The review essay I wrote concerning Douglas Campbell’s Deliverance of God (Reviews in Religion and Theology) has now been published.  It is about 8 pages long and is called: “Douglas Campbell’s Startling Alternative to Traditional Paradigms of Pauline Soteriology.”

The website is here (If the link doesn’t work for you, google-search on “Reviews in Religion and Theology” and navigate to the link “View Content Online” – you will only gain access to my article if you have approval through a subscription)

Without rehearsing the whole review, I will just say that I enjoyed reading Doug’s book, I learned much from it, there was a good deal that I agreed with, but I did not find his “alternative” reading more convincing than the traditional one. In the end, I think it will continue to be read and be useful, but more for its critiques than its reconstructions.

I am preparing lectures for a course next summer on the Gospel of John and I wanted to get my students familiar with ancient expectations of what the messiah would be like. One way to teach about how early Jewish traditions of Messianism were interpreted is to point students to Messianic pretenders and their followers.

I found THIS website which offers lists by time period and also the sources that refer to such people.  Priceless!

(If the link doesn’t work, try to go directly: http://www.livius.org/men-mh/messiah/messiah00.html#overview)

I have recently come into some stipend money to build up reference materials that I can use to prepare a course on John’s Gospel. Aside from commentaries, what other “must-have” resources on the Fourth Gospel would you recommend (specifically things that I can find on Amazon marketplace and Half.com, not OOP)?

It is nice to have reached the 200,000 mark in terms of blog hits (thank you wordpress for the stats!). I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging, despite my sparse postings in the last couple of months.

I am in the middle of moving from Ashland, Ohio to Seattle, WA. I am currently teaching a hermeneutics course at Ashland and that is taking up significant chunks of my time. Otherwise, my time is spent training as Virtual Campus faculty for Asbury Seminary and finishing up a book project I am working on.

I hope to be more active on the blog here especially in late August and following (certainly in the run up to SBL).

A special thanks to those that read and comment here. I highly value feedback and dialogue.

I love my gadgets. I have an old Windows laptop, an older Mac laptop (donated to me from my dad), and an ipod touch. I have been looking for a way to easily share files between these platforms. One option is to use a USB drive, but what about the ipod touch? What about Google-docs? Ok, but always opening a browser is a hassle.

Dropbox is the solution! AND ITS FREE! It is a program that sets up a special folder on your desktop (of Mac or PC) and you literally just drag and “drop” files into it. It syncs up with other computers or systems with the same dropbox account. itunes has dropbox applications for ipods and ipads that are really easy to use.

For free, you get 2GB worth of online space. If all your computers crash at the same time, you still have all of those files backed up on the dropbox server.

Here’s the thing – if you are referred (by me!), you will get extra space free and so will I.  So, instead of just going over to http://www.dropbox.com and signing up, leave a comment that you are interested and I will send you my referral link. You don’t need to specify your email address in the “comment” window, but do so in the personal information window of the comment screen because it will be visible to me and only me.

Recap: If you are interested in getting this for free, leave a comment and I will help you get more online storage space! Please give some feedback in the comments below if you have tried Dropbox and like it.

NB: Dropbox also works well for collaborative works where you share a dropbox folder with some friends or colleagues and you can modify a document in the folder for others to see and they can edit it as well.  Great for co-writing articles, though I haven’t tried it yet!

I have always liked to use art in my Powerpoint slides when teaching on the Bible. I recently discovered an excellent resource that has collected pieces of art and codified it according to which Biblical text it would be associated with. The pictures come from a variety of places and time periods. Check it out here.

Of course every month I try to point out a new Expository Times – July issue is online now. Lena Sofia-Tiemeyer has a nice article on reading Ezekiel as Christian Scripture (which originated as a paper at the Tyndale summer conference last year).

Also, I don’t know how new this is, but I have benefited from reading Stan Porter’s article in McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry called “The Future of Theology and Religious Studies from a Confessional Standpoint” which can be found here.

In the latest Biblical Interpretation there are some really interesting-looking reviews from Jerry Sumney, Mary Coloe, David Rensberger, and others.

For the next few months, I am excited to occupy my thoughts reading the new book of previously untranslated essays and lectures from the late Ernst Kaesemann entitled: On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene (Eerdmans, 2010).

I will be reviewing it for Scottish Journal of Theology, a publication that I think is quite fitting for a review of the work of such a legend in NT theology. I will, of course, check in from time to time here to offer some reflections.

Fellow blogger John Anderson asked me about my experience with WdG as far as publishing my dissertation as a monograph. While I will address John’s questions about the length of the process, I will ask make some general comments.

First, I went with WdG because it is a world-class publisher and the BZNW series is excellent. I appreciate that they have monographs in both German and English and that the editors are well-respected (including James DG Dunn). On a more superficial note, I really like the covers – both material and color-scheme.

Several people brought WdG to my attention, including Loren Stuckenbruck and Dunn. Another factor was timing – I wanted my dissertation published rather quickly so I wanted a publisher (1) with a quick turnaround time for assessing its suitability for publication and (2) that usually requires few changes to the text (i.e. they will publish it more or less “as is”). WdG and Mohr Siebeck both tend to fit that bill.

I submitted it only a few weeks after my viva – perhaps about a month after my viva. I took that time to make the suggested corrections from my examiners – some of them involving major re-writing. The decision took about 6 weeks. I had to make about 30-40 corrections to phrasing, typos, etc… That process took only a few days. The major work is that WdG requires the author to typeset the manuscript – to make a camera-ready copy. This involves major re-formatting in WORD and basically making it look like what they will eventually print out.

They asked me how long this process would take. I didn’t know, but I gave myself plenty of time – about 9 months. I turned it in at about 8 months and 2 weeks. I spent probably 150-200 hours on the typesetting, but much of that time was spent figuring out how to use some of the advanced formatting features of WORD.

I am pleased with my relationship with WdG and they were very kind and patient throughout the process.  They offered to typeset the manuscript for me for a fee (something like $1000-1500, but in the process of typesetting I caught all kinds of mistakes and poor wording, so it worked out for the best. Plus, I don’t have that kind of money to spend on something I could do myself.

Here is a quick snapshot of the timeline

July 20, 2009: defense of thesis

August 20, 2009: submit pdf file of thesis to WdG

October 30, 2009: acceptance into BZNW

June 1, 2010: final submission of pdf camera-ready copy

July 15, 2010: projected publication date

July 16, 2010: take a long nap

I have sent the camera-ready file to the printers and they have given me a publication date of July 15, 2010.

Again, you can view the description here.