Study Commentaries

Reading the Bible doesn't need to be a difficult journey through strange and bewildering territory. How to Read the Bible Book by Book walks you through the Scriptures like an experienced tour guide, helping you understand each of its 66 books. For each book of the Bible, the authors start with a quick snapshot, then expand the view to help you better understand its message and how it fits into the grand narrative of the Bible. Written by two top evangelical scholars, this survey is designed to get you actually reading the Bible knowledgeably and understanding it accurately.

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly 6,000 different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these - rice, wheat, and corn - now provide 50 percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still.

In Shepherds for Sale, Megan Basham of the Daily Wire documents how progressive powerbrokers—from George Soros, to the founder of eBay, to former members of the Obama administration—set out to change the American church. Their goal: to co-opt evangelicals for political purposes.

Often called Paul’s magnum opus, Romans has been pivotal to Christians’ understanding of salvation for generations. It had a profound influence on Augustine and Luther. Calvin saw it as the key to understanding all of Scripture. In this volume, Dr. R.C. Sproul introduces us to Paul’s fullest, grandest, most comprehensive statement of the gospel and explains why it is just as vital for believers today as it has been for believers throughout history. Verse by verse, Dr. Sproul unfolds the vast truths that Paul has clearly and carefully woven throughout this book.

In this addition to the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, two well-respected New Testament scholars interpret the Gospel of John in its historical and literary setting as well as in light of the Church's doctrinal, liturgical, and spiritual tradition. They unpack the wisdom of the Fourth Gospel for the intellectual and spiritual transformation of its followers and connect the Gospel with a range of witnesses throughout the whole history of Catholicism.

If the Bible isn’t a science book or an instruction manual, then what is it? What do people mean when they say the Bible is inspired? When Rachel Held Evans found herself asking these questions, she began a quest to better understand what the Bible is and how it is meant to be read. What she discovered changed her—and it will change you too.

Drawing on the best in recent scholarship and using her well-honed literary expertise, Evans examines some of our favorite Bible stories and possible interpretations, retelling them through memoir, original poetry, short stories, soliloquies, and even a short screenplay. Undaunted by the Bible’s most difficult passages, Evans wrestles through the process of doubting, imagining, and debating Scripture’s mysteries. The Bible, she discovers, is not a static work but is a living, breathing, captivating, and confounding book that is able to equip us to join God’s loving and redemptive work in the world.

Acts is a book of action. But whose actions does it follow? The most obvious answer is the Apostles’. The book’s full name is the Acts of the Apostles, for it recounts their efforts to take the gospel to the nations. Yet we can also think of it as the Acts of the Holy Spirit. Poured out like a mighty rushing wind (Acts 2:2), the Spirit empowered the Apostles’ witness and opened hearts to believe. In this volume, Dr. R.C. Sproul offers an in-depth study on the Spirit’s work through these Christians and in the growth and spread of the early church.

Written between A.D. 413 and 426, The City of God is one of the great cornerstones in the history of Christian thought, a book which is vital to the understanding of modern Western society. Augustine originally intended it to be an apology for Christianity against the accusation that the Church was responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire, which had occurred just three years earlier. Indeed, Augustine produced a great amount of evidence to prove that paganism was responsible for this event. However, by the time the work was finished, the book had taken on a larger theme.

Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman 10 years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease, she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects.

Revelation is a lens that puts the entire Bible into focus. The lens is focused on the person of Jesus Christ, and his destiny is imminent. This is a book of victory: We are overcomers! We are the ultimate winners in the game of life! (I read the ending: We win!) One of the reasons this book strikes us as strange is because of our lack of understanding concerning the Old Testament. The Book of Revelation consists of 404 verses that contain over 800 allusions to the Old Testament. These are detailed, along with Chuck's analysis of the design and structure of this fascinating book.

Throughout much of human history, our most important stories were passed down orally - including the stories about Jesus before they became written down in the Gospels. In this fascinating and deeply researched work, leading Bible scholar Bart D. Erhman investigates the role oral history has played in the New Testament - how the telling of these stories not only spread Jesus' message but helped shape it.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are synoptic in portraying the savior’s humanity in different aspects with his deity. Since Mark presents the savior as a slave, he does not tell his genealogy and status, because the ancestry of a slave is not worthy of note. Furthermore, in contrast to Matthew, who presents to us the savior’s marvelous teachings and parables concerning the heavenly kingdom, and John, who presents his profound revelations of the divine truths, Mark’s intention is not to impress us with the slave’s wonderful words, but with his excellent deeds in his gospel service.

Have we been taught to discount the veracity and deeper meaning of our emotional resonance with the world around us? In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis looks at the curriculum of the English "prep school" and begins to wonder if this subliminal teaching has indeed produced a generation who discount such a nature.

Andrew Murray (1828-1917) was a South African writer, teacher, and Christian pastor. This Best Of collection comprises seven of his most trenchant books.

Even people who are not professing Christians think they are familiar with the story of the Nativity. Every Christmas, displays of Jesus resting in a manger populate lawns and churchyards, and songs about shepherds and angels fill the air. Yet despite the abundance of these Christian references in popular culture, how many of us have examined the hard edges of this biblical story? Timothy Keller takes listeners on an illuminating journey into the surprising background of the Nativity.

Sinai to Zion is an exciting study of how the Bible uses the Exodus story as the basis for its vision concerning the glorious and triumphant return of Jesus the Messiah. For the first time, this book presents a thorough examination of many often overlooked, yet critically important Old Testament texts that the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament authors looked to as describing the return of Jesus.

Traveling in a canoe along the Yukon River with the migrating salmon, a three-month journey through untrammeled wilderness, Adam Weymouth traces the profound interconnectedness of the people and the Chinook through searing portraits of the individuals he encounters. He offers a powerful, nuanced glimpse into the erosion of indigenous culture and into our ever-complicated relationship with the natural world. Weaving in the history of the salmon run and their mysterious life cycle, Kings of the Yukon is extraordinary adventure and nature writing and social history at its most compelling.

Reading Revelation Responsibly is for those who are confused by, afraid of, and or preoccupied with the book of Revelation. In rescuing the Apocalypse from those who either completely misinterpret it or completely ignore it, Michael Gorman has given us both a guide to reading Revelation in a responsible way and a theological engagement with the text itself. He takes interpreting the book as a serious and sacred responsibility, believing how one reads, teaches, and preaches Revelation can have a powerful impact on one's own—and other people's—well-being.

Christopher Hitchens continues to make the case for a splendidly godless universe in this first-ever gathering of the influential voices past and present that have shaped his side of the current (and raging) God/no-god debate. With Hitchens as your erudite and witty guide, you'll be led through a wealth of philosophy, literature, and scientific inquiry, including generous portions of the words of Lucretius, Benedict de Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, and more.