Two of my books now in second edition...

I haven't publicized my books with IWU's publishing wing much up to this point for various reasons. But with my New Testament survey having sold about 10,000 copies, a new cover, the publishing wing finally giving in and putting its books on Amazon, I thought today is the day. The university took out a big ad in Books and Culture this month to advertise it and Steve Lennox's Old Testament introduction.

Here they are:

Jesus is Lord: An Introduction to the New Testament

This is written for people who know little to nothing about the Bible. It has been really bizarre to have people I don't know come up to me in several different contexts and tell me how amazingly easy this book was to understand and, even further, that they found it spiritually enriching! Even facilitators of IWU's adult classes--people I didn't know--have come up to me and said such things.

It is not a textbook for an honors class, and I didn't write it from a scholarly point of view (although it touches all the critical issues). Given IWU's theological affinities, it is written with a view to an evangelical reader, although it is even-handed enough that one complaint I have occasionally received is that I don't fall off the log one way or another when it comes to some disputed matters (e.g., pseudonymity).

The second book is the second edition of my Brief Guide to Biblical Interpretation. Once again, I've used this booklet in adult courses alongside Randolph Tate's Biblical Interpretation and Fee and Stuart's Reading the Bible for All Its Worth. And once again, students tell me it is the clearest and most helpful of the three, even that I should do away with some of the others.

It is not a full hermeneutics or Bible study method book, but I think it gives one of best overviews of the issues you will find out there... without all the names and terms of the more scholarly debate. I've had churches buy these for their people.

It does have some controversial examples in it (like its discussion of why polygamy is wrong)--after all, it was birthed on this blog. But that just keeps things interesting!

It is perhaps my curse that while I long to write books and articles in the scholarly ether (and am), my most lasting and impacting contributions will probably turn out to be these grass roots writings that have irritated me in process because I wanted to get on to the "bigger" projects. I certainly have made over 10 times more money off the NT Survey book than all the other books I've written combined!