Three audio lectures by Gordon Fee

Not very many authors every sell one million books, and the number of Christian scholars that do is very, very small.

If Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart's How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth has not reached one million in sales yet, it is very close (by 2014, when the fourth edition was published, 900,000 copies had been sold).

The authors' sound hermeneutical advice not only touched a general readership of multiplied thousands, but it also helped set many budding scholars down the road toward fruitful careers with a sound foundation. 

New Testament scholar Mark Strauss testifies to that at this video link, and in an interview with Nijay Gupta, published just two days ago, Old Testament scholar Sandra Richter (written about previously on this blog) and Gupta had this exchange:

NG: What books were formative for you when you were a student? Why were they so important and shaping?

SR:  Books that I found formative include Baruch Halpern’s The First Historians, Roland deVaux’s Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, and Fee and Stuart’s How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Each of these books directed me back to the original contexts of the biblical authors via historiography, archaeology, and genre-study. In the spirit of Jeannine Brown’s Scripture as Communication, each of these books challenged me to read the Bible as a communicative act from an ancient community, who had witnessed the mighty acts of God, to me. Each helped me, in the words of John Walton to recognize that although the Bible was written for me, it wasn’t written to me. And until I was able to engage the world of the original authors and audiences, I was not able to truly engage the Bible.

Gordon Fee, who has been featured on this blog the past two weeks (9/5 post ... 9/12 post), gave three lectures related to the theme of he and Stuart's book at Union University back in 2005. The conference the lectures were given at was called the, For All It's Worth Conference. The audio recordings can be heard here:

• "Why Christians Read Their Bibles Poorly"
• "Some Helps Toward Good Reading"
• "Why Read the Bible Well?"

Those who would like to hear all of the lectures at that conference can do so at this link (the other speakers at the conference included: Grant Osborne, Daniel Block, George Guthrie, Michael Card, Gary Smith, Kelvin Moore, Mark Dubis, Brad Green, Paul Jackson, David Gushee, and Todd Brady).