July 15, 2009

Biblical Studies - 1

Since Nick Norelli tagged me for the latest meme I'm going to confess. I don't really read "Biblical Studies" books. I've skimmed a few. I've read lots more first chapters, last chapters, tables of contexts and indices. But I've not read any WHOLE books. I've purchased at least three dozen in the past fifteen months, but I've rarely strapped myself in and taken the ride of attempting to follow the author's entire thought. What can I say? I'm not really a student. I'm a hunter. But I do try to learn.

Therefore, since Nick knows (as do most of you, I'm sure) that I am genuinely trying to understand, appreciate and interact more effectively with the world of professional Biblical scholarship - it's only fair if I blog a few posts about Biblical Studies books to the extent that I've been able to dig in so far. Understand, I'm excluding anything on Roman History, first century Judean History, Josephus, or "N.T. Background" because 95% of what I've personally read on those topics wasn't written by scholars in New Testament or Biblical Studies departments.

This may take a few posts to get through. Sorry, Nick, it's not quite the meme, but I think you'll be interested to see what comes out here. This is going to reveal a lot of my own weak areas, as if they weren't clear enough already. Should be fun. ;-)

So stay tuned...

2 comments:

Brandon said...

Bill,

I think I recommended this book to you when we had lunch, but maybe I didn't. I really think you'll like Gregory Sterling's Historiography and Self Definition because it would be a good book for you to transition into biblical scholarship. I talk about it on my blog here: http://sitzimleben.com/2009/06/16/gregory-sterling-historiography-and-self-definition/

Bill Heroman said...

Hey Brandon.

Thanks for the tip. We left Florida five days after that lunch at Emory and I can't find my notes to say whether you mentioned that one or not, but your post on it is in my shared items and I was glad to read it again, just now.

Since you are without question the most servant minded of all bibliobloggers from an fyi pov (and your blog in that respect is quite amazing, btw, and I'm so glad you're blogging again) - I hope you can squeeze in a quick answer to this question.

To what extent does Sterling's approach to (and/ or conclusions about) Luke/Acts depend on his view of who Luke is and when the material was compiled? And what is that view?

Your answer might not affect whether I buy the book, but it will matter a lot, I'm guessing.

Hope to get your feedback on the next few posts in this series as well, if you make it by...

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