Limited Time: "Journal of Biblical Counseling" Free!

CCEF is releasing the Journal of Biblical Counseling for free each quarter (?). Those articles will be available until the next issue is released and then they'll be available for a fee through the archive service. CCEF also announced that back issues and articles will be available online sometime this summer.

You might want to set a calendar reminder to ensure you check back each quarter and download the new articles.

Keep your Greek

I have recently been convicted that I have not been putting the time I need into studying as I should. I listened to the Pastor as Scholar and Scholar as Pastor lectures by Piper and Carson respectively. It showed me that my laziness was truly sin and I needed to work harder to do the work that I've been called to do.

So, I've resolved to get my Greek back up to snuff (or better than it was, but that'll take some time). As a decent study guide I'll use Campbell's method, which he later published as Keep Your Greek, but they started out as blog posts.

Here they are, in order.

Read Every Day (1)
Burn Your Interlinear (2)
Use Software Tools Wisely (3)
Make Vocabulary Your Friend (4)
Practice Your Parsing (5)
Read Fast (6)
Read Slow (7)
Get It Right the First Time (8)
Get Your Greek Back (9)

If you are a bit more advanced, check out his class notes from his Advanced Greek class at Moore College.

Advanced Greek Notes: 1, 2, 3, 4

If you want to bone up on your vocab, check out this NT Greek Vocab list. It gives all the words that are used 10x or more. It is set up by frequency, so if you just want to know words used 50x or more, then that's sectioned off for you as well.

Israel Antiquities Online

Thanks to BibleX for pointing this out, you can now view images from the Israel Antiquities Treasury online. This is a great way to "spice up" you bible study. I was amazed in college how helpful an understanding of archaeology and figurines was in interpreting scripture. It's not a night/day difference, but it really takes it from black'n'white to color.

A. T. Robertson's Grammar (3rd ed.)

For those of you hardcore Greek guys, A. T. Robertson's magisterial A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in Light of Historical Research is available on the three main bible programs and the third edition (greatly expanded) is available as a very nice pdf. If you want original pagination for citation purposes, you can use the 2nd edition from archive.org. The 4th, and final, version is what bibleworks has (and I assume the other programs as well). The difference between the 3rd and 4th is apparently quite small. Robertson says "The Fourth Edition is a reprint of the Third with the correction of a few errata that remained." (pg. xx)

If you are interested, read a few reviews off of amazon.com (the link to the fourth edition).

Oxyrhynchus Papyri Online

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri were discovered by the archaeologists Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt. "The manuscripts date from the 1st to the 6th century AD. They include thousands of Greek and Latin documents, letters and literary works."¹ Many NT and OT mss were discovered at this time. There were, at it's completion, about 85 volumes published, some of which are available online.


Roger Pearse has linked to the first 14 volumes, with the 15th volume also available. Images of the papyri for vols 41-68 are now online, and it also includes an index to vols 1-68 (this means there is a short description of each papyri--very useful).


Papyri.info is a searchable papyri database that is not limited to just the P.Oxy. group. 


A list of OT and NT P.Oxy. documents. 


A closing word from A. T. Robertson from his book The Minister and His Greek New Testament:

But enough has been said to show how rich the papyri are for the student of the Greek new Testament. The best linguistic commentary on the Greek New Testament is the papyri of the first century A.D. and the Septuagint. It is now possible for any eager student to have both these privileges without having to sell his coat to get them. (last paragraph of Chapter II)

Sell your coat, nothing! With all of this available online, you won't even have to put it on.

Textual Commentary of the GNT Gospels

Wieland Willker has produced an incredibly helpful textual commentary on the Gospels of the Greek New Testament. Each Gospel has it's own pdf where Willker walks the reader through all of the disparate evidence for the textual variant and then he suggests a preferred reading. The best part about a commentary is that you don't have to trust the author's reading: all of the evidence is there for you to come to your own conclusion.

It looks like he's already updated it for 2012, and the full commentary comes out to approximately 2,600 pages and 2,000 variants.

You can look at the textual apparatus on your NA²⁷ to give you a quick idea of what is going on, but for the important variants, I would check out Willker's commentary.

Going further down the textual criticism rabbit hole, you can review all of the different papyri evidence for the GNT and then, if you so choose, look at the actual papyri images.

Merold Westphal Lectures for free download

This appears to be a class on Philosophical Hermeneutics (PH517) at Fuller Seminary taught by none-other than Dr. Merold Westphal. Dr. Westphal is not someone with whom I agree, but he is someone I am lucky to get a chance to listen to and learn from. I would encourage you all to download these lectures, because I have no idea how long they'll be up. It appears a student recorded the lectures with his personal recorder and then put the syllabus and lectures up on his blog.