Tom,
This is a pleasant and welcome surprise. It is good to have you back on board. I always enjoy and learn from your posting.
Thanks, Logos. Likewise, your posts are helpful to me as well.
Yes, thanks for mentioning the PSB, preterist study bible, I have been following their progress and reading the articles they are putting up. I will be getting one when they come out in hard cover. At this point I don’t feel like I need a preterist bible from a mere understanding the scriptures from a preterist standpoint, but it will make a nice quick reference tool and I hope they have articles that will deepen my understanding of the scriptures (When I was on the journey from dispy to amil to partial to full preterist a PSB would have been very helpful to me).
As you probably know, there real isn't tremendous difference between this Bible and other recent renditions in terms of fidelity to the text. But there have been certain areas where eschatological bias has been imposed on otherwise fairly worthy translations.
One is the inconsistency in the rendering of significant terms like "mello", "
katargeo" and several others. These terms are very often nuanced away from their straightforward sense in order to make room for futurist loopholes in those passages that would otherwise make our case quite plainly.
Another inconsistency is not in the words themselves,
but in the spaces between them! Paragraphs breaks are wedged in where the futurism of the editors demand it. A case in point is the severing of Matthew 16:27-28 from the very next verses, 17:1-2
Now it is true that the break at this point, wrong though it is, has a long history - all the way back to (I think) Exiguus in the 6th century. But the point remains that modern editors are quite willing to keep the separation here, though in other places they break freely with traditional chapter breaks by making paragraph breaks elsewhere. At any rate, editors do the same thing with Luke 9, where there is no chapter break.
Their emphasis on Christ coming being his presence (parousia) not a literal body and how translations have changed their emphasis on that word over the last two hundred years or so was very insightful.
It has certainly snowballed in the last two centuries, but we already have signs of a botched eschatology in the second century IMO.
I will also look for opportunities to make a donation of the PSB to church libraries, Christian school libraries, and missionaries, etc. as opportunities present themselves.
I think I will suggest to them that they put up a web page where people wishing to buy and donate a copy can be matched up with willing recipients such as schools and missionaries who have the opportunity to place them with bible study groups where they are working and young churches being formed.
I am not sure if you are aware that they do have a web page, though it has not been updated for few weeks. I started to share it here, but decided against it. I can send you the link privately.
Wait—hold on just a minute—I just read your post and were you writing the actual introduction of Ezra-Nehemiah for the PSB? I am most impressed if I read that correctly.
Yes, they asked me to do those chapters. I was happy to do it, though it came at a time when I also had a heavy teaching schedule. But the intro is just a few pages, nothing really major. The hardest part - at least at first - was working out a few of the details of the cross-chronology between those two books.
I was going to answer your PM too, but it will have to wait until later. My wife has been looking at the back of my head too long, so she needs to have a few pecks at the keyboard too.
