Shalom friends – I’m happy to say that after three years of work, I finished the manuscript for my next book, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus. Yay! It will be released by Baker Publishing in January 2018, so we still have a bit. Between now and then I’ll share some sneak previews and interesting […]
We’ve Found the Emmaus Road and It’s Crumbling
Have you ever wished you could have been nearby when Jesus explained the Scriptures to the disciples on the Emmaus Road in Luke 24? Wouldn’t it be great to just see where this road was? Believe it or not, scholars have known its location for decades now. The remains of the Roman road are visible […]
Considering the Context – A Talk I Gave
Below is a talk I gave at the morning service at Cornerstone Church in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts a few months ago. I introduced people to my interest in Jesus’ cultural context and then shared a Hebrew idiom that unlocks part of the Sermon on the Mount. Then I spoke about what it meant to be […]
Review: The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (Note: Updated ’19)
People often ask me where they can find a Bible that includes the cultural background that I write about, so I wanted to mention a brand new resource that is excellent: the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (Zondervan, 2016). The commentary was edited by two evangelical scholars who are well-known for their expertise on historical […]
Podcast Interview on the “The Dust Cast”
I was recently interviewed on a podcast called “The Dust Cast: Exploring the Ancient Hebraic Context of the Bible.” I had a great conversation with the host, Jason Mahler, about the current book I’m working on, Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus, as well as some questions from earlier books. We talked about the “two […]
In the West, Man is Big and God is Far Away
I’m always fascinated by the question of what we need to know, culturally, to understand our Bibles better. So I enjoyed the essay at this link by James Kugel, a Jewish biblical scholar, about a fundamental disconnect between the worldview of the Bible and of our Western world today. It’s from an essay on Psalm […]