Sixth Year: 2025 NPSE Series Goal.
With the sixth year of Naphtali Press Special Editions we hope to bring the 2020-21 sixth title proposed finally to print, Gisbertus Voetius on The Sabbath and Holy Days. That will make eleven large volumes produced (see prior years) with co-publisher Reformation Heritage Books in under six years. RHB will step away as copublisher at that point, and we will begin a Second Series for NPSE (uniform with the prior series but the numbering restarted) and undertake for the first volume (or two) the first 44 sermons of James Durham’s 228 Sermons on Song of Solomon (very different form the lectures already in print; the 44 sermons are longer than the lectures on the whole book!). This second series will be a solo undertaking under just the Naphtali Press imprint. For more about Naphtali Press Special Editions (NPSE) and the prior year titles now available, see here.
- Gisbertus Voetius, On the Sabbath and Feast Days. Forthcoming 2025. DV. This is a first time translation of De Sabbatho et Festis (1638). Not much by Voetius has been translated into English. This is an important work because Voetius was born in 1589, would have known men of the prior generation, was at Dort and clerked and issued its deliverances to print, and thus was well situated to canvas the Reformed view on this issue as it developed from the earlier days of the Reformed churches to 1638. The issue of the Sabbath, like in the UK, was not without controversy, nor the companion issue of what to do with the old holy days of Roman Catholicism. The work as it now stands will have the two primary theses by Voetius on The Sabbath and Holy Days (translated by David Noe) and the three attending appendices of similar length (translated by Charles Johnson). An appendix to all of this will contain two more theses by Voetius on The Time of Christ’s Birth, which is already complete through the layout stage.
- Second Series, volume 1 (or 1-2): James Durham. 44 Sermons on Song of Solomon (preached, Oct. 1651-1652). Transcribed from 17th century manuscripts. James Durham’s 228 manuscript sermons in five or six volumes, spread over as many libraries in the world, were only rediscovered and detailed several years ago in an article by Chris Coldwell and Matthew Vogan. I know of no repository of sermons, preserved for publication as it were, and not in broken notes,etc., so large for any other Puritan or Presbyterian of that time. Given that Durham’s published sermons only number 133, the publication of some or all of these sermons would add significantly to his body of work.