A feather in your theological cap.
The personal blog of pastor, grammarian, and runner Brent Niedergall
Friday Favorites (31 JAN 20)
Findings From Around The Web to Butter Your Grits Joey McCollum offers an introduction to his work of producing an open-source implementation of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) in a guest post at Evangelical Textual Criticism. The Biblical Studies...
Present, Past, and Purpose: The Historical Present in the New Testament
My TV stopped working. Or my TV remote stopped working. I couldn’t tell which because I could get the TV to do some things, but not others. Thankfully, there’s a simple test to see if your remote is working. Remotes emit infrared light. And although the naked eye...
Friday Favorites (24 JAN 20)
Findings From Around The Web to Butter Your Grits Timothy N. Mitchell at The Textual Mechanic explains how an ancient author could exercise control over a message by tasking their messenger to deliver an oral message along with their letter. Clint Archer at The...
Book Review: Preaching for a Verdict
After reading Preaching for a Verdict: Recovering the Role of Exhortation by J. Josh Smith, I have a new criterion for evaluating preaching. Is the preacher urging his hearers to action? On Sunday, I listened to two sermons. This morning, I read over my manuscript for...
Corn and Unicorns: Misleading Mental Representations from the KJV
Mark Ward, both on his blog and in his book, has done a lot of good work on exposing “false friends” in the King James Version. These are words that meant something different to the 1611 translators than they mean to readers today. And the KJV is crawling with them...
Release Announcement: open-cbgm
It was only a matter of time until someone reverse engineered the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method. The “black box” is now open and freely available thanks to Joey McCollum. His C++ implementation is open-source, compact, fast, and compliant with established...
Friday Favorites (17 JAN 20)
Findings From Around The Web to Butter Your Grits Ever wonder if there’s a better way to learn Greek? Here’s a thread over at B-Greek: The Biblical Greek Forum on the weaknesses of the standard “grammar translation method.” Who is Melchizedek? Peter Goeman gives...
John: A Canonical Discipleship Manual
Christians love to talk about discipleship. We know it’s our responsibility, and we have all kinds of programs to do it. As a pastor, I have a shelf of books on the subject. Discipling others is critical. Making disciples is critical. It's the Great Commission. But...
Book Review: A Little Book for New Preachers
Like many, I’ve worked a variety of jobs over the years. There was the quintessential paper route, in high school I did odd jobs around a funeral home, and later sold clothing at a retail outlet. In college, I washed cars for two different dealerships. Since then,...
Friday Favorites (10 JAN 20)
Findings From Around The Web to Butter Your Grits Greg Ross somehow manages to find the craziest examples of King James Version gematria you’ve ever seen. His most recent deals with the millionth digit of π. And here’s an older one on Shakespeare. Charlotte...