FourSenses.net

Many students enrolled in a Ph.D. program hope to have their dissertation published at some point. I have been asked several times how I got mine published by de Gruyter. It was actually much more straightforward than I had imagined. No arm twisting or bribery or any unbecoming behavior. It all started in 2006. Here is how it happened.

Edwin Hamilton Gifford, The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, Nabu Press, 2010. (London: John Murray, 1886. Originally in The Speaker's Commentary, 1881).

This very good but hard to find exegetical commentary from the nineteenth century is now available again in an exact reproduction.

Well, it’s official, and probably a surprise to many. N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, and well-known prolific author, is moving to St Andrews, Scotland. He will be taking the Chair in New Testament and Early Christianity starting September 1, 2010.

This should allow Dr. Wright to dedicate more time to teaching, supervising, and writing and, I guess, it won’t hurt St Andrews’s reputation and enrollment.

Though I have mentioned the inflation of commentaries, and on Romans in particular, I have to mention these two since they are not in English. The first one is not exactly new since the original dates back to the third century. The second if a full length work in three volumes by Romano Penna in Italian.

Though I have several opportunities to go to professional conferences every year, I don’t actually often attend them. One reason is that I have to pay for them. When you factor in travel, hotel, expenses, etc., it gets quite expensive. Another reason is that I sometimes wonder whether they are really worth the time and expense.

Granted, there are several good arguments for attending professional conferences like the SBL: networking, meeting people, the book stalls, … the tote bag. One paramount reason should be to attend or present papers. The problem is, unless you are a star in the theological world or/and pushing the fashionable hot buttons, most papers are very poorly attended. In the case of the SBL this probably also has to do with the overabundance of study groups, sessions, papers, and what not. All this put together, I don’t really try to present papers in conferences anymore (not counting the largely irrelevant fact that my proposal might be rejected of course). I’d rather put the time in writing.

The use of the Old Testament in Romans has been a fertile ground of investigation for decades, and rightly so since there are about sixty OT “quotations” in Romans. The number varies according to how you define a “quotation” and a few others technical arguments better left out of this post.

Westcott-Hort 1881: Quotation in Rom 2.6 in capitals

The debate is ancient as to whether here and there Paul refers or alludes to some OT passages or not. I have already mentioned the use of Ps 97 in Rom 1.17 as an example.

Working with L^aT_eX involves writing in one application (TeXShop, TextMate, etc.) and viewing your document in a pdf reader (Acrobat Reader, Skim, etc.). To see the result of your work, to correct or improve it, it is often practical to quickly go back and forth between the working text and the resulting pdf.

Scholar-theologian-bishop William Paley (1743–1802) was already a frequent tenant on the best-seller list when he published his Natural Theology in 1802, three years before his death. The book, which starts with the famous watch argument (“ … suppose I had found a watch upon the ground … when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive … that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose…”, p.1), remained on the best-seller lists for decades, albeit with modifications. Evidences of Christianity, another one of Paley’s books (1794), was a required reading in Cambridge, his Alma Mater, into the twentieth century.

Natural Theology is part of a flow of discussions related to science and religion that accelerated after the scientific revolution. In many respects, Paley follows the path of Isaac Newton’s own natural theology and claims that the scientific study of nature only strenghtens the belief that nature points to an Intelligent Being. Furthermore, when Paley wrote, David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion had only recently been published (1779). The basic point of Paley was that science and religion go hand in hand and that the study of the “Book of Nature” only reveals an intelligent and good Creator, hence the full title Natural Theology or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, collected from the appearance of nature.

Dutton, Edward. Meeting Jesus at University: Rites of Passage and Student Evangelicals. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008.

Evangelical student ministries have been around for decades, yet for the most part they have remained under the radar of critical and scientific work. Dutton’s essay, partly based on a doctoral dissertation in Anthropology of Religion presented at Aberdeen University (Scotland), is therefore a welcome addition to the literature on religion and higher education.

Dutton’s thesis is that university is a rite of passage, a corridor between two stages of life (hence the use of the term liminal, from the Latin limen, corridor). University is “a time when young people have their identities challenged, remoulded and even fundamentally changed as they become adults” (ix). These challenges and changes present an opportunity to mix with people of other social groups but also to join a structured and structuring movement like a Christian Union. The book “will examine the relationship between universities, the intensity to which they are a Rite of Passage, and the evangelical student groups within them.” (ix).

To the writing of commentaries there is not end.

There are so many commentaries on almost any book of the Bible today that one might as well give up trying to keep up with the field. It gets even worse if you pay more than lip service to working in several languages. For example, not counting commentaries in English, three pretty hefty commentaries came out recently on Luke: Bovon’s last volume of his four volume commentary; Michael Wolter’s volume published by Mohr-Siebeck; Heins Klein’s commentary published by Vandenhoeck, to name only these three.