This book released this week:
Andreas J. Köstenberger and Justin Taylor. The Final Days of Jesus: The Most Important Week of the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived. Wheaton: Crossway, 2014. 42-page PDF sample.
You may especially enjoy working through this book day by day during the Passion week (this year = April 13–20):
[Read more…] about The Most Important Week of the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived
B&H recently released a new commentary series, and the first volume is an impressive 800 pages:
Howard, Jeremy Royal, ed. The Gospels and Acts. The Holman Apologetics Commentary on the Bible. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2013.
This is the most comprehensive 1-volume defense of the Gospels and Acts. [Read more…] about The Most Comprehensive Defense of the Gospels and Acts
The latest edition of Don Carson’s NT commentary survey released last month:
D. A. Carson. New Testament Commentary Survey. 7th ed. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013.
It’s significantly updated. [Read more…] about The 7th Edition of Don Carson’s NT Commentary Survey
Murray Harris has served as a professor of New Testament exegesis and theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and as Warden of Tyndale House in Cambridge, England. He presently resides in New Zealand.
I describe him more (and relay a funny story about him) in this post, which highlights his book Prepositions and Theology in the Greek New Testament. [Read more…] about Murray Harris’s 6-Page Expanded Paraphrase of Colossians
This new edition is scheduled to release in February 2014:
Craig S. Keener. The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament. 2nd ed. Downers Grove: IVP, 2014.
The first edition, which has sold over 600,000 copies, released twenty years ago in 1993, and the second edition slightly revises it. (Keener’s foreword and acknowledgments to the second edition doesn’t specify what he has revised in the second edition, and I haven’t compared the two editions to spot changes.) [Read more…] about The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament
I’m teaching a course at Bethlehem College & Seminary this fall to second-year seminary students called “New Testament Background and Message.” We are systematically working through the NT, and prior to each time we meet for class the students must summarize the theological message of a NT book in one clear, concise sentence. Then they must briefly unpack that sentence by showing how the book’s themes support that message. (And it takes a lot of work to do that well!)
It frustrates me when books and articles discuss the “theology” of a Bible book by presenting a bucket list of parallel motifs but without showing how they integrate as one coherent theological message. So I was delighted to see that the new NIV Proclamation Bible (ed. Lee Gatiss; cf. publisher page and 40-second video) includes a one-sentence summary of the message of every book of the Bible.
I disagree with many of these one-sentence summaries (which are rather uneven), but it’s still helpful to consider how others articulate the messages. These are from the introduction to each book of the Bible:
[Read more…] about What Is the Message of Each Book of the Bible?
This 640-page handbook is worth adding to your library:
Joel B. Green and Lee Martin McDonald, eds. The World of the New Testament: Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013.
You can view the contents and contributors via Amazon’s “look inside” feature.
Related:
D. A. Carson, The Farewell Discourse and Final Prayer of Jesus: An Exposition of John 14–17 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), 201–4:
To some people, the term ecumenism has only good connotations. Utter the word, and they hear harps playing and angels singing; or if harps and angels are deemed too ethereal, at very least a certain fire lights up their eye. To others the same word evokes only images of evil. Ecumenism is intrinsically a doctrine of compromise which emasculates the gospel and wickedly flirts with apostasy and assorted forms of unbelief. The first group tends to cite John 17 in its favor; the second group tends either to ignore John 17 or else to include within the unity only a very small group, while defining the unity in such innocuous terms (e.g., making it entirely a positional unity with no entailment for conduct) that it becomes difficult to see how such unity could ever serve as a witness of anything to the world. What does the text say? [Read more…] about Carson on Ecumenism and John 17