becoming

Professor Ben Witherington III just told us that his commentary on Matthew in the new Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary series is out.

You can read the whole introductory chapter (54 pages!) here. 

 

 

As mentioned before, Prof. BW3 is working on his commentary on James. This morning he posted an excerpt of it entitled "JAMES—SAPIENTIAL SCRIBE OR CREATIVE SAGE?"

As he mentioned in the comment section, this commentary on James won’t come out until Fall of 2007 (!). It is supposed to be the 2nd volume of a 3-volume series:

1. Volume 1: Pastoral (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus) and Johannine Epistles (Fall 2006)
2. Volume 2: James & Hebrews (Fall 2007)
3. Volume 3: 1 & 2 Peter, Jude (Fall 2008)

The series is entitled Letters and Homilies of the New Testament, from IVP.

Ben Witherington is working on his commentary on James and this morning he has a good reflection on what is meant by "'reckon it all joy" as mentioned in James 1:2.

Earlier on, there was another excellent post on James 4:1-4 and lust.

It is just wonderful to know that biblical scholar can/do have reflections like that during their writing and research. It is something that should be honored in the academic world nowadays.

 

CBS 48 Hours Mystery — The Mystery of Christmas.

Here is the transcript for part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of the show.

As Ben Witherington explains in his blog, the show "was to present the more skeptical points of view first in the first half of the show, being fair to their views, and then we would go to the Holy Land and see if there might be hard evidence from archaeological etc. that these stories could be true." This second part of the programme was led by Ben himself and filmed in Israel.

I strongly urge you to take some time to go over it.