When people see the word “journal” they think of a diary or travelogue. Those aren’t what I’m talking about. I’m thinking of academic research journals. Granted, academic journals make for challenging reading. They are written by scholars for scholars and their students (pastors, seminarians, or graduate students). But there’s nothing like them for biblical research. Since they are published a few times every year, they are more up-to-date than commentaries and Bible dictionaries. They are the cutting edge.
Academic journals are like magazines. They usually have between five and ten articles covering a hundred or so pages. But they are not magazines. There are crucial differences.
Journal content is peer-reviewed. Articles that appear in a magazine like TIME are not submitted to a panel of field experts. They are written by journalists who may or may not have academic exposure to the field of their article. For example, there is a clear difference in tone and quality between an article on Alzheimer’s that appears in the Journal of the American Medical Society (JAMA) and TIME magazine. An article in TIME will be written for nonspecialists and have a strictly imposed word count. It’s a diluted summary of the topic. You get the basics. However, an article in the former may run thirty pages, use technical vocabulary, and will have undergone peer review. It’s scientific research discussed by experts. You get all the hard data.
You ought to know about scholarly journals in biblical studies and read them from time to time. Major news magazines seem to annually produce hit pieces on the historicity of Jesus and the Gospels every Christmas and Easter. What readers get in those articles is the work of a journalist, not a scholar. That journalist might interview a handful of scholars for a half-dozen quotations. Those are sound bites. You’re getting crumbs that a nonexpert with no expert supervision decides you need to read.
As a serious Bible student, you should know that anything you’d ever read in a popular magazine about the Bible is selective in content and guided by an editorial agenda. Academic journals will show you what experts in the field, of all theological persuasions, including those with a high view of the Bible, are actually saying. Read them.