This evening, UPS arrived at my door with a package. Inside—Benjamin J. M. Johnson’s Reading David and Goliath in Greek and Hebrew—was a very generous gift from one of mentors at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Apparently, he read my twitter feed, wherein I linked to William Brown’s review of the volume and commented that I’d love to get my hands on it. And now, I’ve got my hands on it! To the professor who has taught and continues to teach me how to never stop learning, never settle for less than I’m capable of, and how to constantly demonstrate a spirit of generosity, “thank you.”

This now makes one of five volumes I’m hoping to tackle and review on the blog in the coming months. I’ve recently completed reading Mark Sheridan’s Language for God in Patristic Tradition, an excellent work that I continue to mull over. I look forward to sharing some of my thoughts on it in the coming days.

The next book on my list is Odd Magne Bakke’s Concord and Peace: A Rhetorical Analysis of the First Letter of Clement with an Emphasis on the Language of Unity and Sedition. This is the monograph form of Bakke’s dissertation, a work that seeks to demonstrate that 1 Clement conforms to the genre of ancient deliberative rhetoric that has as its aim the goal of restoring harmony within the divided church.

Then, there’s A Question of Methodology, a monograph of collected essays by Albert Pietersma. The essays selected for the volume are not an exhaustive portrait of Pietersma’s work. As Cameron Boyd-Taylor writes, “Instead the guiding principle has been unabashedly didactic. Scholarly fashions change, but the need for methodological rigour remains constant. Our intention in publishing this volume is to promote the application of those principles which have long characterized Pietersma’s research” (vii).

Finally, I’ll be reading/translating through Die Clemensbriefe by Andreas Lindemann. It’s one of the few extended treatments of the Clementine epistles in commentary form. This one will take a bit more time, as you can imagine. But I think it will be a great boon for my German acquisition!

I hope y’all are excited about exploring these works together with me. Stay tuned.