Matthew Poole was a seventeenth century English Presbyterian minister. Towards the end of his life he started work on a commentary on the Bible called Annotations upon the Holy Bible. Wherein The Sacred Text is Inserted, and various Readings Annex’d, together with the Parallel Scriptures, the more difficult Terms in each Verse are Explained, seeming Contradictions Reconciled, Questions and Doubts Resolved, and the whole Text opened. They don’t write titles like that any more, sadly.

Poole got as far as Isaiah 58 and then died, but the work was completed by friends and colleagues largely on the basis of Poole’s earlier Synopsis criticorum aliorumque Sacrae Scripturae interpretum. The section on Romans in Annotations was written by Richard Mayo.

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I have been working through Craig Keener’s Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost (2016) to prepare some teaching materials on Pentecostal hermeneutics. It’s a fairly casual read, so far at least. I could really do with something a bit more technical. But it’s a good… ()
In an article on the Gospel Coalition website, adapted from a book about evangelism, Matt Smethurst attempts to explain the gospel. ( | 11 comments)
Stephen Fowl thinks that it’s impossible to get from history to theology—to start with historical-criticism and arrive at an account of the being and intentions of the Triune God and of the various beliefs and practices that derive from that core Christian doctrine. So we have to start at the… ()
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Probably, for most people interested in biblical studies, “historicism” is a bad word, associated either with a positivist historical-critical methodology that hammers the theological life out of a text or with a certain mode of nineteenth century German historical idealism that culminated in the… ( | 4 comments)
I did a couple of podcast episodes recently with David Capes for The Stone Chapel Podcasts, talking about my book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul. ()
It is easy to visualise the traditional interpretation of Philippians 2:6-11 as a downward parabola or u-bend: Christ existed in heaven from eternity “in the form of God”; he descended into the world, becoming man and dying on the cross; then he is raised from the dead and restored to his position… ( | 13 comments)