Book-Notices

Logos Bible Software offers syntax graphs for “the LXX Deuterocanon/Apocrypha.”

Forthcoming this fall in P&R’s “Great Thinkers” series is Christopher Watkin’s volume on Jacques Derrida. According to the book’s blurb,

Christian thinkers and writers who address Jacques Derrida’s philosophy face two potential pitfalls. One is to recast Christianity in an ill-fitting Derridean mold; the other is to ascribe to Derrida objectionable positions that bear little relation to his writing.

To avoid these hazards, Christopher Watkin, a scholar of French literature and philosophy, walks in Derrida’s shoes through the landscape of recent thought and culture, seeking to understand the rationale for Derrida’s philosophical moves in light of his assumptions and commitments in philosophy, literature, ethics, and politics. He then sets these assumptions in the wider context of God’s nature and purposes in history, providing biblical critique.

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This month, Logos Bible Software has Craig Keener’s New Covenant Commentary volume on Romans available for free. The companion deep-discount volume is Gordon Fee’s on Revelation, also from the NCC.

This month, Verbum has Joseph Fitzmyer’s Impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Paulist, 2009) available for free. The $0.99 companion volume is Fitzmyer’s Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method (Paulist, 2008).

Verbum products will download, integrate, and run with Logos-branded engines and base packages also.

Noet has Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed free in the month of January. A taste of Maimonides’s ethical reflections is also available for $0.99.

The Internet Archive has full-text PDFs of Alban Butler’s twelve-volume set, Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints (Thomas Richardson, 1842–46):

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Volume 5
• Volume 6
• Volume 7
• Volume 8
• Volume 9
• Volume 10
• Volume 11
• Volume 12

Today, Logos Bible Software has Louis Berkhof’s Introduction to the New Testament for free.

Today’s Advent givaway by Logos Bible Software is Geerhardus Vos’s Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Theological Discipline.

For today’s Advent freebie, Logos Bible Software has volume 2, part 1 of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics ( The Doctrine of God).

Today’s Advent giveaway at Logos Bible Software is the Cornerstone series commentary on the Pastorals and Hebrews with contributions by Linda Belleville, Jon Laansma, and Ramsey Michaels.

Today’s free resource for Advent at Logos is Henry Cole’s edition of Calvin’s Calvinism (1856–1857) .

For Advent, Logos Bible Software is providing an additional and daily free or discounted book and media deal. Today’s book freebie is N. T. Wright’s Scripture and the Authority of God(SPCK, 2005).

Logos Bible Software’s free book of the month for December is now live. The selection is Stephen Fowl’s Ephesians from the New Testament Library series. Also deeply discounted to $1.99 is Luke Timothy Johnson’s Hebrews volume from the same series.

Also available for free on the Logos platform via the Noet website is James Joyce’s Dubliners, with Joyce’s Ulysses coming in as the bonus deep-discount item at $0.99.

November’s freebies at Logos Bible Software include several fine texts:

• Lutz, Matthew (Hermeneia, vol. 1)—with vol. 2 coming in at $1.99.
• Kuyper, Collected Works in Public Theology (excerpts)
• Caesar, Gallic War (Loeb Classical Library)

Update: Verbum now shows November’s free text too: Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on Advent and Christmas.

The Faithlife platform family (e.g., Logos, Noet) now has Mortimer Adler’s 60-volume Great Books of the Western World (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1990) available for preorder. It seems the information from Adler’s Syntopicon has also been embedded within this digital version of the series.

Verbum’s free book for October is Wilfrid Harrington’s Sacra Pagina volume on Revelation:

More than any other New Testament writing, the Book of Revelation demands commentary. Its often-bewildering text is easily open to less-than-scholarly interpretation.

Wilfrid Harrington brings his scholarship to the Book of Revelation and conveys its Christian message. He puts the work in its historical and social setting—a first-century CE province of the Roman Empire—and explores its social and religious background and its literary character. Through Harrington we hear clearly the challenge of John, the prophet, to the churches of his time—and to ours—not to compromise the Gospel message.

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A while ago, I mentioned Sacred Texts and Paradigmatic Revolutions would be coming to paperback. That format is now available at about a fourth or less of the MSRP for the hardback.

The kind folks at Bloomsbury (the parent company of the T&T Clark imprint) have recently mentioned that a paperback release is forthcoming for my Sacred Texts and Paradigmatic Revolutions: The Hermeneutical Worlds of the Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts and the Letter to the Romans. Slated for this June, the paperback, at a $29.95 list price, will be a fiscally welcome complement to the current hardback ($120.00) and PDF ($27.99) formats. The paperback is already available for pre-order on Amazon, currently at just under the list price.

This month, Logos Bible Software is giving away Hans Iwand’s The Righteousness of Faith according to Luther (trans., Randi Lundell; Wipf & Stock, 2008, originally published in 1941). According to the product page, the volume:

is an important contribution to contemporary appreciation of Luther’s theological significance. Although Iwand wrote his study three decades after the beginning of the Luther Renaissance, it nevertheless developed some of the central insights of Luther scholarship during that period. Two concepts—in particular, promise and simultaneity—are crucial to an appreciative understanding of Luther’s doctrine of justification. The language of promise presents justification to the believer as a reality that has yet to arrive or is hidden under present reality. And the language of simultaneity attests that humans remain throughout their lives one in the same, sinner and saint.

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Through June 11, the Westminster Bookstore is offering a free PDF download of Iain Duguid’s Is Jesus in the Old Testament? (P&R, 2013). Duguid has been at Grove City College but has recently joined the Westminster Seminary faculty. According to its introduction, Duguid’s essay (the text is a brief 33 pages of prose) has the following major components to its argument:

[T]his little booklet contends that Christ is present throughout the Old Testament. . . . I also want to explore what it means to rightly see Christ in the Old Testament. Not every attempt to discern the figure of Jesus in the Old Testament has been profitable. Some well-meaning interpreters have allowed their imaginations to run wild on this theme . . . . Finally, I want to look at some specific ways in which the Old Testament focuses on and prepares us to see and understand Christ and his ministry in the gospel. ( 6)

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This month, Logos Bible Software has Frederic Perthes’ Life of John Chrysostom (John P. Jewett, 1854) available for free. According to Logos’s description,

Based on the investigations of Neander, Böhringer, and others, Life of John Chrysostom details the “golden-mouthed” orator’s influence on Asia Minor. It offers a look into his role as preacher and bishop, his interactions with different sects and notable persons during his life, and an exacting account of his three-year exile.

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Through June 16, Ben Witherington’s What’s in the Word: Rethinking the Socio-Rhetorical Character of the New Testament (Baylor, 2009) is available for free from Logos Bible Software.

In sum, “Expanding on the work in which he has been fruitfully engaged for over a quarter century, Witherington challenges the previously assured results of historical criticism and demonstrates chapter by chapter how the socio-rhetorical study shifts the paradigm.” The volume discusses concerns related to orality and canon, and includes several chapters treating particular texts or phrases within the New Testament.

The June free book of the month seems already to be live on the Logos Bible Software website. The included text is Walter Brueggemann’s Spirituality of the Psalms (Fortress, 2001). The optional, $0.99 add on is Brueggemmann’s David’s Truth: In Israel’s Imagination and Memory (Fortress, 2002).

The latest Bloomsbury Highlights notes the newly available volume 16 in the T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts Series. The volume is a revision of my 2011 dissertation at Southeastern Seminary and primarily explores paradigmatic, or presuppositional, aspects of the hermeneutics at play in Romans and some of the Qumran sectarian texts.

Bloomsbury presently has the hardback on sale for 10% off and is also making PDFs available at a still more substantially reduced price.

The English Standard Version is now free for a limited time with the Faithlife Study Bible ( affiliate disclosure). According to the press release,

Starting July 24, anyone who downloads or signs in to the Faithlife Study Bible app will get the English Standard Version free for life! All Faithlife Study Bible app users will get a full license to the ESV Bible, including offline access when Internet is not available. Users can download their free copy of the Faithlife Study Bible app by visiting the Faithlife/ESV giveaway page anytime 12:00 am [Pacific], July 24–11:59 pm, August 10.

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Baker and the Stone-Campbell Journal were kind enough to provide a copy of Tom Schreiner’s The King in His Beauty: A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments. According to the publisher’s description, Schreiner:

offers a substantial and accessibly written overview of the whole Bible. He traces the storyline of the scriptures from the standpoint of biblical theology, examining the overarching message that is conveyed throughout. Schreiner emphasizes three interrelated and unified themes that stand out in the biblical narrative: God as Lord, human beings as those who are made in God’s image, and the land or place in which God’s rule is exercised. The goal of God’s kingdom is to see the king in his beauty and to be enraptured in his glory.

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Thanks to Eerdmans and the Stone-Campbell Journal, Gareth Lee Cockerill’s New International Commentary on the New Testament volume on Hebrews arrived recently. According to the publisher,

This commentary by Gareth Lee Cockerill offers fresh insight into the Epistle to the Hebrews, a well-constructed sermon that encourages its hearers to persevere despite persecution and hardships in light of Christ’s unique sufficiency as Savior. Cockerill analyzes the book’s rhetorical, chiastic shape and interprets each passage in light of this overarching structure. He also offers a new analysis of the epistle’s use of the Old Testament—continuity and fulfillment rather than continuity and discontinuity—and shows how this consistent usage is relevant for contemporary biblical interpretation. Written in a clear, engaging, and accessible style, this commentary will benefit pastors, laypeople, students, and scholars alike.

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Logos Bible Software is currently preparing the first English translation of Geerhardus Vos’s Reformed Dogmatics. By way of background regarding Vos:

[T]he “father of Reformed biblical theology,” was born 151 years ago this month. Vos, a professor of biblical theology at Princeton, lectured alongside many famous theologians, including J. Gresham Machen, B. B. Warfield, and Abraham Kuyper. So great was Vos’ academic insight that Kuyper offered him the chair of Old Testament studies at the Free University of Amsterdam when Vos was just 24.

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A single-volume edition Robert Funk’s Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek is due out in April and is now available for pre-order from Polebridge. According to the publisher’s description,

Originally published in three volumes in 1973, Robert Funk’s classic Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek utilizes the insights of modern linguistics in its presentation of the basic features of ancient Greek grammar. Now redesigned and reformatted for ease of use, this single-volume third edition makes Funk’s ground-breaking work available once more.

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On the web:

• Rod Decker shares an update on his forthcoming Greek grammar.
• Logos Bible Software is wishing everyone a happy International Septuagint Day today with a substantial sale on their release of the Göttingen Septuagint (HT: Brian Davidson, Abram K-J).
• Jim Davila excerpts a Cambridge News story about funding that Cambridge and Oxford are seeking to keep together the Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection at Westminster College.