My March Matchups Wishlist—Will You Help Me Win These Discounts?

Every time March Matchups comes up at Logos, I get selfish—and hopeful. I don’t care what books other people have their eyes on: I know immediately which titles I want and need. Historically, I have reason to hope that those titles will get steep discounts because so many other people want and need them, too.

You’re probably a book person or you wouldn’t be here at the back of the party, failing to watch the basketball players. But just in case you need a little coaching on what resources you might find valuable and why, I’m going to offer some quick thoughts on each of the collections available in 2025’s Logos March Matchups.

I divvied them all up in categories that made sense to me. In each category, I will not-so-subtly put the collection I’m most interested in at the top, hoping that you’ll help my favored collections win so I can get a discount along with you!

Original languages

New International Dictionary of Theology and Exegesis: Old and New Testament | NIDOTTE/NIDNTTE | (10 vols.)

I cite Moisés Silva constantly. I did it only last week at a pastors conference. One of the works Silva helped produce that I can’t believe I don’t own yet is the NIDNTTE, which he edited. He’s one of the few people I trust to do lexicography—the study of the meaning of Hebrew and Greek words—with an eye both to serving the church and to honoring the way God made language to function.

I am openly campaigning for NIDNTTE to win the 2025 March Matchups. I was just thinking I was going to have to buckle down, decrease my latte budget, bite the bullet, and purchase this set at full price for a big project I hope to start work on soon. Would you be so kind as to agree with me so I can get a great discount on NIDOTTE/NIDNTTE?

Brill Greek Reference Collection (5 vols.)

I have not personally used these volumes, but countless times I have seen BDAG (the major Greek-English lexicon) mention DELG, a French etymological dictionary of Greek. And at least once, I had to go unearth DELG and do some research in it.

I’m well aware that appealing to etymology can be, and often is, an exegetical fallacy (see references to Silva above). But etymology can be a helpful tool in the hands of the discerning. The Brill Greek Reference Collection is one I want in my tool belt.

Lexham Press Original Languages Suite (25 vols.)

Lexham Press has produced numerous valuable volumes on original-language study. There are riches here that I have sampled and to which many friends of mine have contributed, from the Lexham Theological Wordbook to the various (phenomenally beautiful) Hebrew and Greek textbooks to The Greek Verb Revisited and the helpful essays on exegesis and textual criticism in the Lexham Methods series.

In my experience, most people regard these matters as boring until someone who’s done the work can start answering the questions they didn’t know they had. Then they literally—I have seen this with my own two eyes, even recently—lean in closer.

Mobile Ed: GK101 Introduction to Biblical Greek (15 hour course)

You have to start somewhere with learning biblical Greek. I own this course from my time at Logos, and I trust my friend John Schwandt to teach carefully and well.

There is a wide variety of methods available to learn the Greek of the New Testament. If you’re puzzled about which one to choose, and if this one gets highly discounted for March Matchups, that’s your sign.

Systematic theology

I’ve had my eye on this set. Joel Beeke and Paul M. Smalley have done really incredible work for the church in multiple projects over the years, and in this work they take the head-heart-hands synthesis—the intellectual, devotional, and practical powers—of the Puritans and others in the Reformed tradition and turn it into a lay-accessible systematic theology.

This is the series I hope “wins” March Matchups because I want a good discount on these volumes in Logos. One of the only Reformed systematics to have possibly exceeded this one in mentions-per-blog-post is Bavinck.

Speaking of Bavinck: Interest in Herman Bavinck has had a major resurgence in the last ten years. I will be frank: I have made more than one attempt to read this major work of his, and I have so far failed. One of the reasons is that my lifestyle (I blame the children) makes it difficult for me to find time for paper books, but I get to read electronic ones when everyone else is asleep. And when I read something as rich as Bavinck, I want my highlights to be saved.

If Beeke and Smalley don’t win, I wouldn’t be disappointed—or surprised—if Bavinck does. He is irenic and careful. He is an exegete as well as a systematic and historical theologian. He writes from a clear place in the Reformed tradition but with humility toward other Christian viewpoints. He has Barth’s proverbial newspaper in one hand and Bible in the other.

Speaking of Barth: I care about theology too much to write chipper marketing copy about a neo-orthodox theologian who infamously retained a mistress. But I also care about theology too much not to want to have access in Logos to the most influential theologian of the twentieth century.

I simply wouldn’t want to have Barth’s Church Dogmatics (CD) in paper; I’d never use it. But as part of a searchable library, I can look up citations and read portions that come up in other writings. This indeed is what I have done, because I own CD (and the Römerbrief). Responsible theologians and exegetes should make sure to own important books that don’t reflect their perspective.

Speaking of perspectives: When I want to make sure to cover all the main views on a given theological issue, I turn to series like Counterpoints.

It is a matter of charity to represent someone else’s viewpoints in terms that someone will acknowledge and own. It is simple love—it’s the way I’d want to be treated—to look for the most responsible, influential, and careful proponents of any view and let them be its representatives. That is what the Counterpoints series has sought to do for a long time now. Sometimes the array of views on a topic can be bewildering. Welcome to the real world.

Tune in as the Logos team analyzes the bracket and highlights the benefits of these discounted resources.

Homiletics

My most important mentor was a great lover of Spurgeon. A pastor/evangelist in my book club is. A member of my little Textual Confidence Collective crew is, too. I’ve heard similar advice drop from such Spurgeon afficionados: Just pick up a page and see what Spurgeon does for you.

Florid nineteenth-century oratory tends to grate on modern ears: not so that of Spurgeon. He had a wit and a heart that make him a perennial favorite. He’s the kind of guy whose collected works you should have in your Logos library.

Historical theology

Jaroslav Pelikan is a major name in historical theology. I see him cited frequently. I confess that this particular set has not caught my attention before. After reading some of the reviews, however, I’m interested.

I would encourage you to look at the full list of very specific academic topics covered by this series. If even two catch your fancy or meet some need in your own studies, this set would be worth voting for.

I confess that I own all of these books from my years working at Lexham; but as I looked over this list, I found my eyes settling on The Gloss and the Text: William Perkins on Interpreting Scripture with Scripture. I actually love having contemporaries interpret and synthesize Puritan writings for me.

I’m not a proficient student of historical theology, I confess. I’m an exegete. I’d have to give the same advice I gave for SHST: Look over the topics here and see if several of them scratch itches you might have. My eyes are on one of my more perennial interests in historical theology: Getting to Know the Church Fathers: An Evangelical Introduction.

Church history

I read a fair number of articles from this magazine when I worked at a research center in my university library. It gained my trust with its themed issues and quality articles.

One of the purposes of having a library, and certainly of having a Logos library, is simply having available for reading and citation whatever random John Flavel or Richard Sibbes sermon someone happens to reference favorably. Many times I have been glad to have The Complete Works of Historical Figure X, including some of the very sub-collections in this large collection. John Owen, Thomas Boston, Thomas Watson, John Bunyan—these are resources worth owning.

Hermeneutics & exegesis

I heard often in graduate school of the famous Strack-Billerbeck. But I confess to doing far better at reading a commentary on the New Testament than a Kommentar zum Neuen Testament—even if it is very interesting to me that this Kommentar is aus Talmud und Midrash. My respected friend Jacob N. Cerone, now a resident of Germany, was the general editor of these volumes, and I’m excited to own them.

Instead of appealing directly to them, let me mention a resource which I have used for Sunday school teaching this semester which puts this kind of literature to use: Klyne Snodgrass’s magisterial Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus. I have repeatedly found it helpful that Snodgrass has reached to Jewish writings to illuminate the parables. Reading Strack-Billerbeck feels like a very, very extended form of that beneficial portion of Snodgrass’s commentary: I’m getting help interpreting Jesus and Paul (etc.) from people more familiar than I am with Jesus’s and Paul’s culture.

I read once that hermeneutical method is the Protestant’s pope. In the absence of a final earthly arbiter for Bible interpretation, we refine our methods for that interpretation. I see real wisdom in this comment, and Keener, Brown, Walton, and Klein are recognized teachers of the hermeneutical art.

I don’t share John Walton’s perspective on the lost world of Genesis, but I find his thoughts on hermeneutics to be challenging and stimulating. Jeannine Brown is on the NIV committee. Craig Keener is one of the most prolific biblical commentators to ever live, with more published words than seems humanly possible (one wonders if he discovered AI before anyone else and kept it secret). You will never learn Bible interpretation without at least implicitly entering into conversation with figures like these.

I have Vogt (Interpreting the Pentateuch) in this series—and I have my eye on Futato (Interpreting the Psalms). These are relatively brief volumes that take the reader seriously but give that reader very practical advice for going from zero to sixty in interpreting biblical genres. I remember when a volume like this (in another series, I confess: Tom Schreiner’s Interpreting the Pauline Epistles) had a massively positive impact on my Bible interpretation.

These handbooks are either beginner handbooks for (academic, evangelical) Bible study or expert cheatsheets for how to teach others to do such study. I’m teaching hermeneutics soon myself on the graduate level, so I’m suddenly more interested in these volumes than I knew before.

We truly do have an embarrassment of riches in Bible study materials. No matter your level of knowledge and experience, there’s a resource for you. This series will help, say, a small group leader (as I myself am!) teach through various biblical books.

The translator of these volumes, Jacob Neusner, is a huge name in Jewish studies. These are standard works in the field.

Biblical theology

I own this entire series; I bought it with my own money. I love especially two volumes: Dominion and Dynasty by Stephen Dempster and A Clear and Present Word by Mark D. Thompson. I also thoroughly profited from Paul and the Law by Brian Rosner. This set has many notable works in it; I’ve just offered the three that have meant the most to me.

One of the legitimate definitions of biblical theology is that branch of study which lays bare biblical themes. This collection, which pairs with the popular commentary series by the same name, does this for fifteen biblical books (or corpora), mostly in the Old Testament.

Bible reference

This is a hefty set. I already own almost all of it and have used these volumes for years. Especially valuable, you get all eight IVP “black” dictionaries as well as the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary.

Wikipedia and ChatGPT can now give us a lot of the most basic information we want, even about the topics traditionally covered by a Bible dictionary. But as of this writing, AI tools still “hallucinate” too often for me to really rely on them, and Wikipedia does not really have the “NPOV” (Neutral Point of View) that it seeks. I want evangelicals to write at least some of my reference works. In ZEB, they obliged.

Humanities

I have read or sampled a goodly number of these volumes—or at least watched the BBC version. Boswell’s Life of Johnson was remarkable; Little Dorrit is memorable; Gibbon writes phenomenal prose but pours acid on the Christian faith; Dostoevsky does profound philosophy and moral exploration via painful Russian stories.

What else can I say? I don’t do well with reading lists. I read by whim, as Alan Jacobs taught me. But I can’t help but measure myself against this list, and I can’t help but feel a little pleasure at how many of these volumes I’ve at least cracked open.

Out of my wheelhouse

This set is out of my wheelhouse. Or maybe it is inside it, but the wheels are all gone.

Piety & Christian growth

I am not currently a pastor, so I don’t find myself reaching often for books like these. But if you are, this is a treasure trove. Think of it as the equivalent of Baxter’s Christian Directory, but divvied into catchy topics and written a bit more accessibly for the modern reader.

Vote!

In these politically polarized times, it’s nice to vote for something that really matters to you but that won’t upset you too much if you “lose.”

If you do indeed lose, you may in fact win. Whatever collection wins this year’s bracket is going to be deeply discounted and, almost certainly, valuable to countless Bible students who rely daily, like I do, on Logos Bible software.

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