Today, Will Ross and I are excited to announce the upcoming release of Septuaginta: A Reader’s Edition. This two-volume book is the culmination of over four years of labor, and it will be released by Hendrickson later this year.
Continue reading Announcing Septuaginta: A Reader’s Edition
Friends over at The Gospel Coalition have been promoting a new book, 15 Things Seminary Couldn’t Teach Me, for several weeks. They have also featured videos of big-name pastors sharing about the things they could only learn in day-to-day ministry, not in seminary.
As a seminary professor and a churchman, I fully understand that seminaries don’t ‘make’ pastors, nor do they equip would-be pastors, missionaries, etc. with everything they need to thrive in ministry. Neither do medical schools, law schools, and so forth.
But I’m not sure seminaries have ever claimed that, nor have other professional schools.
Continue reading 15 Things Seminary Teaches Me that My Busy Pastor(ate) Can’t
This past week, The Gospel Coalition ran a short post of mine on Jesus’ difficult teaching about how we will not be married in heaven.
Continue reading On Marriage in Heaven (or the Lack Thereof)
See discussion of this further over at Evangelical Textual Criticism: http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2018/04/greg-lanier-locating-inspired-original.html
During the Spring 2017 term at RTS-O, I taught an elective called “Septuagint Readings.” Each week ~14 students gathered to read various portions of the Greek OT. During one of the classes, I was struck with something I had seen before but not really internalized: the variations in the ordering of the 6th, 7th, and 8th commandments in Greek Exodus 20, Greek Deuteronomy 5, and the Hebrew behind the ESV/NIV/etc. None of them matched. I began to probe this…and one thing led to another, and this inquiry turned into an article that was recently published in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (61.1).
Continue reading On the Strange Order(s) of the Murder-Adultery-Steal Commandments
Tonight I had the privilege to teach at RTS-Orlando’s Teaching Women to Teach initiative. About 110 women from dozens of churches around central Florida have been gathering monthly since January to study Scripture in more depth and develop/hone tools for teaching and applying Scripture in various ministry capacities.
(Note: I created this primarily to use in conjunction with RTS-Orlando’s Teaching Women to Teach initiative. In March, I’ll be teaching on redemptive history, so I wanted the attendees to have a tool like this.)
Bible reading plans are plentiful. Some of the best can be found at Ligonier (see also here). And as a regular part of the Christian diet, reading through the entire Bible in a calendar year can be a helpful thing. I’m not at all opposed to it.
I am on the homestretch of a loooooong series at River Oaks Church on the book of Romans (started last year). During my RTS-O lectures on Romans in my mega Acts+Pauline Epistles course, I am only able to spend one lecture on Romans 12–16, further perpetuating my own gripe (in that very lecture) that the back five chapters of Romans often receive short shrift. But in Sunday School, I am able to take my time through them. This coming Sunday I will be teaching on Romans 12:3–21, and in the process of preparing for that, I came across an interesting possibility regarding the well-known “Faith-Hope-Love” triad.
The Gospel Coalition reached out a few weeks ago to ask if I’d like to do a brief post on the ‘three wise men.’ Thousands of words later, I found myself trying to cut to the marrow in order to say something helpful and thorough on the subject. Throughout the process the classic hymn “We Three Kings of Orient Are” keeps popping in my head (almost as if it knew I was undermining nearly every word in the title).
This afternoon I had the privilege of participating in a session at the meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society entitled “Growing up in the Ehrman Era: Retrospect and Prospect on Our Text-Critical Apologetic.”
The session was moderated by my friends Peter Gurry (now teaching at Phoenix Seminary) and Elijah Hixson (studying at Edinburgh); the three of us spent a week in Oxford a few years ago studying Greek palaeography. They are editors of an upcoming book with IVP Academic (Myths and Mistakes: Correcting Common Misconceptions about the Text of the New Testament) to which I am contributing a chapter, so this session was a bit of a preview of the work.
Continue reading ETS2017 Paper on Later Manuscripts and the Stability of NT Textual Tradition
This morning I presented as part of the New Testament Canon, Textual Criticism, and Apocryphal Literature Section of this years meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. The section is chaired by Dr. Michael Kruger (RTS-Charlotte) and Dr. Stan Porter (McMaster). It was a privilege to be a part of the session along with my other NT colleague, Dr. Charles Hill.
Continue reading ETS2017 Paper on Inspired Use of Diverse Sources
