The 2017 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Awards were just announced in the latest November/December issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. These were carefully selected from hundreds of entries so any or all of them are certainly worthy of purchase and reading. I was honored to serve as one of the judges in the New Testament category, so I particularly want to recommend our choice, J. R. Daniel Kirk, A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), our unanimous choice after a first round of “blind reading” and consultation. It is a bit on the expensive size–but runs 659 pages!–so I think one gets what one pays for, as is so often the case with books. I have Kirk’s book on my desk now as I am writing this and I have not even begun to absorb all the significant insights he offers in this pioneering work. “Christology” (or “Messianism”) and “Apocalyptic” are the two topics in my field of ancient Judaism and Christian Origins that have most fascinated me over the years. I try to read everything I can get my hands on in these areas. It is exciting when a book of this quality appears.
Comments are closed.