I have to wonder if the other reviewers at Amazon read this volume, all the way through; I was forced to as part of a Plymouth Brethern training program. This book is dense; it does not read well. Its writer is seldom quoted even in PB circles. If someone bubbles about this book, ask them this: "How much of it have you read?" My suggestion is first to read the books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) through, perhaps several times. Then look for commentaries on the individual books. Think careful before you purchase this monstroity.

The first five book of the Bible were often the most negelected ones in my study. This great commentary has helped me see Christ throught these books and has helped me pull out many great applications. This book is a MUST for every serious believer's library!

This book is very informative and insightful in regards to providing a clear understandable basis for interpretation of the events of the first five books of the Bible. This in turn helps for better understanding of the Old Testament, which in turn helps to provide a context for better understanding and application of the entire Bible in one's own life. Also extremely helpful as a tool for Bible teachers to see the glory of God and the purpose of Christ even from "the beginning."

Morris believes that the Bible can be scientifically proven. This is impossible, since the Bible is a religious text. It is an interesting read, but keep in mind that Morris uses bad science and fallacy after fallacy to make his religion look scientific.

This is an excellent science book that explains in easy to understand english how the amazing miracles such as creation, the flood, etc. according to a biblical perspective. Henry Morris provides many biblical references and a lot of proof. I was a Christian before reading this book, and already beleived that God created the earth and sent his son to die on the cross. However, for someone who has doubts of how creation, the flood, etc. are possible, I would highly recommend this book.

This is an excellent book. Dr. Henry Morris is a Christian scientist. In this book he looks at several different aspects of science from a Christian perspective. I highly recommend this book.

but unfortunately, terribly outdated and incomplete. By reading this book, you will get a good idea of the Brethren background, which is inspiring and full of light. I would have wished, though, that some of the influential women were included (Lady Powerscourt, for instance), but then of course the title would no longer be approrpiate.

More importantly, Mr. Pickering entirely avoids mentioning the Darby-Newton controversy, or even anyone involved in the side opposed to Darby's views (they were later called, "Open Brethren").

Also, the book is but a sad reminder of the fact that the Brethren have entirely left their original intentions to become just another modern, spineless, wishy-washy denomination.

Chief Men Among the Brethren provides a fascinating survey into the lives of nineteenth century Christians. Pickering communicates a story about Englishmen and Irishmen of almost ultra apostolic character and lifestyle (but not office ! ) who left fortunes, vocations and clerical positions in the established church to spawn a movement which has had a far reaching (albeit largely unknown) influence on the theology of much of conservative Christianity, Baptists and American Fundamentalists. The format offers pictures and biographies of most of the early "Plymouth Brethren" including the insightful Mr. John Nelson Darby, his colleague, the brilliant William Kelly with his mind for the universe and the ever popular yet poignant C.H.M. (Charles Henry Macintosh). The book serves as an ample historical resource for anyone studying this movement. Yet, shining through this historical sketch is their Biblical theology, their simplicity, their disdain for the clergy and their personal sacrifice and adoration for the ascended Christ. It is clearly written and at times inspirational. It incites the reader to desire to follow on in their footsteps. Indeed, for those seeking spiritual encouragement, Chief Men Among the Brethren describes the lives of men who believed God, walked with God and desired to raise the standard of historic New Testament Christianity beyond the baneful confines of denominational bigotry. Henry Pickering has provided material on their conversion, the circumstances that led to their understanding of the simplicity of gathering alone to the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ on the ground of the Unity of the One Body of Christ (the Church) and separation from the world. In his effort, he does not fail to evoke the excitement of those early days. I highly recommend this excellent resource.

Grosse was apparently the first to publish the idea that God might have created the earth with the appearance of age. For this reason, and its value in understanding the history and philosophy of science, I give the book four stars. Otherwise the book was a good example of nineteenth century scientific writing: too many words, excessive examples and illustrations. There are a few very quotable lines spread throughout the text, but most of the book is redundant.

Philip Gosse's little book is a gem of quiet, reverent thinking by a talented biologist. He simply (and unusually, for his age) was courageous enough to ask the question, "how would the earth and all its various interconnected systems look different than they do now, if the world had been created in an instant by a single creative act?" To explore this question, he asks his contemporary young earth creationists to follow him on an imaginative journey back to the very first day of the earth's creation, and he examines the nature of various living things that he sees. Do the trees have rings? Are there seeds just now sprouting from the ground? Do Adam and Eve (and all the mammals) have hair? Teeth? Bones? Belly-buttons?

Every living thing in the world, he begins to prove, is part of an interconnected temporal system, and has a four-dimensional nature that goes to its very core. Nature cannot be created ex nihilo without creating time ex nihilo and nature's whole process "in medias res", so to speak.

This is where Gosse's meditation has been so misunderstood. His argument is that IF the world has been created out of nothing by an act of creative power, AND that event happened recently as his fellow churchmen were fond of claiming, THEN there could be no physical evidence of the point at which that creation took place. To put it crudely, the world is by nature a spinning top, and if it has been created at all, it has been created spinning, and there will be no finger-marks on it, no scars of a sudden acceleration.

Gosse's thoughts were directed at the believers of his time, and were not intended to convert skeptics. It is sad that his prejudice against Darwin and the evolutionists (which he shared with most people of his day, believing and non-believing) has been held against him.

The next step for a 21st century person of belief is to think beyond Gosse about the Big Bang.

David Paul Henry, The Early Development of the Hermeneutic of Karl Barth As Evidenced by His Appropriation of Romans 5:12-21 (National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion Dissertation Series, 1985)

Karl Barth is something of an enigma: a self-styled Roman Catholic "simple country preacher" before and during World War I who took up the task of theological hermeneutics (at its most simplistic level, hermeneutics is simply the interpretation of text) as a means to the end of finding a more effective way to get the Christian message across to his parishoners. He ended up as, basically, the voice of Pauline thought acorss the Christian religion by the time of his death in 1968. David Paul Henry, in his doctoral dissertation, looks at the differences between the first two editions of Barth's book _Der Romerbrief_, published in 1917 and 1920, in an effort to trace the development of Barth's interpretive skills and methods during this period-- in which, it can be inferred, Barth's theological underpinnings did more changing than they did at any other time during his life. Henry also includes an epilogue pertaining to Barth's 1959 release Christ and Adam, which is in many ways a second revision of the original Der Romerbrief.

Barth as a subject is an endlessly fascinating person. His writings, on the other hand, can be something of a trial for the casual reader (I've heard they're actually worse in the original German). Thus, when Henry starts his book with a forty-page excerpt of the first edition of Der Romerbrief (Henry's own translation of the work-- which, in his own words, "attempts to render Barth's phrases in literal English equivalents." Oh, the pain and suffering.), the reader can get the feeling of being quite overwhelmed, even if he has been immersed in the writings of Barth before. Henry's translation does, however, achieve his stated goal of allowing the forcefulness of Barth's personality and conviction to come through; Barth, compared to most of today's well-known American evangelists, comes off as the Mephistopheles to a legion of wan, undernourished Fausts.

The remaining hundred-fifty-odd pages of the book are Henry's own writing, which is quite a bit more readable than Barth, and the book picks up speed. Henry first devotes two separate chapters to the two steps Barth took in his exegetical writing-- the historical interpretation of the text first, and then the (as J. T. Beck put it) "pneumatic exegesis," best described in cimplestic terms as the spiritual interpretation of the text. The fourth and last chapter compares the differences in the second edition-- not so much differences in text as differences in Barth's thinking that led him to rewrite the manuscript (the textual differences are, for the most part, differing translations of the original Greek which Biblical scholars have been arguing over for centuries, are still arguing, and will likely never stop arguing).

If you're a fan of understanding methods of textual interpretation, you don't need me to tell you it's fascinating stuff. Trying to get at the thought processes of a writer makes for great history. Henry had an inroad that most authors don't, in that Barth left two distinct editions of one work in his corpus, and so Henry's book is more cpaable than most of tracing those thoughts. As this is his intention, he also stays away (until the last few paragraphs of chapter four) of value judgments of the work itself, a refreshing change from most exegetical histories.

This isn't light reading, and those completing the book are likely to crack a smile at the irony of Henry's last sentence in Chapter Four: "The task of theological hermeneutics, as Karl Barth recognized, is not simple." Indeed. But that doesn't make Henry's work any less worth reading. I would suggest, however, that novices to the intriguing world of exegesis (either of original texts or exegetic texts such as Barth's) find a slightly less difficult subject to address first, e.g. Stanley Fish's exegesis of Milton, _Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost_. If you find it to your liking, Henry should be right up your alley. (Tackling Henry before tackling Barth is much advised.) *** 1/2

This book is a release of the four Gospels from the Holman Christian Standard Bible translation with snippets of commentary from Henry Blackaby. The translation reads remarkably like the NIV, with occasional departures on sentence structure and the like. The translators seem to be using the Nestle-Aland greek text as the source(same as NIV). What sets this translation apart are the small differences. Capitalization of pronouns regarding Christ; quoted text from the Old Testament is set in bold. Also, there seems to be a greater number of footnotes with more references to the original greek. I was pleased to see several footnotes regarding the literal word structure of passages. Although not part of the translation itself, the book contains several word studies on important usages of greek terms alongside the bits of commentary by Mr. Blackaby. The commentary is more inspirational than informational, but a welcome addition nonetheless.

All in all, if you like and use the NIV or NASB, then this book is a good way to take another look at the Gospels.

"Law is Gospel" wrote Charles Spurgeon of this writer. And after reading this book, you can understand why. Law looks at many of the stories we learned from Genesis in Sunday school class, and shows that they are much more significant than many of our SS teachers understood. Far from being morality lessons, they show the gospel was being unveiled from the first chapters of the first book. Law is inspiring in his devotional style, invigorating in his doctrinal discipline, and pastoral in his applications to the reader.

I downloaded the PDF file of this gospel translation from another website. Overall, it is a very good contemporary language translation, similar in many respects to the Roman Catholic NAB. This version often agrees with the NAB and disagrees with the KJV on certain word choices. I was quite surprised by this fact as it is a translation fundamentally shaped by the Southern Baptist Convention. We know how vehemently anti-Catholic SBC can be, and how KJV-only some of their leadership is (Dr. Adrian Rogers, for instance).

One criticism: This is an extremely conservative text via-a-vis manuscript choice. It seems to be a translation done from the Textus Receptus, with reference to other Byzantine manuscripts. Verses not found in the older Alexandrian manuscripts are bracketted, but included in the translation.

In some cases this is good, as the NIV and RSV teams were often too quick to remove texts whenever they were missing from the Alexandrian manuscripts. However, some extremely obnoxiously scribal insertions have made it into this translation. John 5:4 is a good example. Not even the ultra-conservative NASB team kept this one. The NASB team threw it out.

While modern scholarship has sometimes been to quick to remove "in doubt" texts, this is not one of those instances. John 5:4 cannot be found in any other "Modern" Bible, and for good reason. It doesn't exist in any manuscript before 1000 A.D. It add confusion to the story being told. Worse, it even promotes confusion about the nature and charactor of God. Therefore it isn't the genuine article. It is a counterfeit Bible verse, and should be left out.

Their moto was "more acurate than the NASB and more readable than the NIV." That is a mighty tall order on both counts. Based on this sample alone, I doubt they've hit the mark. Nevertheless, it is a good work. I just wish they hadn't used the Textus Receptus.

This introductory textbook gives a balanced (neither overly conservative nor overly liberal) introduction to all of the classical interpretive questions. Unfortunately, many proofreading errors found in the previous edition have not been corrected in this edition. Some of these errors are substantive, such as putting all of the prophetic books under the heading "former prophets" on p.18 and putting Jerusalem instead of Samaria as the city conquered by the Assyrians in 722 (in the glossary under "transcolonization"). However, an alert teacher can compensate for these types of flaws in an otherwise very competent presentation of the contents and interpretative issues of Hebrew Bible.

At last a new edition of Paradigms and Exercises in Syriac Grammar! I studied Syriac at university using the previous edition (the 4th) and found it lacking. The new revision does help clarify the language considerably, tho' at heart Robinson remains, as ever, a traditional grammar book (not a bad thing). While I think I would rather use Wheeler Thackston, for a student who's already studied some Hebrew or Arabic, especially one who is going to start by spending time reading a lot of vocalized Biblical Syriac, this shorter guide will be as effective a guide as Weingreen in Hebrew or Heywood and Nahmad in Arabic. The book uses Serto script with Western vocalization throughout, and the distinction between begadkpat letters seems slightly better than in earlier editions. It's still in handy pocket size, and one can again get it in hardback too!