Forthcoming Hebrews Volume NICNT

The NICNT (Eerdmans) has long been one of my favorite commentary series. With the recent appointing of one Joel Green as the series editor, replacing Gordon Fee, this series should continue its high marks for excellence. I am excited to see that one of the forthcoming volumes, Hebrews, by Gareth L. Cockerill, is slated to release on 4/30/12.

Here are the particulars: (ISBN: 978-0-8028-2492-9; pp. 768)

Gareth Lee Cockerill's commentary offers sound insight into Hebrews as a well-constructed sermon encouraging its hearers to persevere despite persecution and hardships in light of Christ's unique sufficiency as Savior.


Cockerill analyzes the book's rhetorical, chiastic shape and interprets each passage in light of this overarching structure. He also offers a new analysis of how Hebrews uses the Old Testament - continuity and fulfillment, rather than continuity and discontinuity - and shows how this consistent usage is relevant for contemporary biblical interpretation. Written in a clear, engaging, and accessible style, this commentary will benefit pastors, laypeople, students, and scholars alike.

Seneca and Some Relevant Comments for Our Time

I was reading Seneca's De Beneficiis (On Benefits) when I came across this timeless, sobering quote which really reminded me of the times in which we are living:

Our ancestors made the complaint, we make the complaint, and our descendents will complain about it too: morals are corrupt, vice is dominant, human affairs are declining, and all sense of right and wrong is crumbling. But the situation is still the same and it will remain pretty much the same, give or take a little movement one way or the other, like the waves which the incoming tide brings further inland and the outgoing tide holds back to the low-water line. (10.2) At one point our moral failings will lean more in the direction of adultery than any other vice, and the restraints of sexual modesty will be shattered; at another point the dominant vice will be the mad excesses of feasting and gastronomic extravagance, which reduce inheritances to a shameful state of ruin; at some other time it will be excessive cultivation of the body and an obsession with beauty that advertises intellectual and moral ugliness; again, it will be badly managed freedom which breaks out into presumptuous impudence; then we will descend into public and private savagery and the madness of civil wars, in which everything sacred and holy is violated. Some day drunkenness will bring respect, and the capacity to drink a huge volume of strong wine will be a virtue. (10.3) Vices do not wait around in just one location; they are on the move and jostle competitively with each other— sometimes winning, sometimes losing. But we will always be obliged to make the same declaration about ourselves: that we are bad now, have been bad in the past, and (though I add this point reluctantly) will be bad in the future. (10.4) There will always be killers, tyrants, thieves, adulterers, rapists, violators of religion, and traitors. 

But lower than all of these is the ungrateful man—unless, of course, all those crimes actually stem from ingratitude, without which hardly any great crime achieves its full magnitude. Treat it  as the greatest crime—and so avoid committing it. But think of it as the  slightest—and so forgive it if someone commits it against you.

For the sum total of the injustice is that you have lost the benefit you gave; you have preserved what is best about it, the fact that you gave it (1.10.1-4, translation Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood).

Brief Review of Long and Halcomb's Luke-Acts Polyglot

Here is a brief review I posted for Amazon.com on Fred Long and Mike Halcomb's cool, new resource A Parallel and Interlinear New Testament Polyglot: Luke-Acts.

At $19.99, this is a must-buy! Go out and get your copy! To see a sample of this work check out the website: http://www.ntpolyglot.com