Five Reasons Not to Buy Logos.

This is a “Windows-oriented” evaluation, so the comparison is with BibleWorks. I’d recommend Accordance instead for Mac users (and for Windows users as well who can run Accordance quite well via emulation). And the post also gives a link to a review with a more positive perspective if you want to weigh both sides.

The 5 reasons (you’ll have to read the blog for the thoughtful explanations):

1. Thousands of Books That You’ll Never Use
2. Thousands of Dollars That You’ll Never Save
3. Thousands of Hours That You Would Never Spend
4. You Can Only Read One Book at a Time*
5. Technology Changes

*I would add here, the style “research” encouraged by Logos tends to result in people not reading books, but just snippets from books. And that’s always dangerous since you’re using information out of context.

HT: Bill Combs, on Theologically Driven blog

The beauty of concealed scholarship
by Jeremy Walker

For a taste:

Recent discussions about the place and purpose of seminary need to take into account that much of what passes for gold in the seminary environment turns into tripe in the pulpit, where all the brilliance and erudition that the seminary demands in order to attain its honours needs to be sublimated to the task of preaching the plain truth plainly. That learning cannot and must not be abandoned, but its display needs to be sacrificed on the altar of usefulness. One of the dangers of the seminary is that gifted men may leave it well able to deliver a very competent lecture to their fellow-graduates, but with very little clue as to how to deliver a straightforward sermon to Christ’s hungry flock. The display of learning must be unlearned without unlearning the learning itself.

(Emphasis added)

“The Dating of 1 Clement”
Michael Stover
ThM Thesis
SEBTS, 2012
239 pages(!)

ABSTRACT:

Traditionally, the date of 1 Clement has been very important—it was a main component of Lightfoot’s thesis that caused the 19th century practice of dating “New Testament books in the middle of the second century” to collapse “like a house of cards,” as Neill and Wright relate. The date has also been very much agreed on—even Lightfoot referred to a late first-century date as the “received opinion,” and a few years later C. H. Turner could remark that “its date is fixed by critics of the most different schools with some approach to unanimity.” As recently as 1989, Herron wrote, “One would know very little about the Apostolic Fathers if he did not recall the massive consensus that this letter was written in c 95–96 A.D.” But this is not what one finds in the Anchor Bible Dictionary (anywhere from A.D. 80 to 140), or in a recent introductory article in the Expository Times (A.D. 70 to 140), or in an essay on the subject in New Testament Studies (likely A.D. 70s or 80s), or in a recent book on the Apostolic Fathers published by Hendrickson (A.D. 70, following Herron), or in virtually every major commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews from the last 20 years (A.D. 90 to 120, following Attridge). Yes, the consensus has fallen on hard times. But are such dating alternatives justified? This thesis will argue that the answer to this question is no, that these dating departures have numerous problems associated with them: a fundamental misunderstanding of the traditional arguments for the consensus; a failure to incorporate key external evidence; a mishandling, at times, of the internal evidence. This thesis will argue that there is really no good reason to doubt the consensus, that 1 Clement was more than likely written late in the first century, possibly earlier but definitely not much later.

Here’s Dave Black’s (Mike’s ThM adviser) photo of the committee after the defense:

And while you are on the Cambridge classics site, check out this description of a project that is in its last two years to completion: The Cambridge Greek Lexicon. It is a classical lexicon rather than NT/koine, but any new Greek lexicon is welcome, especially when it contributes new features as this one does. Worth browsing the entire site to get a feel for the CGL.

Left to right, beginning on my left:

Geof Kirkland, “The Use of Jeremiah 50–51 in Revelation 17:1–19:3″

Roger DePriest, “An Examination of Literary Chiasms in the Fourth Gospel in the Light of the Discourse Function of Verbal Aspect”

Neal Cushman, “A Critique of Rikk E. Watts’ Isaianic New Exodus in the Markan Prologue”

Wayne Slusser, “A Discourse Analysis of the Passion Predictions in the Gospel of Mark”

And on the far right, Dr. Bill Arp, my NT colleague

MIA: Rob Green whose schedule made it necessary to graduate in absentia. “Understanding ΕΙΜΙ Periphrastics in the Greek of the New Testament.”

Yes, we had a very busy winter/spring with 5 oral defenses between January and the first week of April.

part two,

part three,

and part four.

His intro to part 1:

For decades, seminary education has endured the slings and arrows of bad jokes, unkind mockery, and downright slander. If I had a quarter for every time I’ve heard a disillusioned preacher intentionally misspeak, recalling his years in “cemetery, I mean seminary,” I might be able to buy something edible. It would be easy for the average Christian to think wrongly, like Nathaniel did with Nazareth, that nothing good can come out of seminary.

Recently, however, the critiques of seminary have taken on a different form. If you’ve been following the blog chatter, you know that it’s become popular almost to assume that seminary is this dangerous place where young people are continually going shipwreck in the faith.

…

Now having spent a number of years in seminary myself, I have a few different reactions to all of this. First, I’m somewhat baffled. Baffled because I think we need to ask the obvious question, “What has so gone wrong that the process whereby we train future pastors, church planters, missionaries, and theologians has degenerated into a crisis of faith?” …

My second response has been one of relief – profound, grateful, relief. Relief, because my years in seminary were a far cry from a crisis of faith. Instead they were four years of concentrated biblical, spiritual, intellectual, and leadership maturation…

And by the conclusion of my seminary experience, there was nothing I wanted to do more than serve Christ by pastoring His church.

Now as a result of these recent blog articles, I’ve done a good bit of reflecting on why my educational experience was so different from what so many others are apparently suffering through in seminary. In my next few posts, I’ll consider some of the factors that I believe resulted in my seminary feeding my soul as opposed to killing my faith.

I commend Tim’s thoughtful articles to anyone concerned about ministry and preparing the next generation of pastors.

I almost wished we’d not begun.
Even now, if people only knew
My sinkings, as we slowly drew
Along through Kappa, Lambda, Mu,
They’d be concerned at my misgiving,
And how I’d mused on a College living
Right down to Sigma,
But feared a stigma
If I succumbed, and left old Donnegan
For weary freshman’s eyes to con again.
And how I often, often wondered
What could have led me to have blundered
So far away from sound theology
To dialects and etymology;
Words, accents not to be breathed by men
Of any country ever again!

Thomas Hardy, 1898, following the death of Liddell
(as in Liddell and Scott)

I ran across this tidbit tonight as I was reading an interesting book (at least it’s interesting to me!): Classical Dictionaries: Past, Present and Future, ed. C. Stray (London: Duckworth, 2010). The poem is on pp. 96–97.

don’t

Bruce’s

I’ll

etc.

Double “quotes” just for comparison.

And


“curly dbl quotes” and curly ‘single’ quotes inserted manually(pasted from Word).

F. F. Bruce, In Retrospect: Remembrance of Things Past (Scotland: Pickering and Inglis/Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980).

For any who do not happen to know of Bruce, he is best known as the Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester from 1959 until his retirement in 1978; he had previously taught at the Universities of Edinburgh, Leeds, and Sheffield. He died in 1990, a month shy of his 80th birthday. The Rylands Chair had previously been held by A. S. Peake, C. H. Dodd, F. C. Burkitt, and T. W. Manson—a distinguished line of NT scholars!

The following are some sample clips which I marked as I’ve read through the book over the past few weeks, usually dipping in for a chapter or two before or after supper, etc. There is no particular theme here, just odds and ends that I found of interest. Perhaps they will be to you as well. And perhaps they won’t!

After recounting some of the preaching and teaching that was common when he grew up in NE Scotland Bruce comments that “If I learned anything in those days, I learned not to inflict Greek on Greekless audiences!” (25). [Good advice for young preachers these days as well---and for some older ones! RD]

With reference to a well-known Bible teacher of his day, Bruce observes that he “was much better at exposing the fallacies of others than at avoiding fallacies of his own, more particularly in the area of prophetic interpretation” (33).

“I have never been in the position of believing what I do simply because I have never been exposed to any other form of belief!” (58).

“There is no conflict between my critical or exegetical activity in a university context and my Bible exposition in church; the former makes a substantial contribution to the latter. At the same time, membership in a local church, involvement in the activities of a worshipping community, helps the academic theologian to remember what his subject is all about, and keeps his studies properly ‘earthed’. One constantly hears complains nowadays, among Catholics and Protestants alike, of the widening gap between scholars’ understanding of Scripture and the use made of it by ‘ordinary’ Christians. The gap would not be so wide, I am sure, if more scholars were to involve themselves in the day-to day life of a local church and communicate the fruits of their scholarship to their fellow church members in a form which the latter could assimilate. I have know some distinguished scholars who did this, to their own enrichment as well as the enrichment of the others (144).

“The Christian acceptance of the Bible as God’s Word written does not in the least inhibit the unfettered study of its contents and setting; on the contrary, it acts as an incentive to their most detailed and comprehensive investigation” (144).

“When once some people begin to write, they find it difficult to stop: this condition is technically called cacoethes scribendi—in plain English, ‘scribbler’s itch’.
“…Scribbler’s itch normally does not begin at the start of the process; one must have begun to scribble before the itch comes on” (177).

“I have met students who claimed to ‘know Greek’ on the basis of their acquaintance with the Greek New Testament; even if that latter acquaintance were exhaustive, it would no more amount to a knowledge of Greek than acquaintance with the English New Testament would amount to a knowledge of English. There is a story told of A. S. Peake writing a Greek word on the blackboard of his Manchester classroom, and one of his students saying, ‘You needn’t write it down, Doctor; we know Greek.’ To which he replied, ‘I wish I did.’ To know a language, even an ancient language, involves having such a feel for its usage that one can tell, almost as by instinct, whether a construction is permissible or not, or whether a translation is possible or not” (293). [That is a high standard for knowing Greek, one that I will likely never attain; I shall have to settle for knowing a little bit about Greek. RD]

“When I try to review as objectively as possible the movement of my mind over the years, one thing that impresses me is the increasing clarity with which I see as fundamental to my thought and life the justifying grace of God, brought near to mankind in the vicarious sacrifice of Christ and offered for acceptance by faith” (309).

“Many of my positions are indeed conservative; but I hold them not because they are conservative—still less because I myself am conservative—but because I believe they are the positions to which the evidence leads” (309).

“I should not find the career of a Bible teacher* so satisfying as I do if I were not persuaded that the Bible is God’s word written. The fact that I am so persuaded means that I must not come to the Bible with my own preconceptions of what the Bible, as God’s word written, can or cannot say. It is important to determine by the canons of grammatical, textual, historical and literary study, what it actually does say” (311). [*A humble way of referring to the Rylands Chair! RD]

“It is by the patient study of the text that I come to understand better not only what the text itself means but also what is involved in biblical inspiration. My doctrine of Scripture is based on my study of Scripture, not vice versa (311).