kendemyer
Inactive Member
|
|
Message 1 of 5 (159454)
11-14-2004 8:02 PM
|
|
|
CONSERVATIIVE BIBLE SCHOLAR RESOURCES/LINKS Here are some web resources I recommend: Bible Query - Answers to Bible questions (look up by verse) http://www.tektonics.org/index2.html (extremely well organized ) A Christian Thinktank (allows lookup by topic or keywords ) Bible Search and Study Tools - Blue Letter Bible (excellent free commentaries) BibleGateway.com: A searchable online Bible in over 150 versions and 50 languages.: Eword (classic commentaries) Apologetics Press (general Christian/Bible answer site) Christian Answers Network [Home] - Multilingual answers, reviews, ministry resources, and more! - ChristianAnswers.Net (general questions) BibleGateway.com: A searchable online Bible in over 150 versions and 50 languages.: Rbc (general questions) HERE ARE SOME WRITTEN SOURCES I RECOMMEND
quote:
1) The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, 4 Vols. 1986
By: Edited by Geoffrey Bromiley Description: This set was first published in 1915. It has had extensive revisions and additions to make it an indespensable source for modern scholarship. This work combines the defining function of a dictionary with an encyclopedia's presentation of more comprehensive information. It has over 9,000 topics and 3,500 cross-references. Every name of a person or place mentioned in the Bible has an entry which which makes this a compreshensive and exhaustive work in that respect. It also examines major bible doctrines and gives opposing articles on controversial topics to ensure a rounded explanantion and description. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrapha and other extrabiblical resources are utilized and explained. This work is based on the Revised Standard Version,however the distinctive readings of the AV and the NEB are included usually as cross references and thus makes a wide reader availability. ISBE is also an exegetical tool because it provides a brief discussion of problem texts under the English keywords and guides the exegete to further information which is found in other scholarly resources. Over 275 photographs and drawings are in the first volume alone! Each entry provides a maximum amount of information in compact form,including pronunciation, etymology,and variant renderings. This is an amazing work at an even more amazing price and will add to your library in an invaluable way. taken from: Product Not Found
2) Wycliffe Bible Encylopedia, 1986, Moody Press, Chicago 3) Eerdman's Bible Dictionary 4) Keil and Delitszch's Commentary on the Old Testament in Ten Volumes - A classic 5) Here is a review of a book I would recommend for this issue and other Bible archaeolgy issues:
quote:
Kenneth Kitchen, professor emeritus at the University of Liverpool, has just recently come out with a massive new work on the Old Testament. This well-regarded Egyptologist is one of the top maximalists who contends for a high view of the Old Testament and its historicity. I have just ordered On the Reliability of the Old Testament and will make my own comments on it in the future. In the meantime, here is the only review of Kitchen's book that I have managed to find online. ***** British expert strongly defends Old Testament
Author makes most sweeping scholarly case in a generation for traditional beliefs of conservatives
By Richard N. Ostling / The Associated Press Is the Old Testament historically reliable, or mostly fiction and legend concocted to buttress Jewish nationalism - or something in between? In this long-running debate, skepticism has recently gained ground in academic circles. Now a British authority has launched a vigorous defence of the Old Testament's historical credibility against the doubts disseminated by liberal scholars and popular books. On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans) provides the most sweeping scholarly case in a generation for the traditional beliefs held by Orthodox Jews and Christian conservatives. Author K. A. Kitchen is professor emeritus of Egyptology at England's University of Liverpool. Because his views are academically unfashionable, he feels a need to immodestly mention his facility in a dozen ancient languages and the half-century he has spent studying the relevant texts. The book was planned as a counterpart to The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? by now-deceased Prof. F. F. Bruce, a conservative classic reissued in paperback last year. But the problems are more complex and the case more elaborate. And Kitchen is more polemical than Bruce, castigating liberal writings with such terms as "wilful evasion of very clear evidence," "without a particle of foundation in fact," "palpably false," "totally misleading," "trendy nonsense," "self-delusion," "sloppy scholarship," "immense ignorance," "agenda-driven drivel," "pure, unadulterated fantasy," "lunacy" and "crude anti-biblical (almost anti-Semitic) propaganda." Kitchen assails radical "minimalists" who dismiss the Old Testament as mostly fictional. But he also targets Israeli archeologist Israel Finkelstein, who finds some factual material in the Jewish Bible (see his co-written The Bible Unearthed) and the University of Arizona's William Dever, who finds somewhat more in What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? and Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? It will be fascinating to see how proponents of well-entrenched liberal views reply to Kitchen - and more fascinating if they don't reply. Much of Kitchen's case is summarized in three words: "Some manuscripts, please!" He repeatedly complains that liberal theories ignore or distort the actual evidence from ancient texts. Another Kitchen theme is that the doubters rely heavily upon "negative evidence," the lack of ancient remains and non-biblical texts that would absolutely prove biblical accounts. Kitchen says this lack "proves absolutely nothing" except that artifacts from thousands of years ago often didn't survive. Archeologists haven't found hard evidence left behind from the 40 years of wilderness wanderings after the Exodus, for instance, but Kitchen says that doesn't prove the Israelites weren't there. Given the many gaps in records outside scripture, Kitchen necessarily supports the Bible with circumstantial evidence from his knowledge of Egyptian and other ancient materials. "Implicit or indirect evidence can be equally powerful when used aright," he argues, and it's fair to judge the Bible's plausibility by comparisons with other events in the same era. Thus he presents arrays of ancient treaties, inscriptions, trade routes, treasure troves, political systems and biological data, and says many more examples could be piled atop those in this book. Kitchen urges readers to closely watch what the Bible actually says. For instance, he notes, doubts raised about the "conquest" under Joshua often distort the Bible's own report that Israel only gradually infiltrated the Holy Land. Similarly, David's kingdom was not like the grand centralized empires of modern times. In terms of "general reliability," he concludes, the Old Testament "comes out remarkably well, so long as its writings and writers are treated fairly and evenhandedly, in line with independent data, open to all." Drawbacks: readers could use a heftier introduction and may be confused by the reverse order in treating events, moving from the Babylonian Exile backward to Genesis. taken from:
TheologyWeb Campus
6) Here is another review of a work which I think you will find helpful:
quote:
In the spring I ordered a copy of the new On the Reliability of the Old Testament by K.A. Kitchen, professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. His massive volume is just now being joined by The Future of Biblical Archaeology: Reassessing Assumptions and Methodologies, which consists of a series of essays by such personages as William W. Hallo of Yale University and Steven Ortiz of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, whom I met briefly in Israel this summer. I have just received that one in the mail.
This zest of writing by the maximalists seems to have begun with a comparatively slim volume that came out in 2002. Windows into Old Testament History: Evidence, Argument and the Crisis of "Biblical Israel" also consists of a series of contributor essays, but only runs 212 pages. The purpose of the book is both specific and broad: specific in that it seeks to repudiate the radical minimalists of the "Copenhagen School" and broad in that it addresses a range of issues involved in studying the Bible. It is truly an international effort, put together by scholars from America, Canada, England and Denmark - specifically, from a Lutheran seminary in Copenhagen itself, the city that is home to the most prominent minimalists. The first essay critiques the methodology of the Copenhagers, who operate on the basis of a profound distrust of textual data and instead prefer the supposed "hard facts" of material remains uncovered by archaeology. Of course, the stones do not literally cry out - we need ancient documents to interpret mute rocks. The minimalists also reject historical validity for the Old Testament books because they have ideological or theological purposes. That they are ideologically slanted is undoubtedly true, and the OT writers are selective about their facts. That this means they necessarily must create fiction or distort the facts beyond recognition as history is an assumption. The second essay is very dense and would be better understood by someone who is conversant with philosophy of language. I imagine I will have to reread it sometime in the future. The next three essays address external evidence that sheds light on what we can possibly affirm about the Bible as history. Richard Hess demonstrates the extent of literacy in Israel throughout its history, as demonstrated by inscriptional evidence. Alan Millard compares the biblical materials to historical and legendary writing in Mesopotamia. After that, the ever-entertaining and ever-knowledgable Kenneth Kitchen demonstrates that an Israelite "mini-empire" under Solomon is certainly conceivable and cannot be simply explained away as a retrojection based on the writer's experience of the Persian Empire. The next two essays are case studies that analyze specific passages in the Book of Chronicles. This work is widely acknowledged to have been completed long after the Babylonian Exile (ca. 586-515 BC) and is thus assumed to be one of the most unhistorical books of the Bible. Yet the authors of these essays highlight clues that indicate the Chronicler had access to authentic pre-exilic sources and is attempting to relate history, albeit with different goals than the writer of Kings. The last essay by Iain Provan is the most refreshing. He argues that he does not defend the Bible as a valid source of history not because of his religious beliefs but because the Bible must be treated the same way other ancient sources are treated. He notes that we do not regularly operate with the hyper-skeptical "hermeneutic of suspicion" that the Copenhagers. He asks what would history we could claim to "know" if we demanded the kind of certainty the minimalists call for, and provides the answer - "Very little." What is needed, he says, is a hermeneutic of openness in which we allow the text to serve as a testimony and then later consider whether other sources of information falsifies its claims. taken from:
TheologyWeb Campus
7) James K. Hoffmeier's Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition. 8) The Art of Biblical History by V. Philips Long 9) A Biblical History of Israel by Provan
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 3 by Brad McFall, posted 09-12-2005 8:15 PM | | kendemyer has not replied |
|
™ Version 4.2