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How We Got the New Testament

To hear the podcast (20 min.) click here.

One of the questions I often get is “How did we get our Bible?”  As you’re going to hear on this podcast, there is not a quick, easy answer. 

It’s an important historical question that had a few questions marks around it.  Dr. Lee McDonald has given a lifetime to the question and has authored more than a dozen books on the topic.  You can find a link to some of those down below.

Dr. McDonald joined David Capes on the Stone Chapel Podcasts to talk about this question.

Who Is Lee McDonald?

Lee McDonald earned his PhD at the University of Edinburgh.  Prior to that he earned his masters at Harvard. 

Today he is retired.  But he spent many years as professor of New Testament Studies and President of Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia. 

He has written a number of books on the canon of the Bible.  See the notes below for some of those.  In retirement he lives in southern California. 

How We Got Our New Testament

McDonald is interested in the question of how we got our Bible.  But this podcast deals only with part two of the Bible, the New Testament. 

The issues are challenging.  We have minimal historical sources that discuss the canon.  The presence of manuscripts themselves help us somewhat. 

Canon is a technical term for the list of inspired books referred to today as the New Testament.  There are historical forces and factors that led to the development of the canon. 

Capes and McDonald outline a few of these in the podcast.   But there are also theological factors and concerns at the same time.  Geographically, the church was scattered.  So, practices in Ethiopia were different than those in Italy. 

Early Christians were a very bookish people.  They wrote a lot of books.  I suppose you could say they also read a lot of books. Some of those books were included in the canon, but many were excluded.  In this podcast Capes and McDonald discuss the criteria for apostolic authorship. 

Resources

Click here for a transcript of today’s podcast.

A key book on the question which he wrote with interested lay people in mind:

Formation of the Bible: The Story of the Church’s Canon (Hendrickson, 2012).

A bit more technical is:

The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority (Baker Academic, 2006)

To see a lecture by Dr. Lee McDonald at the Lanier Theological Library click here.

More Resources

Want more Stone Chapel Podcasts on some great topics? Just click here.

You can get information on upcoming lectures at Lanier Theological Library by clicking here

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The Letter to the Hebrews with Amy Peeler

To hear the podcast (20 min.) click here.

Amy Peeler has been with us before on The Stone Chapel Podcasts.  Her first podcast has two parts and she talked about her book Women and the Gender of God.

There is a link in the show notes below to find those two podcasts.  She joins David Capes today on the podcast to discuss her new commentary on the letter to the Hebrews.

Who Is Amy Peeler?

Amy Peeler is the Kenneth T. Wessner Chair of Biblical Studies at Wheaton College. The former holder of that chair was Dr. Doug Moo. 

She earned her PhD at Princeton Theological Seminary and today is ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church.  She serves as associate rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal church in Geneva, IL.

The Letter to the Hebrews

For all practical purposes the letter to the Hebrews is one of the most complicated and robust of biblical books. 

It has attracted Dr. Peeler’s attention since grad school.  She loves it, first, because of its heavy engagement with the Scriptures of Israel.  She also loves it as a historian because of the way you can see Greek influences in the book.

We call it a letter today.  It also has the overtones of a sermon and deep encouragement to a community under stress.

The commentary is part of a new series on Spiritual Formation.  For Dr. Peeler the essential questions are: (1) who is God as revealed in Hebrews? (2) how are we to live in the light of this revelation? (3) how does reading this book change your life? 

Joshua Jipp, professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago, said on social media that this is his all time favorite commentary.  High praise, indeed! 

So if you want to know more about the letter to the Hebrews, listen to this podcast first.  Then find Dr. Peeler’s book.

Resources

For a link to Part 1 of her earlier podcast click here.

Part 2 can be found by clicking here.

For a link to her book, Hebrews in the Series Commentary for Christian Formation (Eerdmans 2024), click here.

For a link to her book, Women and the Gender of God (Eerdmans 2022), click here.  

Want more Stone Chapel Podcasts on some great topics? Just click here.

You can get information on upcoming lectures at Lanier Theological Library by clicking here

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Eight Million Exiles with Christopher M. Hays

We have heard a lot about refugees in the last 20 years.  War and violence drive people away from their cherished homes.  Displacement creates all manner of suffering for good and decent people. 

Christopher Hays stopped by the Lanier Theological Library recently to talk about a project he led in Colombia, South America, to address some of that suffering.

To hear the podcast click here.

Who Is Christopher Hays?

Christopher M. Hays is the president of Scholar Leaders.  Prior to that he served as a missionary and visionary in Medellin, Colombia. 

Hays earned a PhD in New Testament from the University of Oxford. For eight years he taught New Testament at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia. He was the chief investigator on the Faith and Displacement project.

Eight Million Exiles

Colombia has been in the grip of a vicioius, civil war for nearly 75 years.  In the last twenty-four years, there have been one million murders. 

Eight million people have been violently ejected from the homes  The net effect of all this deprivation, displacement, and  discouragement has deeply injured millions of people. 

Teams of scholars, friends, and church leaders banded together to do something about these casualties of war. 

Hays writes about this in his new book, Eight Million Exiles: Missional Action Research and the Crisis of Forced Migration. (Eerdmans, 2024).

The technical term for these “exiles” is Internally Displaced Persons (IDP).  The Colombian government has done little to help them. 

The UN does not typically help IDPs.  So the best group to come alongside, house, feed, counsel, and help are the thousands of Christian churches already in many of these communities.

Resources

For Dr. Hays’ book Renouncing Everything: Money and Discipleship in Luke (Paulist Press, 2016) click here.

For his book When the Son of Man Didn’t Come: A Constructive Proposal on the Delay of the Parousia (Fortress, 2017)  click here.

You can get a transcript of this podcast by, clicking here.

Want more Stone Chapel Podcasts on some great topics? Just click here.

You can get information on upcoming lectures at Lanier Theological Library by clicking here

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Is Reading the Bible Enough?

Brent Sandy joins David Capes on the Stone Chapel Podcasts talking about his new book.  They met at Wheaton College a few years ago.  Brent taught at Wheaton College for a number of years, until he moved to Indiana.

To hear the podcast click here.

Who Is Brent Sandy?

Brent Sandy was born in Pennsylvania.  He is interested in how best to read the Bible and how to help the church read Scripture for all its worth. 

He earned his PhD in Classics at Duke University.  And he’s spent the better part of his life in/ with/ for church.  He loves the Church and laments that we read the Scriptures so poorly, whether in our churches or in our homes.  

Is Reading the Bible Enough?  

By asking the question this way, we run the risk of being misunderstood.  As Christians, we’re told to read the Bible.  And we should, but what does it mean to read the Bible, actually read it. 

That is what Brent Sandy is doing in his new book, Hear Ye the Word of the Lord: What We Miss if We Only Read the Bible (InterVarsity). 

First, if we don’t read the Bible in context, we may “misread” it.  Second, for us reading is a solitary process.  We do it by ourselves. 

But the Scriptures are meant to be read aloud, in a community of believers.  Third, often even our public reading of Scripture is done badly, with no thought or preparation. 

Fourth, we tend to read the Scripture in bits and pieces, a verse here, a chapter there.  Paul wrote the Galatian letter to be read at one time, in one sitting. 

This podcast explores some of these challenges.

More Resources

We have another interesting podcast about reading scripture. For Randy Richard’s podcast, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, click here.

Click here for a link to Brent Sandy’s book.

You can get a transcript of this podcast by, clicking here.

Want more Stone Chapel Podcasts on some great topics? Just click here.

You can get information on upcoming lectures at Lanier Theological Library by clicking here

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“Nobody’s Mother” with Sandra Glahn

Sandra Glahn has written a book that has a lot of people talking.  She was at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston recently and talked with David Capes on The Stone Chapel Podcasts.

To hear the podcast click here.

Who Is Sandra Glahn? 

Sandra Glahn is a professor of Media Arts and Worship at Dallas Theological Seminary.   She is a creative force behind a project, The Visual Museum of Women in Christianity (www.visualmuseum.gallery). 

It’s a project that is recovering some of the visual history of the Christian faith since its early centuries.  Ironically, some of visual history does not make it into the history books. 

Sandra is the wife of one husband for 45 years, a mother, a grandmother. She holds a PhD from University of Texas, Dallas, in the humanities.

“Nobody’s Mother”

In 2023 Sandra Glahn published a book she has been working on for quite some time.  It is entitled Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament (IVP Academic). 

Although she thought it might be a “woman’s book,” she found that it had attracted a lot of attention from men as well who were unsure how to read certain New Testament references.

Since the time of Jerome, Artemis had been understood to be a fertility goddess, a nurturer, a mother.  But Sandra’s research went deep into the inscriptions, texts, imagery, etc, to discoverer that she was “nobody’s mother.”

She was a hunter, filled with magic power, and often likely to kill a mother in childbirth if you ticked her off. 

Dr. Glahn draws a number of conclusions about biblical texts, like Acts 19 and 1 Timothy 2, from what she has uncovered.

Resources

Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament(IVP Academic, 2023). 

For the Visual Museum of Women in Christianity click here or type https://www.visualmuseum.gallery  into your browser.

Here’s Sandra’s book, Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualized, Vilified, and Marginalized Women of the Bible (Kregel Academic, 2017).