The N. T. Wrong Blog

There’s some interesting reviews in the latest Review of Biblical Literature:

John Piper, The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright (2007)

Apparently there’s this guy in England called N. T. Wright who thinks that eveybody has got Paul wrong. For Wright, Paul is better understood as a first-century anti-apartheid demonstrator than as a purveyor of new religious doctrines. He just wanted everybody to get along, black and white, Jew and Gentile. But John Piper disagrees, and spends a whole book preaching the Gospel according to Luther.

Piper’s book is available for free here. So it beats me why you’d want to buy it.

John J. Collins, A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (2007)

John J. Collins’ Introduction to the Hebrew Bible is given the Reader’s Digest treatment in this 324-page abridged version. It could be handy for planning a short introductory course to the Hebrew Bible.

Sharon, Diane M. and Kathryn F. Kravitz, editors, Bringing the Hidden to Light: The Process of Interpretation: Studies in Honor of Stephen A. Geller (2007)

Mark Brettler’s piece in this collection looks interesting: ‘The Poet as Historian: The Plague Tradition in Psalm 105′. Apparently Brettler concludes that the poet drew on J and P before their combination. In another piece, F. M. Cross reads Jonah as a parody on religious self-righteousness. And Edward L. Greenstein has a look at the types of knowledge in the book of Job.

Othmar Keel, Die Geschichte Jerusalems und die Entstehung des Monotheismus (2007)

Keel gives an overview of the central elements and processes which shaped biblical monotheism.

A startling new theory suggests that Yahweh may have been a computer designed by an ancient civilization:

“If you look at the way the people of a few thousand years ago interacted with their God, the similarity to interacting with a computer is inescapable.

Consider the behavior of a computer when you try to interact with it and it’s feeling uncooperative. The obstinacy, the perverse malevolence, the capriciousness, the dictatorial edicts telling you to do this certain thing, when this certain thing doesn’t exist, its snide little windows telling you how stupid you are and how badly you’ve screwed up. The computer is unapproachable except on its own terms. You have to do precisely what it says, and then it perversely tells you that was the wrong thing to do. You must pay obeisance to it and its procedures to gain access to communication with it, and even then, it smugly refuses to answer, or answers another, unrelated question altogether.”

- Ed Martin, ‘Was the God of the Ancients a Computer?’