About
The Developer
This site was developed by John Dyer, a ThM graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary.
I have a wonderful wife far too beautiful and intelligent for me, and a son coming in the fall.
I love to study the Scriptures and to build things, and this site allows me to
simultaneously do both.
The Site
Students of the Scriptures are busy and generally poor, while their tools (books) are expensive and many.
As Qoheleth put it so long ago:
The writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body. (Ecc. 12:12)
This site works toward resolving that tension by enabling Bible students at all levels to
make good, informed decisions about which commentaries they should purchase
and use by providing a constantly updated biblography of commentaries on each book of the Bible and
collecting reviews, ratings, and prices of commentaries from a variety of sources.
The most notable sources are the published books by
D. A. Carson,
Tremper Longman, III,
John Glynn, and
Jim Rosscup. In addition to these print publications, the web resources of
John Piper's Desiring God Ministries,
R. C. Sproul's Ligonier Ministries, and
the Denver Seminary Journal are in the site.
The data from these books and websites
have been used with permission from the respective owners and
aggregated to provide an average score representing a wider array of biblical scholarship
than would be possible with a single book. These books are still extremely valuable and should be
consulted directly along side of this website.
Scores and ratings alone
cannot determine the best choices for an individual pastor or student, but we hope the
combined resources available through this site points them in the right direction.
Scoring Method
A numerical rating can never fully capture
the value of a work. It is only included here as a guide to help students of the Scriptures
know where to start.
The scoring algorithm is currently under development. Here are some of the criteria:
- Total number of reviews - the more reviews a reviewer submits, the weight of those reviews will increase.
- Number of reviews in for a Bible book - the more reviews a user does for a given book of the bible, the weight of those reviews will increase.
- Number of "Helpful reviews" - much like Amazon, the site will eventually have a "Did you find this review helpful?" function.
- Internal modifier - for some reviewers, a behind-the-scenes modifier may be added that will give their reviews more or less weight. The reason for this is to be able to give more weight to credible academic sources that may not have many reviews.
Right now the algorithm looks something like this:
score = (weighted average) + (# of times in a library / 10) + (# of overall reviews / 10).
Credits
