Selling your UK PhD to employers

I recently interviewed for an academic job (unsuccessfully!) and for the second time now the issue came up of uk phd students having too narrow expertise.  If you are only researching for your thesis and not taking courses, does that not make you incapable of teaching more broadly?  This is the kind of issue you [...]

New Interpreter’s Dict of the Bible I-Ma (vol. 3): notes

I just received for review the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible I-Ma (Vol. 3) (Abingdon, 2008). I have the first two volumes and I have found the articles to be well-written and the contributors are highly respected scholars internationally. How does it compare with the Anchor Bible Dictionary? First, there are [...]

Bookstore page added

Please note that I have added a bookstore page (see tabs at top of blog). I will continue to expand what is in there, but I thought it might be nice to highlight what I think are the best commentaries, survey books, textbooks, scholarship, etc…
The bookstore is still a work-in-progress, but I have added several [...]

Bibleworks 8 (Review Part 1): First Impressions

I installed the version 8 upgrade of Bibleworks yesterday. I am very excited to have this new version and I have already found many of the new features very useful. Here are some first impressions that are noteworthy.
- Many features seem streamlined without the kind of total-changeover that can be daunting to users familiar [...]

Need Help from Greco-Roman specialists…

I am doing some research on the history, habits, strategies, ethos, and organization of the Roman Army from its inception to the the end of the first century AD.  I can find books on the Roman army relatively well (though suggestions of highly respected authors and sources are welcome!).  I need to get to know [...]

Review of Dunn’ BFJ (Sources)

In our last post on Dunn’s Beginning from Jerusalem we noted his discussion of how a Jewish sect became a Gentile religion (i.e. Jesus to Paul). Dunn goes on (in ch. 20) to discussion various solutions to this issue including F.C. Baur’s approach, the history-of-religions approach, gnosticism theories, and sociological approaches. Dunn sees [...]

Converting from Bibleworks Greek to Unicode

I have been asked in some comments how I convert from Bibleworks font to unicode in a Word doc.  It can all be done within Word’s add-in function once you install Galaxie’s biblescript program.  See HERE.
On such matters and more see Mark Hoffmann’s excellent post HERE.

James Dunn and New Testament Theology

Ok.  It is purely coincidence that I have mentioned Dunn in most of my recent posts, but he is deserving of yet another one.  I just saw an announcement of a new New Testament Theology by Dunn (Abingdon, 2009).  It appears that it should be available in June or July.  See description below:
In this third [...]

In Defense of Academic Generalists

I have now seen several posts on Mike Bird and Craig Keener’s excellent little article in the SBL forum on being academic generalists (see HERE).  I very much resonated with what Bird and Keener had to say.  For one’s thesis research he or she will no doubt focus and learn much about one area (or [...]

Dunn’s BfJ (The Quest for the Historical Church)

This is the first installment of my review of James D.G. Dunn’s Beginning from Jerusalem (Eerdmans, 2009) where this master theologian and biblical historian treats the emergence of ‘Christianity’ in the period 30-70CE.
The first chapter (ch. 20, following the chapter numbering ending from Jesus Remembered) engages in the ‘quest for the historical church’.  ‘After Jesus, [...]