I'm surprised at the number of five-star reviews already. It is one of the most awkward and stilted translations I have ever come across, kind of like Young's Literal Translation. I wouldn't include this in the legacy of KJV, a work of linguistic art. The translation reads like the early generation computer translations. It is very mechanical and uses English words in sentences that make very little sense, I think for the sake of "one-to-one" correspondence between English and Greek. Unforutnately, that's just not how languages work, and it's amazing that simple linguistic principles are still being ignored in translations like this. Anyone travel abroad and see signs in English that you think, oh, they could have used an English speaking editor for that. That's how it feels reading this. But then it notches up the arrogance of the translation with near blasphemous marketing: "Know what God said, not what we think he said." Well, God did not "say" any of this in English. In any case, there is not a unanimous consensus on what the original canonical manuscripts of either testament should be, so even with the Greek and Hebrew versions, you cannot claim to "Know" what God said. It's always what we "think", and I don't mean that to be subjective. We "think" with very good reasons and high certainty, but also with humility. Not so here. Despite the fact that countless brilliant scholars across languages and millenia have worked at understanding some rare and difficult words and phrases in the originals, this team claims that their efforts are infallible and not subject to human "thinking", but just knowing. The most dangerous kind of biases in translation are the kind where the translators think they are objective. At least I don't feel like I'm missing anything with this translation. ESV and NASB really do good work. If you want "word for word", you've gotta learn Greek. Writing Greek sentences with English words isn't translation. It's neither Greek nor English.

I was hoping for reflections specifically related to advent, but it turns out that it's just a rearrangement of Wright's sections from "Luke For Everyone." If you already have that, you can just follow the daily Revised Common Lectionary readings from Luke and go to the corresponding section in "Luke For Everyone." The only difference is that some sections are cut off short if the passage in Luke For Everyone was longer than the lectionary reading, and also each reading ends with a question for reflection. I felt a little misled since the title makes it seem like there will be advent-specific reflections. A convenient repackaging for those that don't already have the other title, but disappointing if you do have "Luke For Everyone" already. It's a shame because "Lent for Everyone: Luke Year C" seems to have had fresh devotionals from Tom, at least the first week I looked through did not come from "Luke For Everyone." It seems for this advent book (9 years after the Lent one) the publisher wanted something to sell without having to get new content.

I hate to give this only three stars, because there was a lot of great and really impactful teaching. The problem is how often it was a mixed bag. One of the things I love about hearing from Christian OT scholars is that I feel like I'm being made aware of my own cultural bias. The thing with Waltke is often I recognize the American Evangelical bias that I'm trying to get away from in the very way he's interpreting the texts, in contrast with someone like Gordon Wenham, who I feel like takes me into another world, rather than taking American culture and worldview into the text as Waltke frequently does. Some of these things are really alarming. For example, his views on women carry this subtle (or not so subtle?) misogyny. When talking about Adam and Eve, he shares a story of a knight who raped a woman. The knight does not get punished for it because he "rightly" answers the queen's riddle by pointing out that all women want to rule over everyone. That is the moral of the story, and he says that's a great story and teaches us what Genesis 3 is saying. Wait, shouldn't the moral of that story be that men aren't held accountable in society? Shouldn't the moral be the outrage we feel at miscarriage of justice? No, the moral is that women just want to rule everyone according to Waltke. He also talks derisively of an apparently obese woman that he sat next to on the airplane. He later says that a husband should have zeal for his wife as his property. I wish I were making this up. He also teaches the eternal subordination of the Son in Genesis, flirting with an ancient heresy, with the intent of making a cultural point on gender relations, (and that's some radical eisegesis to bring ESS into Genesis 3). There's all this kind of misogyny that unfortunately is pretty widespread in the American church (I'm sure all of us have certain influential pastors that might jump right to our minds). I really love Bruce Waltke and his manner, but there are topics that are really unfortunate cultural leftovers. All in all though, for the price, I would say look to another mobile ed course, like any of Douglas Moo's NT courses (if you are looking for other courses at this price level). The good here is really good, but it's just mixed in with mediocre, questionable, and sometimes unfortunately bad teaching.

It might just be that too many topics were covered in two hours, but I found that none of the topics were touched on at depth to be really insightful or helpful. The course feels more like an introduction to start studying these things rather than a course on the topics. In some ways Ben says as much, saying that you really need to get his six books on the topics to fully experience the course. Maybe it's better to just get those books and skip this course. Also, I found that he would somewhat often say that most people don't understand the context of a passage, but then his presentation of the context often felt unconvincing at full of equivocation (for example, does "work" mean "career", does "work" mean "labor", does "work" mean the good one does in the world? He uses the word in a very unclear way then applies verses that seem to be referring to specific aspects of work. In all, I couldn't really apply anything, but I like Ben's work in general so this isn't meant as a criticism of him and the many valuable resources he's produced.