On Book Buying and Revised Editions

When should you go for a revised edition of a book?

Book lovers know all about this problem, especially when it comes to works of non-fiction, and academic and scholarly titles: You discover that a volume you have owned and cherished has now come out in a second edition. Sometimes it is said to be a “revised and enlarged” version of the original.

The question then is: ‘Should I get it?’ For most people who do love books, this can be a problem, since obviously at the very least you will need to spend more money and need to have more shelf space in your home. But since I am here talking about things like works of theology and biblical commentaries, there can indeed be good reasons to get the revised version.

I in fact wrote about these matters some eight years ago. I discussed in particular the very helpful reference work, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, edited by Green, McKnight and Marshall. The original 1992 volume of 934 pages was expanded to 1088 pages in the 2013 edition, edited by Green, Brown and Perrin. The articles in that large volume were rewritten with new authors, and so on: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2016/08/30/jesus-new-testament-scholarship-second-editions/

As I said in that article:

If you are like me, you tend to be a bit wary of updated and revised volumes, as they are often little more than a very slight updating, with bibliographies perhaps updated or a few new bits and corrections added. Unless you are a theology and biblical studies fan who also happens to be a millionaire, you tend to be rather cautious about shelling out more money for such updated works. Of course some updates are the real deal however.

 

Consider for example the 1983 commentary on Joshua in the Word Biblical Commentary series by Trent Butler. The original volume of 300 pages was replaced in 2014 by a two-volume work totalling nearly 950 pages. Now that is a major revision and addition. So something like that I am willing to dig deep into the wallet for. Learning to discern which revised volumes are worth getting and which ones should be passed on is part of the game here.

So here I want to give a few more examples – and much more recent examples for the most part. I still believe you need to check out any revised volumes closely before purchasing them. They may just contain some very minor changes and are not worth the money to procure them – and take up valuable shelf space.

Here are two brand new volumes (or rather, second editions) that certainly are worth dishing out the big bucks for (and the first one, at least here in Australia, was not cheap!).

Robert Bowman and J. Ed Komoszewski, Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ. Kregel, 2007. (392 pages)
Robert Bowman and J. Ed Komoszewski, The Incarnate Christ and His Critics: A Biblical Defense. Kregel, 2024. (853 pages)

I should say at the outset that this is not exactly a revised edition. In the Preface to the new book the authors explain the relationship of the two books:

Some explanation is in order concerning the relation of this new book to our 2007 book Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ. We originally planned to produce a second edition of that book (and still do, in future years); however, the needs of the day have led us to go far beyond that original goal. The Incarnate Christ and His Critics is an entirely new book of about three times the length of our earlier book, though organized using the same five-point outline featuring the HANDS acronym (Honors, Attributes, Names, Deeds, and Seat). Putting Jesus in His Place is a semipopular defense of the deity of Christ aimed primarily at a general readership. In contrast, The Incarnate Christ and His Critics is an academically oriented treatment, though written in a manner that is hopefully accessible to all motivated readers.

 

The literature relevant to the deity of Christ has expanded dramatically in the years since Putting Jesus in His Place was published. We estimate that relevant serious literature has more than doubled since that time (not to mention the less-than-serious material with which cyberspace is now awash) compared with all of the relevant literature published in the previous two centuries. In our notes we cite more than four hundred books and articles published since our earlier book. Although we are painfully aware that there is much more we did not reference, we have made it our aim to bring readers reasonably up to date with works that are representative of the mass of relevant studies.

But let me say a bit more. If you have the first work, you will know that it was a very helpful look at various issues involving the deity of Christ. Christ’s divinity has always been attacked, and this book offered more than just some mere proof-texting, but a well-rounded case for his divine status and nature.

But now, some 17 years on, this defence of Christ’s deity has become their magnum opus, and perhaps the best book to date attempting this. There is so much to discuss in it, so I need to offer a proper review of this volume. That should be coming soon, so stay tuned.

John Lennox, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. Zondervan, 2020. (239 pages)
John Lennox, 2084 and the AI Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence Informs Our Future, updated and expanded edition. Zondervan, 2024. (359 pages)

It is not just advances in areas of theology, hermeneutics, textual criticism, archaeological finds and biblical research that keep needing to be noted, taken into account, and updated, but so too the volumes discussing advances in science, technology, and so on. And one rapidly changing and advancing field has to do with things involving artificial intelligence, new digital technologies, and worldviews that may go along with that, such as transhumanism.

Things here are moving along very quickly, so even a book written on this just a few years ago can quickly need some revising and updating. That is the case here with these books by Lennox. The Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist wrote a quite helpful book on this in 2020. But a lot has happened since then, so he had come out with an greatly enlarged book on this. The original 13 chapters have expanded to 17 chapters, and plenty of new material is found throughout.

As he writes in the Preface to the updated edition: “The advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the four years since I wrote the first edition of this book not only justify its revision but also require a considerable expanded edition in order to try to keep pace with what is an unprecedented phenomenon of the early twenty-first century.”

Please note that I hope to soon have a review of this book posted in the coming days.

And finally, an earlier updated work that is still worth mentioning:

Gordan Fee, 1 Corinthians (NICNT). Eerdmans, 1987. (880 pages)
Gordan Fee, 1 Corinthians, rev. ed. (NICNT). Eerdmans, 2014. (1044 pages)

Confession time: unlike the two previous books that I did eagerly get the revised versions of, I did not do that for this one. That is not because this noted New Testament scholar should ever be ignored, but because I was a bit late in learning that a revised edition had appeared.

And by now, as I more or less enter my twilight years, I have decided I really must cut back on getting new works of theology and new commentaries. But if I were twenty years younger, was still lecturing in these subjects, and still had lots of money and empty bookcases, I would have grabbed it long ago. Fee tells us in his preface to the revised edition what has changed:

It has now been over twenty-five years since the first edition of this commentary appeared, Much has happened during this quarter century, besides the author’s (who was also the former editor of the series) growing long of tooth! There are two primary reasons for the present revision:

 

First, the original commentary was based on the 1978 edition of the NIV, which was probably more poorly done in this letter than anywhere else in the entire canon. I came to discover the reasons for this when in 1990 I was invited to join the Committee for Bible Translation (the committee solely responsible for the translation itself)….

 

Second, the amount of scholarly literature on this letter has increased incrementally, so much so in fact that I make no claims here to have been able to consult all of it for this edition. Indeed, in terms of articles in the scholarly journals alone, the bibliography has in the past twenty-five years multiplied over 300 percent in relationship to all such material in the preceding two centuries! I have tried to be thorough and fair to all, but I herewith also must apologize to the many who will look in vain in the index for something they wrote.

 

A third, probably less significant, change from the first edition is related to another passion engendered from many years of teaching, writing, and listening to sermons — namely, to eliminate the language of “chapter and verse,” a system of numbers absolutely essential for “finding things” but otherwise totally foreign to the first-century author. Paul wrote words put into sentences, which in the present written culture also require paragraphs. But he did not write “verses,” language that has inherently, but not purposefully, created a misguided use of Scripture that would be foreign to the original authors. So I have tried to relegate the numbers to parentheses, rather than use such language in the text of the commentary itself. This in itself required a third and final reading of the text in an attempt to be faithful to Paul, while still trying to help the reader “find things” regarding the rest of the biblical revelation.

In sum, for those considering getting revised and updated editions, it depends on obvious things like budget and book space, but it mainly depends on what sort of revision it is: how extensive it is, how much new material has been added, and if it really warrants getting the second, revised, copy of the book.

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