On ScribD

I’ve had a ScribD account for years. Over the years I’ve used the service to download PDF files of books and articles and it was a pretty even exchange where I would have to upload a document in order to download a document. But then they started to get greedy and I’d have to upload multiple documents to download a single document. That’s when I decided on taking advantage of the free trial.

So I signed up for 30 days and that gave me unlimited downloads without me having to upload anything. It was pretty good. I downloaded dozens of books and articles but time eventually got away from me and I exceeded the 30 day trial. Once I was charged I considered cancelling immediately but then I figured I might as well ride the month out and cancel at the end of it.

In the process of the next 30 days I began to realize what a great service that ScribD actually provides. Aside from thousands of PDFs for download they also offer ebooks of new releases in pretty much every category you can think of. I’ve always been a hardcopy guy but since acquiring an iPad Pro I’ve been doing a lot more with digital books. I love having the PDFs because they’re properly paginated and I can mark them up but it’s nice to be able to consult newer ebooks if I’m really just interested in the content and don’t need to accurately cite something.

In addition to that they offer audiobooks as well as lectures and podcasts. And when I say lectures, I mean good lectures, like Gordon Fee on 1 Corinthians! But the audiobooks are super convenient for when I’m driving or when I want to listen to something while I’m working. I don’t listen to a ton of music these days so having a seemingly limitless supply of material to learn from is fantastic.

In all, after two months of paying for ScribD, I’m fully satisfied that it’s worth every bit of the $9.99 per month and more! I’ve been recommending it to family and friends without the slightest inhibition and those who have taken advantage haven’t regretted it a bit. So subscribe today if you haven’t already. You’ll thank me for it, I promise.

B”H

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The Greek-English New Testament (NA28/ESV)

The Greek-English New Testament: Nestle-Aland 28th Edition/English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012.

There are no shortage of Greek-English Bibles on offer in the world of modern publishing. I have a number of useful editions of the Greek New Testament with English translation on facing pages adorning my shelves. They each have their own particular strengths while some exhibit more weaknesses than others.

There is the NIV Greek and English New Testament, which features the Greek text underlying the NIV translation. This is a rather straightforward volume presenting mainly text with very little by way of notes. When a note appears on the English side it’s usually signaling a translational issue. When they appear on the Greek side it’s mostly to note differences between this text and the UBS/NA text.

I also have a NA27/RSV diglot, which is a real gem. This contains the full NA27 critical text with full textual apparatus alongside an RSV translation that has quite a substantial textual apparatus in its own right. For quite some time I considered this the gold standard by which I judged all other diglots.

The NA28 Greek-English New Testament was a departure from the one modeled a version before. This particular text gave the full NA28 with apparatus on one page and then on the facing page in double columns the NRSV and REB. The NRSV appears in standard print while the REB is italicized throughout. There are scant notes for the English translations.

The UBS5/NIV is more in line with the NA27/RSV in terms of appearance aside from a thicker white Bible paper of the UBS5/NIV to the thinner cream colored paper of the NA27/RSV. But once again we’re left with hardly any notes for the English edition accompanying the Greek text.

The NA27/NET diglot on the other hand provides more notes for the English translation than even the RSV. The RSV contained a critical apparatus but the NET is another animal altogether. While the regular NET Bible contains three types of notes, namely study notes, translator’s notes, and text critical notes, this edition has removed the study notes and opted to abbreviate the translator’s notes, and have placed many (though certainly not all) text critical notes in an appendix. Still, this is the most useful volume of the lot in terms of information provided and layout. It’s also the only large print version available.

But all of these diglots, useful as they are, lack one thing: ample room to take notes. This is where the NA28/ESV excels. Alongside the full NA28 critical text and apparatus is the ESV, which has become my English translation of choice over the past few years. Like many of the newer editions it has very little by way of notes for the ESV text, but the lack of notes and the absence of a textual apparatus creates a large void on every  page of English text that leaves a significant amount of space to write.

Like the NA27/NET diglot this one is also large print. And like the UBS5/NIV this one has a seemingly thicker white paper than the standard cream colored paper of other versions. This makes things quite easy on the eyes. However, this is the only volume of the Nestle-Aland lot that doesn’t contain the standard leaflet of witnesses, signs, and abbreviations. Sure, there are appendices in the back matter (1581-1674) that contain this information but it is an unnecessary burden to have to flip back and forth between the back of the Bible and the page that you’re studying in order to decipher the textual apparatus. We’re not all textual critics who have this thing committed to memory.

And while this is a beautifully bound volumes in blue cloth-over-board there is regrettably no ribbon marker (something missing in the NA27/NET as well). This was an easy enough fix but you’d think that by this point in that Bible publishers would include such things of necessity. I shouldn’t have to modify my Bibles to meet basic needs.

Lastly, because this is the large print version of the NA28 it follows the same page layout as the standard edition. This is fine as far as it goes but it creates a strange flow when dealing with the facing English page. Remember, there is no textual apparatus or significant amount of space dedicated to notes on the English page. So if the Greek page begins a new verse and there is only room for one or a few words of that verse at the bottom of the page it creates an awkward look and feel on the English page. For example, on p. 980 Romans 5:15 being with “Ἀλλ᾿” which looks fine. On the facing English page (981) we have “But” just floating there by itself.

On p. 1022 Romans 15:8 has “λέγω γὰρ Χρι-” with the facing English page (1023) having “For I tell you that Christ” but this signals another awkward type of break in the text. The beginning of Χριστὸν appears on p. 1022 but we don’t see the rest of the word until p. 1024. The English translation opted to not break the word up (how could they?) but there’s something unsettling about this kind of break. I don’t know how much work would be involved in the removing little things like this, nor do I know if anyone other than me would be bothered by it, but in a perfect world they wouldn’t exist.

These are rather minor complaints though and the strengths of this particular diglot outweigh its weaknesses considerably. Those readers of the ESV who would like the reference the Greek text without a separate volume would do well to pick this one up. Honestly, anyone who likes to take notes other either the Greek or the English text of the New Testament would do well to pick this up. There’s more than enough room to do so and this is its major benefit in my opinion.

B”H

ESV Heirloom Single Column Legacy Edition (Blue Goatskin): Some Preliminary Remarks

Nearly two weeks ago I mentioned that I had ordered a premium ESV from evangelicalbible.com. I went with the Ocean Blue goatskin ESV Heirloom Single Column Legacy Bible after more than a week of research. My research included watching video reviews, reading written reviews, and looking at as many pictures as I could find. This was, after all, a pretty big purchase. I got my copy for $155 marked down from $275.

Now this isn’t the first premium Bible I’ve ever owned. In point of fact, some years back Zondervan sent me a Premium single column NIV reference Bible for review. It’s really a beautiful Bible but it’s not one I’ve found myself using frequently over the years. I think the main reason has been that the type is on the small side and I have a double column NIV reference Bible with large print that I prefer to read and preach from.

But my friend Michael Burgos put the bug in my ear when he started talking about getting a new preaching Bible. I’m going to be leading a Bible study series at church in the near future and I’ll be starting up a Bible study at my job after work on Tuesdays so I figured that I’d get a nice preaching/teaching Bible as well. I had a short list of things I was looking for:

First, I wanted an ESV. I love the NIV and it’s almost always the translation I preach from, and I love the KJV because it’s the translation I was raised with, but the ESV strikes the right balance between the two for me and it’s the one I read most of the time. At this point it’s the translation I’m most familiar with.

Second, I wanted something with wide margins so I could take notes. I haven’t written in a Bible in years but I wanted to go back to my roots and really mark this thing up. For months I had my first KJV on my desk and I’d revisit it from time to time and look at my markings with fondness.

Third, I wanted a single column because I just find them easier for reading. Over the last couple of years I’ve been reading the various versions of the ESV Reader’s Bibles. It’s hard to go back. 

Lastly, I wanted something that was manageable in terms of size. A thinline would have been preferable but not absolutely necessary. I just don’t like unwieldy Bibles and this one will be traveling with me rather than positioned permanently on a pulpit.

So with this in mind I went searching evangelicalbible.com and I immediately fell in love with their selection of blue Bibles. Something about the blue gilding jumped out and grabbed my attention. They had a few to choose from but the Heirloom Legacy was the only one that met my criteria.

Technically it’s not a wide margin but because it’s a reader type of text there isn’t really anything extra on the page. I think they said its layout is based on the concept of “the perfect page.” This leaves plenty of room in the margins and page footers.

It’s also not a thinline. I had a Legacy when Crossway first published it and I hated it for its size. From my research I discovered that this one wasn’t as thick. I couldn’t be sure exactly how thick it was though as I hadn’t seen too much to establish a scale by which to judge it. I could just tell that it was thinner than the one I owned a few years back.

But it was an ESV and it was single column and that blue… So I ordered it and eagerly awaited its arrival. Well, it came in more than a week ago and it’s glorious! Below are some pictures showing just how nice the blue is, how flexible and soft the goatskin is, and how thin it actually is (take note of the last three photos; which include the original Legacy compared to my thinline NIV reference Bible and the new Heirloom Legacy compared to the same Bible).

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 In another post I’ll say some more about how I’ve been marking this Bible up and the pens I’m using to do so. Until then, enjoy the pictures, which really don’t do the reality any justice.

B”H

Just Ordered (Yes, Again…)

So I had to add a few more Scott Hahn books to my library. I took advantage of some used copies with free shipping on Amazon. I got the following:

Understanding “Our Father”: Biblical Reflections on the Lord’s Prayer

A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God’s Covenant Love in Scripture

Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism

Reasons to Believe: How to Understand, Explain, and Defend the Catholic Faith

I was also able to take advantage of something that Hahn mentioned on Twitter, namely that Aleteia has partnered with the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology in offering Hahn’s latest book The First Society: The Sacrament of Matrimony and the Restoration of the Social Order for free (as a promotional paperback) to the first 20,000 people to take advantage. I jumped all over that! They just ask that you pay for shipping.

I also spent 45 minutes of my day going to 3 different stores in search of Pigma Micron pens to write in my new Bible. Michaels had some but not the ones I needed. Target and Walmart didn’t have any. So I ordered a 4 pack from Amazon containing black, red, blue, and green pens. These have archival ink that won’t smudge or bleed through and that’s extremely important to me since I plan to write quite a bit in my premium Bible, which arrived yesterday. I plan to post some photos soon and I might even write a review. We’ll see.

B”H

Chris Tilling Recommends My Book

PURCHASE HERE

B”H

Phil Long (@Plong42) Reviews my Book

Phil Long as reviewed my book Christology in Review over at his blog Reading Acts. It’s a favorable review—thanks be to God—but Phil was surprised to see that I didn’t review the Michael Bird edited How God Became Jesus. To be honest, I’m surprised that I haven’t reviewed it either. I read it when it first came out and I began a post (which I believe is still in my drafts) summarizing each chapter but for some reason I never got around to finishing it. It’s been so long since I’ve read the book that I’ll have to go back and read it again!

Thanks to Phil for taking the time to read and review the book. I have produced a corrected edition in which I have fixed all of the typographical errors I spotted in the original version. I also fixed the format, which I wasn’t happy with in the original version. It looks and feels much more like a real book now. I’ll be sending Phil a copy of the update when they come in. I’d also note that I’ve added 2 other reviews to this corrected edition and a bibliography of the books reviewed. The latter became necessary since I removed the bibliographic details from the reviews themselves.

I’ll post on all that another time.

B”H

Recent Goings On

So much has been happening and I’ve not kept my faithful readers abreast of it all.

First, thanks to those of you who have stuck with this blog during its dormancy.

Second, I’ve received a couple of books over the past few months for review. Yes, I still plan to review books when I have the time. My Twitter followers have been made aware of these but my blog readers have not.

Wipf & Stock sent along Kevin Giles’ The Rise and Fall of the Complementarian Doctrine of the Trinity. I was made aware of this volume from a post on Scot McKnight’s blog. The material he quoted had Giles quoting Denny Burk so I naturally tracked the original material down and found that Giles was taking Burk out of context and misrepresenting him. Burk confirmed as much on Twitter when I brought it up to McKnight. So I’m looking forward to a more than likely scathing review of this book. I’ve admitted to being unnecessarily harsh to Giles’ work in the past but then I reread it or read something new and think that maybe it was necessary.

The other volume I received for review came courtesy of Mohr Siebeck. It’s Benjamin Pacut’s Redescribing Jesus’ Divinity Through a Social Science Theory. Tim Bertolet had good things to say about it so I’m hopeful that it will be good.

Thirdly, in other news, Fortress Press has partnered with an organization called Givingtons and they’re running a ridiculously discounted sale on a bunch of books. I had initially ordered a copy of David Congdon’s The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology. Okay, so this has a $99 list price. Amazon sells it for just under $70. They had the Kindle version available for like $7 for a while but I’ve never once read any of the Kindle volumes I own. I can’t see starting now. So I was pretty much out of luck with this one. Until this sale. I found out about it on Facebook from Congdon and proceeded to order his book for a paltry $9! I also added a book on Incarnation.

But then some wacky stuff started to happen. Two weeks after placing the order I emailed customer service to check on the status of the order since nothing had even been shipped. I was refunded the money for Congdon’s book with the explanation that they were out of stock and didn’t expect to receive any from the publisher. This was disappointing. But they assured me that they were sending the other book. I told them thanks, but no thanks, and canceled the entire order. The other volume was merely an add-on.

So I took to Twitter and lamented the state of affairs. I also emailed the customer service rep and asked why people who had ordered the book after I had received a copy while I had been declined. You see, I know for a fact that there were people who missed out on the initial sale and ordered during a second wave. They had received books while I had not. I was given an unsatisfactory answer. But Congdon was good enough to contact his people at Fortress and get to the bottom of it all. I ended up being contacted and told that they were getting a new batch and that I could order it again, this time with free shipping for my inconvenience! So that I did. I also added a book on a non-sacramental reading of John 6.

Fourthly, I got off Facebook. I had initially signed up to meet my wife. We met. We dated. We married. The end. I still have the account; I just deleted the app.

Fifthly, I’ve self-published a collection of book reviews on books about Christology. It’s called Christology in Review: A Layman’s Take on Books about Christology. You can purchase a copy here if you’re so interested. It’ll cost you $6. Almost all of these reviews are available for free on the blog. I have added a review essay of Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God, which is a bit more detailed than the review I have on the blog. I’ve also slightly edited the content of the some of the reviews and have done my best to format them all similarly; at least where possible.

And that’ll just about do it for this update.

Oh, and I’m happy to note that my brother from another mother Fr Esteban Vázquez is back to blogging! It’s substantive stuff too; not drivel like this!

B”H

Better Late than Never

I just saw a review of Kevin Giles’ The Eternal Generation of the Son written by Jim Cassidy on the Reformed Forum blog. It’s a good review. Much more sympathetic to Giles’ work than my own review. Cassidy begins with reference to my review and he agrees with certain points I make but disagrees with others. I only wish I had known about this more than 3 years ago when it was originally posted! It was still good reading though, and I always go back to my reviews of Giles’ books and think that I was unnecessarily harsh at the time of writing them. There’s just something about his stuff that riles me up. In any event, check out Cassidy’s review. It’s worth your time.

B”H

RBL Lockdown

I just wanted to comment on how stupid I think it is that you now have to be a member of SBL to read reviews in RBL!!! This makes no sense to me. None. It’s stupid. Utterly stupid!

B”H

The Parables of Jesus: A Commentary

Hultgren, Arland J. The Parables of Jesus: A Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000. Pp. xxix + 522. Paper. $42.00. 

For the last few months we’ve been doing a Bible study series on Jesus’ parables at my church. As I’ve prepared to teach there have been three books that have become indispensable. The first has been Klyne Snodgrass’ Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, which I reviewed a few years back. The second is Eugene Peterson’s Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers, which was graciously given to me by my friend Robert Jimenez. The third is the title under review, Arland J. Hultgren’s The Parables of Jesus: A Commentary.

Hultgren’s volume was published in 2000 and sat on my shelf for a few years before it got any regular use but has since become invaluable in my preparation to discuss Jesus’ most popular form of teaching. This book served as the basis for the introductory class I taught that gave us the basics on how to read and interpret Jesus’ parables. Hultgren begins with an introductory chapter that gives the reader the who, what, when, where, and whys of parables in the Gospels, namely how to identify and interpret them and what makes Jesus’ parables unique (or not).

The working definition that drives Hultgren’s study is that “A parable is a figure of speech in which a comparison is made between God’s kingdom, actions, or expectations and something in this world, real or imagined” (3). He says that there are two types of parables: narrative parables and similitudes, which is somewhat simplistic compared to the categorization that Snodgrass uses, but workable in a general sense. Under this definition and these categories Hultgren identifies 38 units that can be treated as parables.

He separates them thematically and treats them as:

1. Parables of the Revelation of God
2. Parables of Exemplary Behavior
3. Parables of Life Before God
4. Parables of Final Judgment
5. Allegorical Parables
6. Parables of the Kingdom

There are also chapters on the Evangelists as interpreters of Jesus’ parables as well as parables in the Gospel of Thomas. Each individual parable receives the same general treatment although the length of the treatment varies from one parable to the next. But Hultgren’s approach is to first provide a translation of the parable followed by notes on the text and translation. He then gives exegetical commentary before moving on to exposition while rounding the studies out with select bibliographies. Sometimes he provides general comments on the texts when a parable appears in more than one place (e.g., “The Lost Sheep” in Matt 18:12-14//Luke 15:4-7; Thomas 107; Gospel of Truth 31-32).

It’s quite helpful to see how non-canonical material draws certain parallels with the Gospels but also where that material differs. For the most part Hultgren doesn’t go into the depth that Snodgrass does but his volume is half the size so we wouldn’t expect him to. Where I find him to be at his best is in the exposition, which is full of theological reflection and insight for practical application. He makes it clear early on in the book that his approach is to interpret the parables in light of the canon and for the benefit of the church. He does this well by building the foundation for his exposition on exegesis.

Is there room for disagreement in his interpretation of certain things? Of course! But that doesn’t detract from this volume any more than it detracts from others with a similar focus. Perhaps the section that will receive the least disagreement from scholars but possibly the most from those steeped in tradition is the chapter on the Evangelists as interpreters of the parables. Here Hultgren assumes Markan priority and proceeds to discuss the ways in which Matthew or Luke adapt, revised, or altered Mark’s material. This is in no way certain and it could have been helpful to see the alternatives explanations based on Matthean or Lukan priority. But this is a minor complaint.

In all, this is a wonderfully helpful commentary that is sure to aid anyone who is studying or teaching the parables. I wouldn’t say that it should be the only volume you should consult but in the event it was the only volume you could consult then I wouldn’t be too worried. Hultgren’s evenhanded discussions are more than enough to get the student heading in the right direction.

B”H