I wanted to take this opportunity to announce the release of a new monograph that deals especially with the deity of Christ, and especially from a grammatical perspective. Based on my doctoral dissertation but with significantly more material and thoroughly updated, Granville Sharp’s Canon and Its Kin: Semantics and Significance was published last week by Peter Lang. If you’re familiar with Sharp’s Rule, which was articulated especially in relation to Christ’s deity, you will understand the need for Sharp’s name in the title. (This announcement is timely, too, since it’s Sharp’s birthday! He’s 273 years old.) The monograph represents about 25 years of research, off and on, and touches on some key passages such as Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1. It’s available at Amazon. But since it is an academic book, it’s a bit pricey: $69.95.

Besides affirming the deity of Christ in both of these passages, the book deals with constructions that do not fit Sharp’s rule and thus have a different force. “Pastors and teachers” in Eph 4:11 and “apostles and prophets” in Eph 2:20 are discussed at length, for example. In neither of these passages is it likely that the groups are identical. The fact that the book came out after Gordon Fee’s magisterial Pauline Christology has afforded me the opportunity to interact with Fee’s arguments that “our great God and Savior” refer to the Father rather than the Son. I disagree with him on this, and argue that the epithet speaks of Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately, the book had several typos in the Greek due to some font issues at the printer’s. But a corrigenda sheet will accompany each hard copy so that you can spot the errors and make the corrections. If you write to me (dbw@csntm.org), I can send you the corrigenda sheet (in case you buy a copy that was already dispatched to the reseller before the typos were detected).
The monograph will be on sale at the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual meeting coming up in Boston later this month.

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