Musings of a Snickerdoodle

This is quite an eclectic collection of works by J. B. Lightfoot.  It includes two (both to some degree incomplete)commentaries , one on 2 Corinthians and the other on 1 Peter,  and five lectures/sermons/essays by Lightfoot as appendices.  You get quite a bit of content in this volume. The Commentaries in this book are unfinished/incomplete, but you still get a good deal to work with. There is an editor's introduction at the beginning of the book that presents an interesting look at the production of this book and the discovery of the 'lost' writings of Lightfoot, as well as bit of info on Lightfoot's life, scholarship and some of his method of writing commentaries.  I particularly liked to see it pointed out that Lightfoot was a stickler for context, James D. G. Dunn is quoted in the book as saying, "time and again Lightfoot 'clearly demonstrates the importance of reading a historical text within its historical context, that the meaning of a text does n...

A Syntax Guide For Readers of the New Testament by Charles Lee Irons is a nice addition to one's NT Greek tools library.  It is not a stand-alone tool, but meant to be used with  other lexical aids.  Irons notes that,  "This Syntax Guide does not duplicate the help provided by such tools.  Rather, it picks up where these other tools leave off"  and  "presupposes their use…"    The introduction explains that in this guide, "select cases, glosses and parsing are not the focus".  Rather, in some places it gives specific explanations of "syntactical, clause-level features". There is a chapter for each book of the New Testament, and each book is divided into chapters and each chapter has a list of select verse references from that chapter and next to the reference there may be  a section of the Greek wording of the verse and some comments .   Some of the verses only have a brief...

Martin Luther by Simonetta Carr i s a nice overview of the life of Luther for children.   It starts with Luther's birth and moves on through his life as a child in schooling and then on to his college days, where the thunderstorm happens that scares him into a monastic life where perhaps he could earn his way to Heaven.  As a Monk we learn that Luther was very meticulous and very much into examining his own thoughts and motives for sin; his ritualistic confession of his sins grew so frequent (sometimes happening just moments after he had  confessed other sins) that it irritated his superiors who then "told him to confess only big sins."  Luther ultimately is promoted to higher positions, moving on to the city of Wittenberg to be a professor of Bible studies. Ultimately he also ends up preaching in the city church as well as "supervising ten monasteries".  Tetzel comes into Germany with his indulgences and as a consequence Luther writes his "ninety-...

Greek for Everyone by A. Chadwick Thornhill presents a unique book on New Testament Greek.  His  stated goal is to have those reading this book learn  "Greek in order to become better students of the Scripture rather than students of Greek."  The aim of the book is not to  "gain reading proficiency but rather are working to establish the ability to use various tools to study the text in Greek".    And I think that Thornhill accomplishes his goals with this book, he   takes you through a basic (though it still seems quite thorough) overview of the various parts of Greek so that you may then use lexicons, parsing guides, and other Greek tools in your Bible study without having to become an expert Greek scholar.  Thornhill starts out by explaining that one of the most important things to do in acquiring a knowledge of Koine Greek that is useful to Bible study is to remember to keep looking for the 'big picture' in a text/pas...