Although the post is now comparatively a bit dated, Corey Tomsons still has some very good advice about academic blogging (HT: Kirk Lowery via Facebook).
http://thoughtcapital.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/how-to-write-an-academic-blog/
According to Google, the world contains about 129,864,880 books. Google calculated this number by combining duplicate entries from a data base of nearly one billion raw, bibliographic records and by eliminating about an additional 16.5 million non-books that had records in Google’s raw data base.
Jeremy Thompson has July’s Biblioblog Top 50 available. Jim West and Joel Watts again take the top two spots respectively. The top ten student biblioblogs are:
StudentOverallAuthor(s)BlogAlexa Score18Stephen SmutsBiblical Paths22490929Matt DabbsKingdom Living228817311Mark StevensScripture, Ministry, and the People of God240043414Jeremy ThompsonFree Old Testament Audio Website Blog328123515Brian LePort, JohnDave Medina, and Robert JimenezNear Emmaus: Christ and Text331730616Scott BaileyScotteriology342515718Gavin RumneyOtagosh408591835JasonEis Doxan729697936Rick MansfieldThis Lamp7365221038Brandon WasonSitz im Leben791601
This table should represent this past month’s ten highest-ranked bibliobloggers or groups of bibliobloggers who are actively seeking a degree. If, however, I have erroneously included or omitted anyone, please note that fact here in the comments, and I will make the appropriate adjustment(s) for next month.
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caption=“D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo”] 
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Thanks to the kind folks at Zondervan, I just received the second edition of D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo’s Introduction to the New Testament for use this fall. I had used the first edition (co-authored also with Leon Morris) when I took my initial New Testament Introduction course, so I will be interested (finally—this second edition has been available since 2005) to see firsthand what revisions have been made.
...The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include the following:
Jewish Scriptures and Cognate Fields
New Testament and Cognate Fields
...This week in the blogosphere:
In the past few weeks, I had thought of what might be a pedagogically helpful application for Google Wave. I had all but decided to experiment with it in a course assignment, but on Wednesday, Google announced that it would not “continue developing Wave as a standalone product” but would, over time, “extend the technology for use in other Google projects.” So, apparently, it is time to “wave” goodbye and wait to see what the next iteration of the technology holds.
...Hosea (NICOT)
The Book of Hosea, written by Andrew Dearman for the New International Commentary on the Old Testament series, has been released. Dearman is Professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary’s Houston extension. Some of the endorsements for Dearman’s volume include:
Dearman’s commentary provides the most recent deep engagement with the ancient text of Hosea the prophet. Dialoguing with the best of scholarship, the commentary offers both detailed exegesis of the text with accompanying translation from the original Hebrew, as well as general overviews at key literary junctures to orient the reader to the progressive development of the book as a whole. Particularly helpful is Dearman’s sensitivity to the social context of ancient Israelite households. He restores the vivid metaphorical colors of the book of Hosea long faded by history. This is a welcome addition to the NICOT series. – Mark J. Boda, McMaster Divinity College
...
This week in the biblioblogs:
As promised, Jim West’s revival of the Biblical Studies Carnival has begun.
HT: Mark Goodacre.
This year’s second issue of the Bulletin for Biblical Research arrived in the mail yesterday and includes the following:
In commenting on Phil 2:12 in his recent Pillar series volume, Walter Hansen observes the following about Paul’s description of Christian community and obedience:
The church is an eschatological community, a colony of heaven. But in order for the heavenly reality to be a present, earthly experience, believers need to work out the salvation promised to them. Paul desires to see an ecclesiological fulfillment of the eschatological promise of salvation. This understanding of working out salvation as a present expression of God’s promise of salvation does not contradict but rather implements Paul’s earlier instruction to look after the interests of others ( 2:4) ( 174–75; cf. 177).
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In this clip, Richard Bauckham briefly abstracts his own argument from Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=292NTf1cCNw&hl=en_US&fs=1]
Blogging has unfortunately gotten edged out by too many other things the past few months, but I hope the dearth of posts here recently will be reversing itself shortly. In any case, last week, Carrie and I were blessed with a beautiful baby girl, Ella Grace. Ella came a bit early, but I can now officially enter her as my vote for the “most precious baby ever” award:
[slideshow]
Robert Cargill reports that a recent test conducted by Italian scientists suggests that the Temple Scroll’s papyrus was “cured using water from the Dead Sea.” Cargill also mentions a forthcoming test that could reasonably demonstrate a connection between the scroll’s ink and the water of the Dead Sea. Even if it does so, however, Cargill qualifies, “this still leaves open the possibility that both the inks and parchment were produced at Dead Sea industrial installations and exported to other areas (for instance, Jerusalem), [but] the preponderance of evidence (animals at Qumran, inkwells at Qumran, scrolls in caves near Qumran) would seem to support the continued suggestion that at least some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced at Qumran.”
...Sunday, National Geographic reported that researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had successfully tested a computer system that, by itself, deciphered a substantial amount of Ugaritic “in a matter of hours” ( MIT press release). This system is based on a statistical model developed by Benjamin Snyder and Regina Barzilay of MIT and Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California. According to MIT,
Snyder and Barzilay don’t suppose that a system like the one they designed with Knight would ever replace human decipherers. “But it is a powerful tool that can aid the human decipherment process,” Barzilay says. Moreover, a variation of it could also help expand the versatility of translation software. Many online translators rely on the analysis of parallel texts to determine word correspondences: They might, for instance, go through the collected works of Voltaire, Balzac, Proust and a host of other writers, in both English and French, looking for consistent mappings between words. “That’s the way statistical translation systems have worked for the last 25 years,” Knight says.
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The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include the following:
New Testament and Cognate Fields
Jewish Scriptures and Cognate Fields
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caption=“Paul Silvia”] 
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Over at To Do: Dissertation, one of the authors provides a list of aids that dissertation writers may find helpful. Second on this list is Paul Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot, which has proven particularly helpful to me as well. The book really is worth its purchase price for the number of practical thoughts that it includes that may help the writing process go more smoothly.
...Defending the legitimacy of the category of “collective memory,” Maurice Halbwachs observes the following:
History is neither the whole nor even all that remains of the past. In addition to written history, there is a living history that perpetuates and renews itself through time and permits the recovery of many old currents that have seemingly disappeared ( 64).
Thus, in some respect, the “collective memory” provides the means by which a community recovers for itself things that it has forgotten or allowed to fall into the vague and dusty corners of its memory. Without such collective memory, these lost currents would have no presence in relation to the community and they would have to be recovered—if they would ever be recovered at all—in the same manner as the community discovers new things of which it had not previously been aware.
...The equivalent of 15 print volumes of over 1,800 Oxyrhynchus Papyri fragments are now available to order from Logos via their pre-publication discount program. Details about the module and a list of the papyri it will include are available here.
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Due out in a little less than one month is the revised version Elizabeth Mburu’s PhD thesis, Qumran and the Origins of Johannine Language and Symbolism. In the book, Mburu
sets out to demonstrate that the sectarian Qumran document The Rule of the Community, provides linguistic clues which illuminate our understanding of how the author of the Fourth Gospel used truth terminology and expected it to be understood.
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Christian Book Distributors is offering their 22-volume collection of Calvin’s commentaries for $99.99 (retail: $1200.00) with a bonus copy of Calvin’s Institutes. Also, starting November 1, CBD will offer a 14-volume set of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics for $99.99 (retail: $995.00). Even after accounting for shipping costs, the 90%+ discount offered on these sets’ retail prices still leaves them as strikingly good bargains.
According to Google’s blog, the National Library of the Netherlands will soon start making over 160,000 public-domain volumes available through Google Books. Works targeted for digitization “constitute nearly the library’s entire collection of out-of-copyright books, written during the 18th and 19th centuries.” Among the authors whose works this post explicitly notes as being included within this group is Abraham Kuyper (at least via a direct link to his Wikipedia page), the Dutch Reformed theologian, philosopher, and politician.
...Today, the following arrived from the kind folks at Baker for use this fall:
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caption=“Darrell Bock”] 
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Being in the classroom (whether virtual or physical) is always enjoyable, and I am certainly looking forward to meeting and interacting with everyone there again this fall.
Larry Hurtado announces that the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins now has a blog from which readers may expect posts by ” the several [scholars] who make up CSCO.”
The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include the following:
New Testament and Cognate Fields
Jewish Scriptures and Cognate Fields
...Michael Meerson has the latest article in the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism, “One God Supreme: A Case Study of Religious Tolerance and Survival.” In this article, Meerson “attempt[s] to combine the consideration of both [θεὸς ὕψιστος and εἷς θεός]” as these titles are found in a sundial inscription from Mount Gerizim (32). For, although
[a] picture of a sundial with a Greek inscription was published in the 33rd (2000) issue of Qadmoniot, as an illustration to the essay of Y. Magen, ‘Mount Gerizim—A Temple City’ . . . the sundial’s inscription, neither transcribed nor translated, failed to provoke commentary. And yet the inscription is remarkable in many ways: one of only five Greek inscriptions from the Hellenistic era ever found on Mount Gerizim, it was discovered outside any architectural context. The inscription addresses θεὸς ὕψιστος, the God Most High, which would have provided the archaeologists of Gerizim with a doubly difficult quest: to identify the ‘nationality’ of the so-called god, and to find a temple in which this sundial would have stood—Samaritan, Seleucid or Roman. Inscriptions bearing the εἷς θεός invocation present a similar problem (32).
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In the second and third centuries, the church worked under several different hermeneutical constraints, including: canonical development, community boundary definition (vis-à-vis Judaism, Paganism, and heretical, “Christian” sects), and hermeneutical method. Although this period of biblical interpretation has long been closed, being aware of the natures of these respective constraints can help us understand the early church’s hermeneutical environment and gain better access to some of their thoughts about scripture.
Regarding canonical development, within the patristic period the text of the Jewish canon was essentially closed, but what has become known as the New Testament was not yet a distinct collection. In this period, the church sometimes used certain documents as scripture, although these documents like Shepherd of Hermas or 1 Clement were not eventually canonized, and the church sometimes refrained from using as scripture other documents like Hebrews and Revelation, which were eventually canonized. Additionally, the early church seems to have viewed the Old Testament as having a higher status than the Gospels [including the Diatessaron ( ANF 9:43–130)] and Paul’s epistles, although a somewhat more egalitarian view was also feasible (cf. 2 Pet 3:15–16). For instance, when the Epistle of Barnabas cites the New Testament, the references seem to be mainly incidental to the main line of thought (e.g., Epistle of Barnabas 5:9; 4:14; 13:7), whereas the Old Testament seems to be used as though it held more weight for Barnabas’s author. In the earliest part of the patristic period, it was also possible for Papias to say that he preferred the “living voice” (of oral testimony) to what was written. By contrast, in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (ca. AD 165; ANF 2:194–270), Justin explicitly cites the New Testament as scripture (e.g., §43, 100). Justin’s use of the New Testament as scripture typified a growing trend out of which the Muratorian Canon list (ca. AD 200; see Westcott 557–64) came and which culminated in Athanasius’s Easter letter of AD 367 ( NPNF2 4:551–52). In this letter, Athanasius demarcated what he saw to be the boundaries of the New Testament canon, which have remained until the present day.
...The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include the following:
New Testament and Cognate Fields
Jewish Scriptures and Cognate Fields
...The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include the following:
Jewish Scriptures and Cognate Fields
Hermeneutics
...