Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism: Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado

Bloomsbury has courteously sent along for review this recently published volume.

Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism: Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado, Editor(s): Dieter Roth, Chris Keith.

Mark, Manuscripts, and Monotheism is organized into three parts: Mark’s Gospel, Manuscripts and Textual Criticism, and Monotheism and Early Jesus-Devotion. With contributors hailing from several different countries, and including both senior and junior scholars, this volume contains essays penned in honor of Larry W. Hurtado by engaging and focusing upon these three major emphases in his scholarship. The result is not only a fitting tribute to one of the most influential New Testament scholars of present times, but also a welcome survey of current scholarship.

Visit the link above for the contributors and Table of Contents. My review will be posted in the not too awfully distant future.

You Can Get Yourself a Gem and David A Birthday Gift All At the Same Time!

Today is David Congdon’s birthday.  You probably didn’t get him anything did you?  Well you can solve that problem and at the same time get yourself something better!  That’s right, gift giving which benefits the birthday boy and you!

Buy David’s book!  You’ll be getting him something (royalties) and yourself something (a very fine and instructive volume).  It’s a genuine win/win.

It’s better than anything NT Wright has ever written.  Or ever will.

I Didn’t Realize Academia.edu Did That

So for a pretty good while I’ve been – I thought – linking book reviews from the blog to Academia.edu.  I would post the review and then post the specific link to it to Academia.edu, imagining that people who arrived at the link on Academia would just click it and be taken to the review.

I was, apparently, wrong.  Clicking any review just takes people to the Academia page where the book review would be if I had uploaded it.  I don’t wish to upload them to Academia, so people who want to read them are kind of stuck looking but not finding.

So, I’ve added a note to the Academia ‘About’ page which explains where the reviews can be found.  I’m sorry, but I didn’t realize that Academia.edu didn’t send folk to the right link.  And frankly, I don’t know how to get them to do it.

An Update

I’ve been working on this for a good while now and it’s almost ready to send off to the publisher.  And I’m excited about it.  I’ll have it to them in a month or so.  Then I can return to the Commentary and finish off Samuel and Kings and it will all be over with.  Yay!   (And in the meanwhile I’ll work on my assigned portions of the critical edition of Melanchthon’s Opera Omnia and a Festschrift and a volume of essays on the Reformation and other sorts of projects).

It’s a Contest For a Book!

And it’s a great book.  I reviewed it back in January and I’ve an additional copy, still in the shrink wrap, to send to some lucky soul (in the United States).

So, if you’d like to win a copy of this gem, retweet this contest and whoever retweets it the most times will get it.

You have 48 hours (or, till sundown Saturday).

Let the joy begin.

Der Majoristische Streit (1552–1570)

Are good works necessary for salvation, or, on the contrary, even detrimental to salvation? How important is deliberate ethical action for the Christian life? What should Christians do to avoid the danger that the message of justification by grace alone might lead to moral indifference?

Over such questions the so-called Majoristic Controversy evolved (1552-1570), which caused some unanticipated confrontations on the field of scholarly disputes among the followers of Luther and Melanchthon in the second half of the sixteenth century.

An echo of this dispute can be heard in the fourth article of the Formula of Concord.  In volume 3 of the edition  “Controversia et Confessio” readers find the most important texts produced during that controversy, by authors including Georg Major, Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Matthias Flacius, Stephan Agricola, and others.

I’m looking forward to digging in.

The Nowhere Bible

Frauke’s new book is out.  I’ve not read it but she’s super sharp so it’s got to be excellent.  It sure sounds interesting.

The Bible contains passages that allow both scholars and believers to project their hopes and fears onto ever-changing empirical realities. By reading specific biblical passages as utopia and dystopia, this volume raises questions about reconstructing the past, the impact of wishful imagination on reality, and the hermeneutic implications of dealing with utopia – “good place” yet “no place” – as a method and a concept in biblical studies.

A believer like William Bradford might approach a biblical passage as utopia by reading it as instructions for bringing about a significantly changed society in reality, even at the cost of becoming an oppressor. A contemporary biblical scholar might approach the same passage with the ambition of locating the historical reality behind it – finding the places it describes on a map, or arriving at a conclusion about the social reality experienced by a historical community of redactors. These utopian goals are projected onto a utopian text.

This volume advocates an honest hermeneutical approach to the question of how reliably a past reality can be reconstructed from a biblical passage, and it aims to provide an example of disclosing – not obscuring – pre-suppositions brought to the text.

The table of contents is here.