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Matthew Crowe has February’s Biblical Studies Carnival. In February’s biblioblog rankings, Jim West and Joel Watts again top the Biblioblog Top 50 Alexa chart, and James McGrath and Daniel Kirk top the vote-based rankings. By Alexa rank, then, February’s Student Biblioblog Top 10 lines up as follows: StudentOverallAuthor(s)Blog12Joel L. WattsUnsettled Christianity23Brian LePort, JohnDave Medina, Joshua Smith, and Mark StevensNear Emmaus: Christ and Text314Thomas VerennaThe Musings of Thomas Verenna418Daniel O. McClellanDaniel O. McClellan523Matthew CroweA Fistful of Farthings625Jeremy ThompsonFree Old Testament Audio Website Blog726Bob Hayton, Jason Skipper, Damien Garofalo, Will Dudding, Erik DiVietro, and Phil DearmoreKJV Only Debate836Phillip LongReading Acts939Gavin RumneyOtagosh1044Mitchell PowellFont Words ...

Beginning with Moses has been substantially refreshed, and the site is scheduled to have regular updates begin again on September 1. If you like, you can also follow Beginning with Moses on Twitter and Facebook. The Biblical Theology Briefings have carried over from the old site, and the site’s principal editor, Mark Owens, invites fresh contributions for this section. ...

This year’s second issue of the Bulletin for Biblical Research arrived in the mail yesterday and includes the following: Brian Gault, “An Admonition against ‘Rousing Love’: The Meaning of the Enigmatic Refrain in Song of Songs,” 161–84 William Wilder, “The Use (or Abuse) of Power in High Places: Gifts Given and Received in Isaiah, Psalm 68, and Ephesians 4:8,” 185–200 Gerald Peterman, “Plural You: On the Use and Abuse of the Second Person,” 201–14 Craig Keener, “Spirit Possession as a Cross-cultural Experience,” 215–36 Joshua Jipp and Michael Thate, “Dating Thomas: Logion 53 as a Test Case for Dating the Gospel of Thomas within an Early Christian Trajectory,” 237–56 Book reviews, 257–307

[caption id=“attachment_1618” align=“alignleft” width=“80” caption=“Paul Silvia”] [/caption] 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. ...

[caption id=“attachment_5648” align=“alignright” width=“80” caption=“Elizabeth Mburu”] [/caption] 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. ...

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. ...

Today, the following arrived from the kind folks at Baker for use this fall: [caption id=“attachment_5710” align=“alignleft” width=“80” caption=“Craig Blomberg”] [/caption] [caption id=“attachment_5709” align=“alignleft” width=“80” caption=“Darrell Bock”] [/caption] 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. ...

The Evangelical Theological Society’s southeastern, regional meeting begins tomorrow and will feature some interesting-looking papers, a couple of which I have been able to preview as they have come through Southeastern’s Writing Center. Fellow blogger Alan Knox will be presenting on “A Theology of Encouragement in Hebrews,” and my own paper, “But What about Israel?: A Biblical-Theological Approach to the Question of Individual and Corporate Election in Romans 9–11” has also been included in the program. To abstract this paper briefly: ...

In the March 26 issue of All You magazine, my wife, Carrie, has had following recipe featured: The roll-ups really are quite good, and of course, the black-and-white picture hardly does justice to the visual appeal of the dish. In addition to the instructions here, the chef herself does suggest that the “sprinkl[ing] with mozzarella” (#4) should be done rather generously. ...

Jeremy Thompson has the month-end biblioblog rankings available, and Joel Watts again tops the chart. Congratulations are also due to the folks at Near Emmaus who, after cracking the top 50 in the middle of the month, have now settled into the number 40 slot for February as a whole. Today will tell, but on the back of what may turn out to be the busiest month yet, New Testament Interpretation has also risen to 79th place, its strongest standing thus far. Many thanks to everyone for the interest. ...

New to the biblioblogosphere this week is Matthew D. Larsen’s NT Studies Blog. Matthew is a graduate student in Jewish Studies, and some of his major, academic interests include studying the synoptics, the historical Jesus, and early Jewish-Christian relations with, according to the blog’s subtitle, a blend of “Narrative, Rhetorical, and Historical” criticism. In his inaugural post series, Matthew is discussing Jesus’ relationship to women against the backdrop of several different corpora of Jewish literature. ...

Brooke Lester has a bipartite Biblical Studies Carnival LI available at Anumma. In consideration of February 3 as Blogroll Amnesty Day, Lester particularly highlights the smaller fry in the biblioblogging community.

Dead Sea Scrolls Today A revised edition of James VanderKam’s excellent introduction to the Dead Sea Scrolls is making its way to retailers. This new edition “retains the format, style, and aims of the first edition, and the same wider audience is envisaged” ( xii). Consequently, this edition includes five primary categories of changes ( xii–xiii): ...

The Evernote blog has a helpful new video for Google Chrome users, showing them how to get Chrome to search their Evernote accounts directly. Firefox users can achieve the same results with Ubiquity (0.1.9.1) by copying this code into the Ubiquity command editor or by subscribing to this command feed. ...

Klyne Snodgrass discusses a “hermeneutics of identity.” Snodgrass repeatedly observes the New Testament’s concern with issues related to identity.

Jeremy Thompson has mid-month biblioblog rankings available for the top 50 biblioblogs. Congratulations to Brian LePort and JohnDave Medina, who have cracked the top 50 for the first time, and to Joel Watts who continues to lead the pack. The full list, including some additions, will again be available at the month’s end.

Today, Philip Payne concludes his critique of Peter Head’s contention that the distigmai in Vaticanus “mark[] textual variation” and “belong to one unified system that was added some time in the 16th century.” To read the series in five parts, click below. Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Diple Part 3: Small Numbers, Large Numbers, and Other Marginalia Part 4: De Sepulveda Part 5: Identifying Later Distigmai and Conclusion A composite PDF is forthcoming, as is Head’s revised argument that incorporates Payne’s critiques. ...

Various people have expressed, at different points, the wish that David Black’s blog had its own feed, but Google Reader users can now have this feed—somewhat. Last week, the Official Google Reader Blog announced an update to Google Reader that allows individual users, much as they would add any normal feed within Reader itself, to have Google Reader watch for changes on any webpage. ...

In Rom 11:15, Paul’s reference to ζωὴ ἐκ νεκρῶν ( life from the dead) may refer to bodily resurrection, but it may also be read as metaphorically referring to the restoration of the then hardened portion of Israel into participation in the blessings of the Abrahamic covenant that Paul regards as having come to fruition in Jesus: ...

Amy Donaldson’s dissertation on Explicit References to New Testament Variant Readings among Greek and Latin Church Fathers is now available in PDF format through Notre Dame’s thesis and dissertation database. According to the abstract, In his introduction to New Testament textual criticism, Eberhard Nestle stated a desideratum, later repeated by Bruce Metzger, for a collection, arranged according to time and locality, of all passages in which the church fathers appeal to New Testament manuscript evidence. Nestle began this project with a list of references; Metzger continued the work by examining the explicit references to variants by Origen and Jerome and expanding Nestle’s list. This dissertation picks up where Metzger left off, expanding and evaluating the list. The purpose is to contribute to patristics and New Testament textual criticism in two ways: first, by providing a helpful catalogue of patristic texts that refer to variant readings; and second, by analyzing the collected data with a focus on the text-critical criteria used by the fathers. ...

Biblical Studies Carnival XLX is available at Abnormal Interests in two sections: one based on submitted posts and the other based on Duane Smith’s own blog reading and interests. HT: James McGrath

The University of Groningen is seeking a PhD candidate for the project: The Jewish Revolt against Rome: Religious Groups and the Shaping of Identities in First-Century Judaea: The Graduate School of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen is looking for a PhD candidate (0,9 fte) for the project ‘The Jewish Revolt against Rome: Religious Groups and the Shaping of Identities in First-Century Judaea’. ...

Jeremy Thompson has the automated, monthly Alexa chart available for a short(er) list of 237 biblioblogs for which Alexa reported rating data. This month, New Testament Interpretation saw a bump up to slot 156, and not surprisingly, Joel Watts tops the chart. ...

Lipscomb University is set to host a symposium in honor of Everett Ferguson: Everett Ferguson’s Baptism in the Early Church offers an exhaustive survey of the literary and material evidence for baptismal practice in the first five centuries of Christian history. This symposium, hosted by the Christian Scholars’ Conference, brings together leading scholars to engage this magisterial work and to honor its author’s contribution to ecumenical theological scholarship ( Lipscomb). ...

Yesterday, Zotero 2.0 moved from beta into its first and second release candidate versions. If you have yet to try Zotero, you may download it or view the video introduction from their homepage. At this point, Society of Biblical Literature Handbook of Style support is still under development, but even so, Zotero does provide a fairly good approximation that can be tweaked here and there with reasonable ease. ...

In the past few days, there have been several very interesting posts around the biblioblogosphere. To highlight some of those posts here: Tommy Wasserman reports the new online presence of Bodmer 25 (GA 556) and, at Münster’s Virtual Manuscript Room, another 60 manuscripts as well. This morning also sees the beginning of a series in which Philip Payne is critically responding to Peter Head’s contention that the distigmai in Vaticanus “mark[] textual variation” and “belong to one unified system that was added some time in the 16th century.” John Anderson has an excellent and substantive interview with Richard Hays (HT: Stephen Carlson), and Andy Rowell has compiled a complementary bibliography of Richard Hays resources (HT: Mark Goodacre). Nijay Gupta has posted an interview with Gordon Fee (HT: Thomas) and the first part of an interview with Craig Keener, as well as a link to a website that is identifying free, online, public-domain Loeb Classical Library volumes. Jeremy Thompson has automated the compilation of a new biblioblog Alexa ranking list (HT: Mark Goodacre). On a similar note, the Official (Unofficial) Biblioblog List has undertaken the task of maintaining an updated list of biblioblogs (HT: Joseph Kelly) and, as of this morning, the task of maintaining a current biblioblog search engine. The Official (Unofficial) Biblioblog List also makes available HTML code that will restore a biblioblog badge that has become non-functional with the password protection of the Biblioblog Top 50.

The following poem, “Epi-strauss-ium,” by Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) playfully draws attention to D. F. Strauss’s then recently published Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet ( Life of Jesus Critically Examined; NAEL 2:1452 n. 1). Matthew and Mark and Luke and holy John Evanished all and gone! Yea, he that erst, his dusky curtains quitting, Through Eastern pictured panes his level beams transmitting, With gorgeous portraits blent, On them his glories intercepted spent, Southwestering now, through windows plainly glassed, On the inside face his radiance keen hath cast, And in the luster lost, invisible, and gone, Are, say you, Matthew, Mark, and Luke and holy John? Lost, is it? lost, to be recovered never? However, The place of worship the meantime with light Is, if less richly, more sincerely bright, And in blue skies the Orb is manifest to sight. ...

For the past several weeks, I have been working on some reasonably substantial changes to the site that should make it more useful and beneficial. With these changes completed and my comprehensive exams on the horizon (in both a hermeneutical and a temporal sense), I hope to begin regularly posting again quite soon. For anyone who may be interested, the following are among the most significant of changes to the site: ...

http://evepheso.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/aspect-aktionsart-one-more-time-part-ii/ Blass’s discussion slightly earlier [§56.1 – 1898, MacMillan, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray] affirms, perhaps slightly more explicitly, that the Greek tenses express time relations “absolutely, i.e. with reference to the stand-point of the speaker or narrator, and not relatively, i.e. with reference to something else that occurs in the speech or narrative” (italics added). Blass’s subsequent discussion of the present in direct and indirect discourse (§56.9) also seems to illustrate your point about his view of the Greek tenses: “In the N.T. the use of oratorio obliqua is certainly not favored, and that of oratorio recta predominates; but it is noteworthy that subordinate sentences after verbs of perception and belief are assimilated to oratorio recta, and the tenses therefore have a relative meaning” (italics added). Blass then cites Matt 2:22 and John 6:24. In these cases, then, the tense in the quoted discourse is relative with respect to the writer who reports the discourse and absolute (see §56.1) with respect to the person(s) reported as constructing the discourse originally. ...

Over the past several weeks, I’ve become convinced that the Παραλειπόμενα page would be more serviceable as a post category. Below are the current παραλειπόμενα not also included in other posts; a complete selection of the παραλειπόμενα can be obtained by clicking the παραλειπόμενα category link. ὁ δὲ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· διὰ τοῦτο πᾶς γραμματεὺς μαθητευθεὶς τῇ βασιλείᾳ τῶν οὐρανῶν ὅμοιός ἐστιν ἀνθρώπῳ οἰκοδεσπότῃ, ὅστις ἐκβάλλει ἐκ τοῦ θησαυροῦ αὐτοῦ καινὰ καὶ παλαιά ( And he said to them, “Therefore, every scribe who has been taught for the kingdom of the heavens is like a man who is a master of a house, who brings forth from his storeroom new and old things”; Matt 13:52) “[I]t is better for [people] to find you [O God] and leave the question unanswered than to find the answer without finding you” ( Augustine 1.6; affiliate disclosure). “If you can’t imagine how anyone could hold the view you are attacking, you just don’t understand it yet” ( Weston 6; affiliate disclosure). “I have never been able to give myself the comfort which some devout believers seem to derive from a contemptuous attitude toward men on the other side of the great debate; I have never been able to dismiss the ‘higher critics’ en masse with a few words of summary condemnation” (J. Gresham Machen, quoted in Baird 352; affiliate disclosure). עשות ספרים הרבה אין קץ ולהג הרבה יגעת בשר ( Of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is the weariness of the bones; Eccl 12:12). “We do God’s work for our brothers and sisters when we learn to listen to them. So often Christians, especially preachers, think that their only service is always to have to ‘offer’ something when they are together with other people. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking. Many people seek a sympathetic ear and do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking even when they should be listening. But Christians who can no longer listen to one another will soon no longer be listening to God either; they will always be talking even in the presence of God. The death of the spiritual life starts here, and in the end there is nothing left but empty spiritual chatter and clerical condescension which chokes on pious words. Those who cannot listen long and patiently will always be talking past others, and finally no longer will even notice it. Those who think their time is too precious to spend listening will never really have time for God and others, but only for themselves and for their own words and plans” ( Bonhoeffer 98; affiliate disclosure). καὶ ἐδικαιώθη ἡ σοφία ἀπὸ τῶν ἔργων αὐτῆς ( And wisdom is justified by her deeds; Matt 11:19). “The New Testament is concerned with proclamation. It is a Kerygma, the loud cry of a herald authorized by a king to proclaim his will and purpose to his subjects. It is Euangelion, good news, sent to those who are in distress with the promise of deliverance. It is the Word of the Lord—and in the East a word is no mere vibration in the atmosphere, it is a living power sent forth to accomplish that for which it is sent” ( Neill and Wright 448–49; italics original; affiliate disclosure). “[T]he hermeneutical task involves both distance, in which account is taken of the particularity of the text, and also a progress towards as close a fusion of horizons with the text as the relation between text and interpreter will allow” ( Thiselton 440; emphasis original; affiliate disclosure). ὁ ἀφʼ ἑαυτοῦ λαλῶν τὴν δόξαν τὴν ἰδίαν ζητεῖ ( He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; John 7:18).