*via flickr.

Commentaries on Luke (and Acts)

May 15, 2013 — 2 Comments

I was recently asked what commentaries I am finding most helpful as I research the Gospel of Luke. Briefly, in a not-so-particular order, here are a few thoughts on Luke (and  a couple on Acts):

I. Howard Marshall on Luke (NIGTC) (1978), though its been around a while (!), nearly always hits the significant exegetical issues of a given passage. Marshall is also concise: Whereas some commentators need two volumes, Marshall is able to pack it into one. I always consult Marshall.

Joel B. Green on Luke (NICNT) (1997) is good especially for his narrative-critical sensitivities in the text. Like Marshall, Green is concise, but he is unable to cover near as much ground! I usually consult Green.

François Bovon on Luke (EKK in German and Hermeneia in English) (1989–2013) is a seasoned Lukan scholar. He has produced commentaries on Luke for more than two decades (though the latest works are essentially updated English versions of the EKK commentaries). Bovon is aware of a breadth of scholarship in more languages than most commentators know. I always consult Bovon. (I’m waiting to get my hands on the second and third volumes of the Hermeneia series, one of which was out just last year). Continue Reading…

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Review of the Ziggi HD Document Camera

May 14, 2013 — 4 Comments

Thanks to IPEVO, I have the opportunity to review a fairly new product, the Ziggi HD document camera. I am especially interested in its use as a document and book scanner. I started a DIY Book Scanner project a few years ago (see here and here and here), but never finished. Now that I’m in a new country during Ph.D. studies, I don’t plan on building a scanner anytime soon. The Ziggi works so well, though, that I wonder if I’ll ever get around to building one.

The Video Review

To see the product in action, I’ve put together the follow video which focuses on the book scanning use of the camera. You can watch it in HD (1080p) if you want to really see the text capture in detail.

Highlights Continue Reading…

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John T. Carroll’s Commentary on the Gospel of Luke (pt 3)

May 7, 2013 — 2 Comments

For part one of my review, see here. Part two here. (Amazon link to the book.) I wanted to touch on a few issues before finishing up with Carroll. Continue Reading…

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Changes to the Website: Now at joshualmann.com

April 29, 2013 — Leave a comment

This evening I made some significant changes to this website, many of which are hardly noticeable. (Das ist Gut!)

The Short Story

I migrated my site from sakeoftruth.com to joshualmann.com. I have also changed a few other things that made the whole migration work. Using 301 redirects, all the old links from within and without should work fine. Everything should look and function essentially the same, but a major migration like this often results in at least a few broken links. I have yet to find any, but if you do, please let me know. Thanks!

The Not-So-Short Story

For those interested in the nerdy details of the process, here’s what I did: Continue Reading…

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Reflections on Ebojo’s Review of The Early Text of the New Testament

April 23, 2013 — 5 Comments

First, a few less-than-serious thoughts on Ebojo’s review of The Early Text of the New Testament, followed by a few more serious ones:

  1. I can’t recall ever reading a book review which spends close to 50% of its words on typos, etc.
  2. I hadn’t heard of rbecs.org prior to reading about the review on the ETC blog. Why didn’t I think of starting a book review site with some other postgrads? Free books! [Seriously, I like what I see there. Check 'em out].
  3. This might be the last book OUP will be sending to RBECS.
  4. If Ebojo is in interested in proofreading as a side job, interested clients need only visit the book review for an example of the quality of work.
  5. This confirms what I often think after hearing Text-crit. folks speak or write: They mind the details. (Nevermind that a bunch errors wound up in a book written and edited by them). [For the record, I am pro TC and try to keep my TC skills sharp.]
  6. I suspect that very few people, including the editors and authors themselves, read as carefully as Ebojo. In fact, I doubt few, if any, will read through all the observed typos pointed out in the review. Perhaps we should!

On a more serious note, I question how helpful it is to mention typos in this manner in a book review:

Is the purpose to hold authors, editors, publishers accountable? 

Is it to help the publisher make corrections if the book goes into a second printing (which few in our field do)? Why not just inform the publisher, then?

Is it to aid readers who might be confused apart from being alerted to the errors? Perhaps, but few errors cause such confusion.

 

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James-Brother-of-Jesus Ossuary

April 18, 2013 — 3 Comments

Ron Huggins has another nice piece on the James Ossuary, with the clever title, “James D. Tabor’s Drop-Dead-Amazing, Forever-Shape-Shifting, Super-Elastic, Stretch-to-Fit, James-Brother-of-Jesus Ossuary.”

*via Washington Post.

*Photo: Washington Post.

He addresses the claim that the James Ossuary and the “Lost Tenth Ossuary” of the Talpiot tomb are the same, especially with reference to their dimensions:

At the time Tabor claims to have checked and discovered that “the dimensions of the missing tenth ossuary are precisely the same, to the centimeter, to those of the James ossuary,” anyone who bothered to look it up knew that what he said was false, that in fact, the lost tenth ossuary was 4 centimeters longer than the James Ossuary, 1 centimeter wider, and .5 centimeters taller.

James Ossuary (Lemaire):  56 x 25 x 30.5 cm.

Lost 10th Ossuary (Kloner): 60 x 26 x 30 cm.

All this is old news.In the 2007 book by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino, released in connection with Jocobovici’s The Lost Tomb of Jesus, the dimensions of the James Ossuary are reported, this time as 56.5 x 26 x 30.2 cm. (The Jesus Family Tomb, 210).

James Ossuary (Lemaire):                       56  x  25  x 30.5 cm.

James Ossuary (Jacobovici & Pellegrino) 56.5 x 26 x 30.2 cm.

Lost 10th Ossuary (Kloner)                      60   x 26  x 30 cm.

Huggins goes on to counter Jacobovici’s attempts to explain the differences, suggesting that Jacobovici and Tabor really are stretching the ossuary. Give it a read.

 

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Too Many Ph.D.’s?

April 15, 2013 — 2 Comments

From the Chronicle of Higher Education website (originally from University World News): “More Countries Are Asking Whether They Produce Too Many Ph.D.’s, Says New Report.”

According to Rymer, one issue stimulating debate about Ph.D. education is the view that, at least in some disciplines, universities are producing too many Ph.D. graduates.

. . . In a 60-page paper published by Australia’s Group of Eight research-intensive universities, Rymer describes the rise of the Ph.D. in universities across the globe, the reasons why nations want more and more Ph.D.’s, the increasing diversity among doctoral students, funding constraints facing universities and efforts to improve the quality of research training.

He notes that questions have been raised about the number of Ph.D.’s a country produces, or their quality, or the relevance of the training students receive given the employment opportunities on offer.

There is also questioning of whether the intention to increase the number of Ph.D. graduates will be at the expense of their quality and whether the rewards of having a Ph.D. compensate for the costs of acquiring one.

Obviously,

. . . with an increasing proportion of the population holding the qualification, its “elite” nature tends to disappear “as does the premium that can arise from having a credential that very few other people possess.”

*via.
*via.

 

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John T. Carroll’s Commentary on the Gospel of Luke (pt 2)

April 12, 2013 — 4 Comments

For part one of my review, see here. (Amazon link to the book.)

Carroll’s introduction is succinct and adequate, not ground-breaking yet covering real ground. I give it a mark of ‘good’ on a scale of bad to excellent (that’s something like 7 out of 10), particular in view of a semi-technical audience.Luke-commentary-Joshua-Mann

On authorship, Carroll lays out the data but remains neutral, advocating for an understanding of the implied author, likely a Gentile of social status, perhaps a God-fearer. Carroll assumes the author has some amount of rhetorical training.

Regarding the date, he says the evidence only allows a date between 75 (allowing for the composition of Mark and the destruction of the Temple) and 125 AD (time for dissemination to Justin and Marcion). More precise dating relies on assumptions (4).

The audience, according to Carroll, is a diverse group (along side of Theophilus, the named recipient in Luke 1:1-4), likely in an urban center in the eastern Mediterranean (possibly broader than one city) (3). Carroll mirror-reads to gather information about the audience and their situation: “Information about the audience  . .  . only becomes evident as the Gospel unfolds . . .” (17). He suspects the readers already belonged to Christian groups, facing increasing Gentile membership, recent synagogue conflict, left wondering about its identity with the Israel of the Scriptures in the context of the Roman Empire (3–4, cf. 398 ff.). This supposed situation of the audience features prominently throughout the commentary. I will comment more at length on this in part three of my review (next week). Continue Reading…

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John T. Carroll’s Commentary on the Gospel of Luke

April 9, 2013 — 4 Comments

Some time back I mentioned I would be reviewing a handful of books, one of which is John T. Carroll‘s Luke: A Commentary (The New Testament Library; Louisville: WJK, 2012). The following is part one of my review, having had the chance to thoroughly read the introduction and use a good portion of the commentary proper.

Luke-commentary-Joshua-MannI would classify Carroll’s commentary as semi-technical with a broad target audience, owing in part to the purposes of the series of which it is part. It comes in at just over 550 pages (including indices) which, for the Gospel of Luke, is about the right length for an adequate pericope-by-pericope analysis (but not verse-by-verse). Even so, Carroll is able to cover a lot of ground in a short space, and most of the time he does so without sacrificing his prose. The introductory and summary paragraphs that introduce units of text are especially well-written. The nitty-gritty commentary sometimes feels a bit clunky, as is the case with most commentaries.

Carroll is very sensitive to literary and theological issues, and this is perhaps the greatest strength of the commentary. A good example is a line from p. 15:

With regard to time, the web of prophecy (or promise) and fulfillment links the events of the Gospel to the OT and ‘Jewish antiquities,’ and the teleology of the story moves to divine vindication of the crucified Messiah ‘on the third day’ (Luke 24) and onward, through a period of witness under duress (prolepsis in 21:12–19, with realization in Acts) that will span the destruction of the temple, toward the triumphant return of the Lord Jesus in eschatological judgment and deliverance (Luke 21:25–36)

In spite of sparing interaction with secondary sources (I assume this owes again to the purpose of the series) Carroll makes room for brief commentary on text-critical issues. Noteworthy is that Carroll follows the Western non-interpolations of D in Luke 22 and especially 24 (Luke 22:19b­–20; 24:3, 6, 12, 36, 40, 51–52).

On Greek grammatical and syntactical issues I found the commentary wanting. I noticed two issues right off the bat: (1) Claiming the traditional view that the perfect tense indicates a past action with present results (this was applied to the substantival participle in Luke 1:1- τῶν πεπληροφορημένων); and (2) Applying the Granville Sharp rule (which states that an articular, singular noun followed by kai and an anarthrous noun share the same referent) to two plural nouns (“eyewitness” and “ministers of the word” in the preface of Luke). This is true of most commentaries coming off the press today. I am not sure if authors are simply not sure how to incorporate recent linguistic studies in exegetical discussions or whether they are just ignorant of the issues altogether.

Part two here.

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Huggins on Taussig’s ‘Prostituting of Scholarship’

April 8, 2013 — Leave a comment

Ron Huggins recently critiqued Hal Taussig’s A New New Testament, and puts his finger on a problem that I believe plagues more popular-level publishing in our field:

 I am not sure of the exact number but I am quite certain I have at least ten other English translations of the Gospel of Thomas on my shelves in addition to this one. Do we really need another, when so many competent ones are already available?  Yet even then I do not object to someone producing another.  What I do object to is what I consider the prostituting of scholarship through the use of cheap sensationalistic packaging  of the sort employed on Taussig’s ”New” New Testament, which essentially seeks to peddle serious scholarship by reducing it to the level of sensationalistic rubbish.

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