The Teaching Company - The Old Testament and The New Testament - reviews please

[MIch elle]

If you've watched these can you tell me what you thought? TIA! :D

[Faithr]

I don't know anything about the Old Testament professor. And I have avoided the ones by Bart Erhman (sp?). If you ever go to Barnes and Nobles or some such other bookstore you'll find plenty of books by him all debunking the New Testament. Apparently he is a former evangelical who stopped believing in God and is now trying to educate the rest of the world about how wrong Christians are to believe in the New Testament. I've seen him appear on Colbert too. He is rather glib and not very penetrating. So I don't trust him as a professor because I think he's got a cause to further and it may or may not jive with good scholarship. Fortunately his kind of scholarship is very popular right now; it kind of jives with the shallow scholarship that is pop spirituality.

[Michelle in MO]

I don't know anything about the Old Testament professor. And I have avoided the ones by Bart Erhman (sp?). If you ever go to Barnes and Nobles or some such other bookstore you'll find plenty of books by him all debunking the New Testament. Apparently he is a former evangelical who stopped believing in God and is now trying to educate the rest of the world about how wrong Christians are to believe in the New Testament. I've seen him appear on Colbert too. He is rather glib and not very penetrating. So I don't trust him as a professor because I think he's got a cause to further and it may or may not jive with good scholarship. Fortunately his kind of scholarship is very popular right now; it kind of jives with the shallow scholarship that is pop spirituality.
Faithr is right; I would not recommend Bart Ehrman. I wouldn't be familiar with any of their other religion professors.

[Chris in VA]

A third vote against Ehrman. Try NT Wright's New Testament book (although he disagrees with Piper--I'm not sure how).
There's also a little book that RR sells that just goes into a little detail about each book of the Bible, and also covers how to use Bible notation (what does
"Luke 2:1-5" mean, for example), how to use a concordance, and a few other things. We just used it in 9th grade before plunging into daily reading the Bible.

[Moira in MA]

I have seen the New Testament Course. As others indicated, they are very much in the historio-critical vein. I was disappointed.

I recently worked through the course on Luther as we had read the Bondage of the Will in Omnibus and I wanted to know more. It was fabulous, imho.

HTH
~Moira