These movies are all intellectual enterprises and require some significant concentration. These are not movies for a leisurely night with friends or a significant other. There are a couple of foreign language movies in this collection as well as two silent movies. If you are a theologian or just prone to deep thinking about theology, I strongly recommend that you see these movies if you haven't already! I guarantee that they will stimulate your thinking.
Profs. Brettler and McKenzie have recently published books entitled How to Read the Bible. These are welcome additions to Gordon D. Fee's similarly titled books. I strongly recommend all four of these books to people who are willing to learn how to read the Bible from scholars (and men of faith) who have studied these texts as a professional, personal, and spiritual discipline:
How to Read the Bible: Translating the Culture of the Bible by Marc Zvi Brettler
In his new book, master Bible scholar and teacher Marc Brettler argues that today's contemporary readers can only understand the ancient Hebrew Scripture by knowing more about the culture that produced it. And so Brettler unpacks the literary conventions, ideological assumptions, and historical conditions that inform the biblical text and demonstrates how modern critical scholarship and archaeological discoveries shed light on this fascinating and complex literature.
How to Read the Bible: History, Prophecy, Literature — Why Modern Readers Need to Know the Difference, and What It Means for Faith Today by Stephen McKenzie
McKenzie argues that to comprehend the Bible we must grasp the intentions of the biblical authors themselves—what sort of texts they thought they were writing and how they would have been understood by their intended audience. In short, we must recognize the genres to which these texts belong. McKenzie examines several genres that are typically misunderstood, offering careful readings of specific texts to show how the confusion arises, and how knowing the genre produces a correct reading.
How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon D. Fee
The primary task of Bible study is to determine what the Scriptures meant at the time they were written and how that meaning applies to us today. This vital guide focuses on the historical contexts of the Bible and explains differences between the Old Testament narratives, the Epistles, Gospels, Parables, Psalms and more. It's a practical approach to Bible study—one that makes good sense and is easy to understand. This new edition includes, among other changes, a new section on the Song of Songs and an updated list of recommended commentaries and resources.
How to Read the Bible Book by Book by Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart
Reading the Bible need not be a haphazard journey through strange and bewildering territory. Like an experienced tour guide, How to Read the Bible Book by Book takes you by the hand and walks you through the Scriptures. For each book of the Bible, the authors start with a quick snapshot, then expand the view to help you better understand its key elements and how it fits into the grand narrative of the Bible. Written by two top evangelical scholars, this survey is designed to get you actually reading the Bible knowledgeably and understanding it accurately.
I recently discovered these new products from Zondervan that I think are likely to be quite helpful to people who struggle in learning the biblical languages:
These two CDs with a booklet enable a person who is taking biblical Hebrew to work on, by ear as well as through the eyes, all vocabulary words that occur in the Old Testament 20 times or more and all the names of people in the Old Testament that occur 100 times or more. A 40 page booklet containing the entire word list and glosses accompanies the CDs.
The vocabulary is read with a 'classical' pronounciation rather than a modern Israeli Hebrew pronounciation, which adds a learning twist for those who have learned the latter, but I still found it possible to quickly determine the word as I would have pronounced it. For students and scholars of New Testament Greek, there is a parallel product as well as a helpful readings CD:
These two CDs with booklet enable a person who is taking biblical Greek to work on, by ear as well as through the eyes, all vocabulary words that occur in the New Testament ten times or more. Read by Jonathan T. Pennington using the Erasmian pronunciation for New Testament Greek vocabulary.
Readings in the Greek New Testament helps you develop fluency in biblical Greek as a spoken language. The vocabulary and grammar will become second nature as you listen to Greek in its working context, articulated with clarity and inflection. Jonathan Pennington reads select passages from the Greek New Testament, including the Sermon on the Mount, the entire book of 1 John, and all the passages included in William Mounce’s A Graded Reader of Biblical Greek.
Herodotus' Histories can be read in many ways. Their literary qualities, never in dispute, can be more fully appreciated in the light of recent developments in the study of pragmatics, narratology, and orality. Their intellectual status has been radically reassessed: no longer regarded as naïve and 'archaic', the Histories are now seen as very much a product of the intellectual climate of their own day - not only subject to contemporary literary, religious, moral and social influences, but actively contributing to the great debates of their time. Their reliability as historical and ethnographic accounts, a matter of controversy even in antiquity, is being debated with renewed vigour and increasing sophistication. This companion offers an up-to-date and in-depth overview of all these current approaches to Herodotus’ remarkable work.
I reviewed five articles from this volume last year:
Sometime ago, Benjamin Myers of Faith and Theology did a terrific series on Karl Barth. In a mere seventeen short and concise posts, he expertly summarized this great theologian's Church Dogmatics. This was no small task! I'd hate for the series to get lost in Ben Myers' blog archives so I wanted to highlight it again and especially encourage those of you unfamiliar with Karl Barth's work to read it and discover the important contributions of this great thinker. Here's the series:
The employees at Oak Tree Software have decided to join the blogosphere with an official company blog. David Lang writes in the inaugural post that it's their "goal to post new blog entries about two to three times a week." Check out the new Accordance Blog!
Bubblewrap and Penguins
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