The
book of Hebrews is a challenging portion of the Bible, heavy on Old
Testament references to the Jewish law system that most modern
Christians are pretty ignorant of. To read it and understand it
requires knowledge of that system – or a guide to fill you in on
the details. Matthew Martin's And Now For Something Completely
Different strives to be that guide.
The
author thoroughly dissects the book of Hebrews verse by verse,
explaining in great detail the ideas in each as well as its place
in the overall argument the book is making about the superiority of
the New Covenant to the Old. Martin seems to have extensive knowledge
in this area and offers a good number of helpful insights. The
chapter titles alone gave me a good overall picture of the
organization and argument being made in the biblical book.
However,
on a more “micro” level, I didn't find Martin's guide that useful
for me . . . although I think that's my fault and not Martin's. His intention seems to be that someone
struggling with a particular section of, say, chapter four can turn
to that part in the guide and get help in their understanding. And it probably serves that purpose well. To someone like me, on the
other hand, who is just reading straight through to get an
overall view of the entire biblical book, he often seems to be saying
the same thing over and over. (My husband remarked that he had the
same experience reading through his study Bible with all the notes;
it's not really meant to be read that way.) Personally, I think I
would have benefitted from a more general discussion of each
chapter's main points, followed by the detailed analysis of each
verse if I wanted to dig deeper or had a more specific question.
Martin
also uses the King James Version of the Bible, which I find very
difficult to understand in Hebrews. Few Christian writers use
the KJV exclusively anymore other than the minority group who hold to
the belief that it is the only accurate English translation we have –
so I am led to assume that Martin is one of that crowd. That being
the case, I was surprised then to find places in his analysis where
he offered what he thought would be a better translation of a certain
word or phrase.
My
biggest beef with the book, however, came before I even started
chapter one. Martin ends his introduction saying, “This book is
written only for the benefit of any who wish to read another's
opinions (grammatical errors included) and reflections on this
marvelous work of inspiration.” Grammatical errors included? He's
not kidding about that. Angel is sometimes spelled angel
and sometimes angle. Altar and alter are
interchangeable, no matter which meaning is intended. Weird spacing
errors . . . random capitalizations of words (with no consistency
throughout even the paragraph that contains them) . . . blatant
misspellings that a spellcheck would have found (beng?) . . .
various wording errors that would have been easily caught by a close
reading of the text. For an English teacher and self-proclaimed
grammar diva, it was very distracting. Not that I'm a total snob –
I could appreciate the points he was making even with the errors
(which is apparently what he asked me to do there at the end of the introduction). But it is easy to get the
impression that there wasn't a lot of care put into getting things
right -- which is not the impression one wants to give of a
scholarly work. I found myself searching for a biography of the
author to determine whether he had the credentials to justify his
claims on the biblical text (such a biography is not included, by the
way – I'm left to simply trust that this guy knows what he's
talking about).
In
the end, I felt this was a work with good intentions, a work with
good potential, but a work in search of a good editor. If you are not troubled by editorial needs and are looking for a new analysis of the book of Hebrews, you can find this one right here.
Disclosure: I received this book free from the publisher through BookCrash.com in exchange for an honest review.
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