Mark Goodacre and Alan Garrow are due to meet at this year’s British New Testament Conference at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, 6‐8th September. The issues at the heart of the $1,000 Challenge will be debated in the Synoptic Gospels...
Sometimes when a New Testament writer quotes the Old Testament, the two passages do not match precisely. Is the New Testament writer misquoting the Old Testament? Or is there another explanation? Luke records that when Jesus began his ministry, he...
See Philippians in high definition Divided into preachable chunks, High Definition Commentary: Philippians features clear and concise big ideas of the passage, as well as custom-designed graphics that you can export directly for sermons or Bible...
In 2007, James R. Royse published his exceptional study on the scribal habits of six early New Testament papyri. In his work, Royse revolutionized text critics’ understanding of the text-critical canon lectio brevior potior or, “the shorter reading...
I had the great honor of interviewing Stephen Chester, Professor of New Testament at North Park Theological Seminary, about his new book, Reading Paul with the Reformers: Reconciling Old and New Perspectives (Eerdmans, 2017). In the interview...
Two weeks ago, Tavis Bohlinger wrote a blogpost in which he encouraged students and scholars of the New Testament to focus on the “common dialect,” ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος of the Greek language—that is, the Greek spoken roughly between 300 BCE and 300 CE...
by Vinh T. Nguyen In his recent post Four Reasons to Master Koine (and to Leave Attic Alone), Tavis Bohlinger made a plea to specifically focus on Koine in order to master “this particular type of Greek as thoroughly as possible.” This post...
Learning to read Koine (or biblical) Greek is essential, if you are training for church ministry, an academically focused career in biblical studies, or simply as a means to reading the New Testament in its original language. Even while I was in...
by Tavis Bohlinger* Yesterday we celebrated International LXX Day by publishing an essay on The Origin of the LXX. Today we are pleased to present the second half of that essay, because, well, we just love the Septuagint here at Logos (this proves...
One of the most distinguished commentary series of the modern era is the International Critical Commentary, or ICC. The ICC has been around for over 130 years, but the history of the series is a bit hard to trace.
Logos is on the brink of shipping an exceptional resource for those working in Early Christian studies, and useful for those wishing to expand their research capabilities in the NT. The Eerdman’s Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and...
by Craig A. Evans The last quarter-century has seen some impressive advances in biblical archaeology, especially relating to the time that we call the First Temple period (roughly 1000–600 BC) and the time of Jesus and the beginnings of the...
by Grant R. Osborne I just realized my ministry lasted exactly fifty years, from my first church in Newark, Ohio, in 1966 to retiring from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 2016. Forty of those years were at Trinity. I didn’t just like my job...
The God of the Old Testament wants his enemies’ blood shed for their abominations; the God of the New Testament wants to shed his own blood for his enemies’ abominations. Since the first century, this dilemma has led many Christian (and non...
Rev. Dr. Alan Garrow’s work recently enjoyed attention as the focus of the $1,000 Synoptic Problem Challenge—as taken up by Mark Goodacre on Bart Ehrman’s blog (we covered the debate here, here, and here). While having an interest in the Synoptic...
You’ve never read Barth’s lectures on Ephesians. I guarantee you that this is the case, unless, however, you meet the following two criteria: (1) you read German (quite well), and (2) you somehow managed to get a hold of the German edition of 2009...
A mysterious commenter on Bart Ehrman’s blog has offered him a $1,000 challenge regarding Q. Mark Goodacre has taken up the challenge. And this all came about because of Alan Garrow. Here’s the short version: Alan Garrow has put together...
Over 70 volumes of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (P.Oxy.) have been published in print. These volumes are expensive and typically available only in well-stocked libraries. But the first 15 volumes (1898–1923), covering over 1,800 ancient papyri retrieved...
Using a commentary like you use a lexicon — it’s not really a far-fetched idea. There are scads of context-sensitive discussions of Greek and Hebrew words locked away in commentaries. As a matter of fact, Ceslas Spicq’s justly famous (and...
In its modern form, the study of Christian origins has been dominated by the study of the apostle Paul. Take, for instance, Johannes Weiss’s précis of nineteenth-century scholarship on Christian origins, written in 1917: ‘’The history of...
We are honored to have Drs. Peter Williams and Dirk Jongkind of Tyndale House, Cambridge, join us on theLAB to discuss the Tyndale House Edition of the Greek New Testament (THGNT). Peter and Dirk, it’s a true honor to be able to speak with you both...
The fuller version of this article was just published in the Journal of Biblical Literature as “The Messiah Is ‘the Holy One’:ὁ ἅγιος τοῦ θεοῦ as a Messianic Title in Mark 1:24” JBL 136, no. 2 (2017): 417–433. The Messiah is the Holy One of God...
It is inevitable that every student of ancient Greek will find a time when they feel out of their depth. Greek literature, as with literature in any language, ranges from relatively easy to read to frustratingly complex. And, since literary Greek...
Ἀγωνίζομαι is a Greek word commonly abused by Bible interpreters; and I think it raises an interesting test case for what to do when major Bible translations differ. In this post, I want to try to discern what that word is used to mean in its...
Do we know for certain that Jesus can be found in the OT? In our efforts to “read backwards,” are we finding Christ where perhaps he should not be found? Or do we have license as Spirit-led interpreters of Scripture to allegorize as we see fit, and...
While many New Testament scholars may know a whole lot about Matthew–Revelation, many lack the ability to pick up and read Josephus and Clement in the original Greek, or Seneca and Cicero in Latin. This reveals not just a severe lack of language...
Not since the Reformation has there been a challenge to the five solas as persistent and potentially persuasive as Matthew W. Bates’ third book, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Grand...
As the writer of Ecclesiastes mourns, and as John the Evangelist hints, there is no end to the number of works one might consult for acquiring knowledge. When commencing research for a paper or sermon, a critically important skill is that of...
“Revisionist history” is inherently redundant, since all history is revised. As George Bernard Shaw writes: “History is always out of date,” and is rewritten to lie, to burn, and to stick in our throats. That is to say, a revision may seek to...
One fine South Carolina day my little family was driving down the road listening to the radio, and on came “Rudy Mancke’s Nature Notes,” a delightful little minute-long feature by a local naturalist who talks about flora and fauna in the Palmetto...