this book, and he presents his material in an easily readable manner without sacrificing the quality of his comments or the grounding of what he says in the actual text of James and the light of biblical theology.

This is certainly not the most in-depth commentary on James or maybe even the best. The work by Luke Timothy Johnson in the Anchor Bible series and Douglas Moo's Pillar Commentary (as opposed to his earlier, more brief Tyndale volume) are probably the best works on this epistle. However, Motyer is an excellent place to start for a more popular level and provides a nice complement to those works.

This is taken from my Amazon.com review of this book, 17 April 2002 (with some modifications).

Rooker does a good job of treating the book of Leviticus on a level designed for a pastor. By many accounts the best evangelical commentary on Leviticus in existence is Gordon Wenham's in the NICOT series, but that is getting more out-of-date. John Hartley's more recent one (Word Biblical Commentary) updates it well but is much harder to use if you don't have a strong Hebrew background. Some evangelicals might also raise questions about Hartley's attitude toward scripture, so there's need for a good, readable, recent commentary on this book from a solidly conservative position. Rooker's is probably the best to fill this need.

Jollyblogger asks if any bloggers have created Amazon Listmania lists. Most of mine are lists of commentaries, so I'll list the other one first.

Books on Apologetics
Commentaries on Leviticus
Commentaries on Numbers
Commentaries on Samuel
Commentaries on Kings
Commentaries on Psalms
Commentaries on Isaiah
Commentaries on Zechariah
Commentaries on Malachi
Commentaries on Matthew
Commentaries on Luke
Commentaries on John
Commentaries on Romans
Commentaries on I Corinthians
Commentaries on Galatians
Commentaries on Ephesians
Commentaries on Philippians
Commentaries on James
Commentaries on I Peter
Commentaries on II Peter, Jude
Commentaries on Revelation

Joe Carter hosted a project I call Jesus' Reasoning a little while ago, and I never managed to put together a post with links to all the entries I contributed. Here is that post. Joe explains the project here, and the entries are all here.

In Jesus the Logician? I express why I don't like Joe's name and insist on calling it Jesus' Reasoning. Since Joe organizes the posts by passage, I'll put them in the order I wrote them:

1. John 9:1-3
2. Mark 7:1-23
3. Matthew 10:40-42
4. Luke 21:1-4
5. Mark 11:27-33; Matt 21:23-27; Luke 20:1-8
6. Matthew 21:28-32
7. Mark 12:18-27; Matt 22:23-34; Luke 20:27-40

A thorny problem in the interpretation of the book of Samuel is the chronology of chapters 16ff. As most commentators look at this section of the book, Saul gets rejected as king in ch.15 (as he had in ch.13), Samuel arrives in Bethlehem to anoint David in the first half of ch.16, David gets called to Saul's side to play soothing music to calm him, a David unknown to Saul shows up to fight Goliath in ch.17, and then Saul rewards David at the end of the chapter. Then early in ch.18, Saul keeps David in his court, which he'd already done at the end of ch.16.

Some people try to avoid the problem simply by saying there are multiple accounts that conflict with each other that were all spliced together by some complete idiot who didn't know how to compile a book to save his life. The problem with such a view is that the author of Samuel is extremely careful, with an overwhelming number of subtle hints here and there and with a fairly consistent unity of style. The sections of the narrative are constructed in clear patterns throughout, with thematic progression and careful literary skill on a much more global level than just with the details within each chunk. There may have been multiple sources for the book, but the author made them his own. He wouldn't have left things so ridiculously conflicting, all within a few chapters, that the common picture you get from modern scholars would result, with this haphazard arrangement of contradictory reports that some editor just threw together because he didn't know what to do with them otherwise. So what's going on in this section of the book?

People are saying some strange things about the discovery of an early Revelation manuscript that has 616 as the" number of man" or "number of a man" in Rev 13:18, strange enough to make me look around at the NT blogs for more info on the find, and they've confirmed my suspicions. Here are the facts: We've known for a long time that some manuscripts of Revelation have 616 instead of 666. There are multiple explanations of why this would have come about, more than one of them fairly plausible, but I'm not going to bother with that now, mostly because I'm on campus and don't have my Revelation commentaries with me. Suffice it to say that this is a late development in the manuscript tradition, and there's no reason to think 616 was original.

All that's new is that this find is a manuscript that's older than the other ones we know of that have 616. It's a good deal older than the ones we knew about, but it's not at all the oldest manuscript we know of for the book, and there's no reason to think as a result of this that it's the most likely reading. The number 666 is overwhelmingly represented in multiple text traditions, in the earliest manuscripts, and just plain overall as the dominant reading. See Ralph the Sacred River for a nice summary of the important points. [Hat tip: NT Gateway Weblog] Some of the reports going around on this are treating it as if the 666 texts have been disproved. Hardly. This isn't that significant a discovery for the study of copyist errors in text criticism, for which it's a very interesting find. It hasn't affected what scholars think the original manuscript said.

This is the second introductory post to my series reviewing commentaries on different books of the Bible. The first introduces the series and explains some of the classifications I'll be using. This post will review the various series of commentaries. See this post for a list of series abbreviations, which I'll use a little bit in this post. The first time I introduce a series I'll give its whole name, and I'll use abbreviations if I refer to it when discussing a series later in the list. I suppose it's fitting that a post that took well over a month to complete will end up as the round number of post #1100.

[Update: I'm putting together posts listing individual volumes for each series, but it will take me a while to do this. As I go, I will put links in from this post. As of this update, I've only got two in there, but this process should be a lot quicker than my more detailed reviews of commentaries on each book of the Bible, which takes a lot more work for me to put together if I want to do as careful a review as I've been doing. So I expect these to be filling out in due time.]

Mark Roberts has been working through a balanced evaluation of the TNIV. This post is a catalog of my posts that interact with his series. I'm moving through his posts a few at a time, focusing on crucial points and summarizing what seems right to me. When I disagree, I'm spending some time explaining why. I'll update this post as my series continues.

Part I covers Mark's first five posts, covering mostly introductory issues about translation in general, with some specific information on the TNIV as well.

Part II looks at one further issue in translation, that of the changing target language. The bulk of the post deals with dynamic vs. formal equivalence translations, why it's misleading to think of this dispute as one between those who want a more literal translation vs. those who want one that's more of a paraphrase, and how the TNIV stands with respect to this issue as compared with the translations that are usually called more literal and with respect to the NIV itself.

This is Part II of my series interacting with Mark Roberts' series on the TNIV controversy.

In my last post I'd gotten through Mark's fifth post. In the sixth one, he discusses the difficulty of translating into a changing language. Linguists tell us that English has changed less since the standardization of spelling and grammar in formal media , which lessens Mark's point a little bit, but he's still right. As English changes, younger generations will have less familiarity with the forms of language in an older translation, and the NIV is old enough that it has forms that sounded ok to its translators, many of whom were old in the 1970s when the NIV was completed. Mark points out that those who grew up wi