Gary Shogren's Blog
Someone in Costa Rica asked me to preach about “John in Patmos.” And I realized that, it’s an excellent subject for bored, shut-in, and isolated people during COVID! First, a little background. John wrote that he was on the island of Patmos “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. 1:9b).... Continue Reading →
I was fresh out of university when the editors of the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary asked me to write the article on election. My starting point is exegesis of texts, not systematic theology. You can read the original article in volume 2:441–444; the following is slightly paraphrased. The nature of this article is a panoramic... Continue Reading →
Not everyone can read the biblical languages. Some of us can read them at a decently intermediate level, a few people at a higher level. But there is an entire army out there with little to no Greek, who claim to be able to reinterpret the Bible from the original language, usually based on the... Continue Reading →
Coronavirus! Here is, I hope, the last thing I'll say on this matter. People are uncovering, as they always do with any and every scary event, COVID-19 buried deeply in some mystical Hebrew code. For example, one guy finds COVID and the accidental death of KOBE - as in the late basketball player - predicted... Continue Reading →
This material adapted from 1-2 Thessalonians, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, from pages 161-66. The book is available from Amazon and as a discount from Amazon, and also from Logos, in Korean and also in Spanish. 1 Thess 4:4 is the most complex verse in the Thessalonian correspondence because of the difficulty of... Continue Reading →
“Morpho-syntactical exegesis”: it all sounds so mysterious! It is not. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that there is no such thing as morpho-syntactical exegesis as such. Morpho-syntactical analysis, on the other hand, is a thing. Such analysis involves the identification and labeling of each word of a Greek sentence as... Continue Reading →
In short, no, the evidence suggests that in the first century AD and beyond, it just meant "father". Here are the three uses of the term in the New Testament: For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry,... Continue Reading →
[UPDATE: in February 2022, BibleGateway removed The Passion Translation from its website. Note that this was the one it removed of all the 90 versions available.] I was only recently alerted to this new edition, which seems to have become all the rage in some ministries, especially Pentecostal ones. As is often the case with... Continue Reading →
This morning I read a portion of 1 John and happened to remember a rather odd teaching I heard a long time ago. It ran like this: Everyone knows 1 John 1:9, ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’ However... Continue Reading →
There are hundreds of Bible versions in English. To express myself bluntly, that is hundreds too many, and we are pouring time and energy and resources into new versions that are not needed. I exclude the regular updating of the versions that already exist - and my friends on the NIV committee tell me are... Continue Reading →
Open Our Eyes, Lord! 