Nerd Stuff: The Book Order Has Arrived

One of the best parts of my job is that, from time to time, I get to buy some new books. Last Thursday I order eight books from amazon.com and they arrived today. I'm a little excited. Okay, I'm a lot excited! I know, I know. I'm a total nerd. But, because the odds are good that you are also a nerd, here are the books that arrived today.

The Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament by John Walton, et. al. 

The Bible Background Commentary: New Testament by Craig Keener. I really wanted to get the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Background Commentaries for both the Old & New Testaments, but I settled on these instead. These should be excellent resources, particularly as I prepare for the text track of e4 this fall.

Warranted Christian Belief by Alvin Plantinga. I'll consider myself brilliant if I a) finish this book and b) understand ten percent of it. Woohoo!

Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told by Bradley Wright. I saw this over at Scot McKnight's blog, the Jesus Creed, and I'm very much looking forward to reading it. What a provocative title!

Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament by John Walton. Yep, I'm a nerd.

God is Great, God is Good by William Lane Craig, et. al. I've never read anything by Craig, who does a lot of apologetics, but this caught my eye. I'm looking forward to hearing from the various authors, most of whom I've not read anything else.

The Bible Among the Myths by John Oswalt. Yep! I'm still a nerd!

The Lost World of Genesis One by John Walton. This is the one I'm most looking forward to. I saw it reviewed by James-Michael Smith at the Discipleship Dojo and immediately wanted to read it, but haven't had the opportunity to get it until now. I think if there's one chapter in the Bible we've gotten wrong it's Genesis 1. (Actually, you could probably say Genesis 1 and 2 and Revelation 21 and 22 are the most misunderstood chapters in the Bible. Funny how we've gotten a lot of the stuff in the middle but missed the stuff at the beginning and the end.) This will be my next book review, but don't expect it this Friday. My schedule has picked up a bit so I don't have as much time to read, more's the pity.

Nerd Stuff: Metanarrative

This is an article I posted on the Equipping Journal webpage of my church's site. I repost it here because I am a nerd, and if you are reading this, then you are probably a nerd, too.

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Maybe you’ve heard the word “metanarrative” before. It’s a five dollar word that educated types like to throw around to make other people regret they didn’t spend tens of thousands of dollars on a post-graduate degree. (And yes, I’m one of those guys. Sorry.) Metanarrative just means Big Story. It’s the Story behind and above the story. You might say the metanarrative of the Lord of the Rings is the triumph of Good over Evil in spite of human frailty and temptation to power. It’s not just about hobbits and elves and rings—it’s about you and me and the struggle between Good and Evil we find ourselves in every day.

The Bible has a metanarrative. There is a Story behind all the stories of the Bible—behind all the books and poems and laws and prophecies there lies a Big Story that holds them all together. The Big Story of the Bible is just like any other story. It has plot, characters, settings, moods—even occasional pyrotechnics! In order to see the metanarrative of the Bible you have to pull back so that you can see, as it were, the whole Scripture lying open in a scroll before you. When you see the whole Bible you find that the plot is this: Creation; Rebellion; Redemption Pursued; Redemption Accomplished; ReCreation.

Creation

“In the beginning, God.” That’s how the story starts. The first actor on the stage and the first one to speak is God. It all starts with him. He creates everything and calls it good. And then he creates humans and calls them very good. In the beginning, it’s all good.

Rebellion

Well, that didn’t last long. By the time you get to the third chapter of the Bible humans are screwing things up by rebelling against God. It’s not all good anymore. In fact, it’s very, very bad. Now that humans have sinned (which is basically rebelling against God), they have invited death into creation as a consequence. And it’s not long before brothers start killing each other. Things spiral quickly into chaos until God regrets creating humans in the first place, so he sends a catastrophic flood to start over with the only good family left on earth. But, of course, that doesn’t really solve anything, and it isn’t long before humanity is back on the same path it was pursuing before the flood.

Redemption Pursued

Then along comes this old fella named Abraham, and God decides that he’s going to undo everything that humanity has done through this guy and his descendants. Long story short, Abraham’s descendants become the nation of Israel, whom God establishes through their great, triumphant exodus from slavery in Egypt. (By the way, the Exodus is the most important event in the Old Testament, so you would do well to study up on it.) God’s intention is to redeem the whole world from sin and death and evil through Israel. But you probably already know how this story ends—not good! Israel winds up becoming just as sinful as everyone else, so there’s no way that they can fulfill their role as the hope of the world. God’s going to have to do something else—something drastic.

Redemption Accomplished

Jesus. Because the people God chose to be the vehicle of redemption for mankind failed to live up to their end of the bargain, he decided to do it himself. So God sent his son Jesus to become a human. (I know you’ve heard that a million times, but think about it. Think about it again. God. Became. Human.) Jesus came and did what Israel had failed to do—keep their agreement with God. And the thing is, when God became human, we killed him. Jesus was crucified like a brigand or criminal. But then he rose again! He came back from death, and his resurrection is the victory over sin and death that we had been waiting for all this time! The redemption that God had promised would come way back when we first rebelled finally happened in Jesus’ death and resurrection.

ReCreation

But that’s not the end of the story, because now Jesus is busy making all things new—that means me and you. God is at work ReCreating the cosmos, and he’s starting with us humans, the people who sent everything into this downward spiral in the first place. Someday, when he decides the time is right, Jesus is going to come back and judge everyone, and that judgment will be the ultimate act of ReCreation, because when he has judged he will ReCreate everything—not just you and me but the heavens and the earth as well. (If you think our world is beautiful now, just wait until Jesus gets to work and Yosemite Valley is the least beautiful place on earth.) Then he will come down here and live with us for all eternity.

That’s the metanarrative of the Bible. The Big Story. All the little stories are just retellings of the Big Story (Scot McKnight calls them wiki-stories), and the Big Story is what holds them all together. And now it’s our turn. It’s our turn to find ourselves in the story (hint: we’re in the ReCreation part) and tell wiki-stories of the Big Story, and to live out the implications of the Big Story so that the world can know that there really is a Storyteller behind and above it all.

Nerd Stuff: Book Sale

This past Saturday morning I went to my very first book sale! While in seminary at Gordon-Conwell, my friends would often invite me to the Christian Book Distributors (CBD) book sale, but I was too lazy to ever go. But this past weekend I had no excuse except to sleep in, and since my kids wake me up at 3:00am and 6:00am every day, I'm now physically unable to sleep into the 7's.

This particular book sale was the bi-annual Augsburg Fortress Press sale where you can get hardcovers for $2 and softcovers for $1. That's right, you can purchase the N.T. Wright New Testament trilogy for a grand total of $3. I think I paid somewhere north of $100 for these books in seminary.

Needless to say, the book sale was epic. I bought 45 books for 50 dollars. Let me blog that again for emphasis, this time in all caps. I BOUGHT 45 BOOKS FOR 50 DOLLARS!! The treasures included:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer | Ethics ($2)
Walter Brueggemann | Theology of the Old Testament ($1)
E.P. Sanders | Paul & Palestinian Judaism ($1)
Robert Stewart | The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan & N.T. Wright in Debate ($1)
Richard Horsley | Jesus in Context ($1)
Brevard Childs | Old Testament Theology in Canonical Context ($1)

Yes, I realize that this makes me a huge nerd. But I'm okay with that. You can have my lunch money, just please don't take my books.

Nerd Stuff: NT Manuscripts

Here's another nerd blog that I first wrote up for my church.

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It seems that the Bible is constantly coming under attack as being hopelessly full of errors and contradictions, and that the many manuscripts on which our translations are based are unreliable. The critique normally takes the line that too large a gap of time exists between the original documents and the earliest copies we have found. Hundreds of years have elapsed, they tell us, between the first writing and the copies we now possess. Who knows how the documents might have been altered? Who knows what absurd theological points (like the divinity of Christ) have been inserted in the interim? But is this really the case? I suppose I wouldn't be writing this if it were.

The New Testament is far and away the best-attested ancient document. What I mean by this is that there are hundreds and hundreds of early "copies", or manuscripts that date to within a reasonable amount of time to the first composition of the various books. The number of manuscripts (whether in whole or fragments) is estimated at 5000, with some dating to within a few decades, and many within three centuries.

By means of comparison, consider the second best-attested ancient document, Homer's Iliad. This epic Greek poem has about a tenth of the manuscripts as the NT, and the earliest document we have was written roughly 1200 years after Homer first composed the story. The best document, called Venetus A, is preserved from the tenth century AD, almost 2000 years later!

What we have with the NT is an embarrassment of riches. So many documents. So early. So similar. Consider one document, called p52. It contains a portion of the gospel of John, which was written in about 90. Scholars have dated p52 to about 125. You can do the math. 35 years! Less than a generation! Consider also that p52 was written in Alexandria, Egypt, and John wrote his gospel in Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey. That means that the Gospel of John was circulating throughout the Roman Empire in less than a generation.

Consider also Codex Sinaiticus, which was written in the middle of the 4th century and contains the complete New Testament, as well as about half of the Old Testament. Again, you can do the math. The whole New Testament was compiled and copied less than 300 years after it was written. When you consider that we're dealing with multiple authors at different times from varying locations working without the benefit of modern technology, this is truly a remarkable feat. So don't let Dan Brown get you down. The New Testament is the most reliable ancient document around.

Nerd Stuff: Textual Criticism

I wrote the following article on my church's blog and thought it was so nerdy I'd repost it here.

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How do we get our English Bibles? What are the documents that the Bible translators work from? Haven't all of the original documents been lost or destroyed? Is it true that all we have now are copies of copies and that they are full of errors?

The questions of Bible translation are difficult and complex. Some scholars would have you believe that we are in an impossible position because we don't have any original documents and all we're left with is a bunch of error-ridden copies of copies [of copies of copies...]. Like in the game "Telephone" where a message is passed from person to person and is inevitably changed at the end, the message of Scripture has been passed on so many times that we can't possibly discover the original. Bart Ehrman even says that there are more errors in our New Testament documents than there are words!

And technically speaking, he's right. There are more errors than the words. And we don't have any of the original documents. All we have are copies of copies and all of them are at least slightly different from each other. <sarcasm>What a hopeless state we're in! We can't possibly trust the Bible! My whole system of faith is falling apart!</sarcasm> 

While it would certainly be easier if we had all of the original manuscripts of the Bible, we are not without hope. We can identify, with as much assurance as possible, the original readings of Scripture. As the man says, "There's an app for that." Our app is called textual criticism, and it is a proven scientific method for determining the original reading of ancient texts. Let's do a contemporary English example.

Imagine that you've got five pieces of paper that are all supposed to say the same thing, but they're all different. Your task is to reconstruct the original message of which these five are copies. Let's look at them:

1. Thee Bucki's will win the national champion ship this year.
2. The Buckees wil wind the nashunal championship this year.
3. The Buckeyes will win the Big Ten Championship this year.
4. The Wolverines will win the National Championship this year.
5. The Buckeyes will win the National Championship this decade.

Now let's examine each one in turn. #1 was clearly written by someone unfamiliar with college football, but you can still discern a coherent message if you know what they probably meant to say. #2 was written by an awful speller. #3 was written by someone who lacked faith. #4 was written by a heretic. #5 was written by a revisionist historian.

With these five texts in front of you, you can begin to piece together the original message. The first word is obviously The, with the only variant being a misspelling. The second word is interesting, not because of the misspellings, but because of #4's insertion of "Wolverines". In this instance, you would likely conclude that the original reading is Buckeyes, but you may also add a footnote that says something like, "one obviously heretical document substitutes Wolverines". The third, fourth, and fifth words are easily discernible: will win the. The sixth word is interesting because you have another substitution. But which one is it? By all appearances it should be National, but if document #3 is unusually credible and strong, it could be Big Ten. In this case, it's wisest to go with National, but to also include a footnote for Big Ten. The seventh and eighth words are clearly Championship this. The final word seems obvious, but we have another example of a single pesky variant. Here again, we'll choose year but have a footnote for decade.

So our final text would read: The Buckeyes¹ will win the National² Championship this year³.

And we can be quite certain that this is, indeed, the word of the Lord.