Thank you for catching me up on that. So glad you finally got it!

Order cancelled, re-ordered, and I have just received my copy in London — printed on demand nearby in England. I try and read a chapter at each mealtime, now about half-way through. Excellent. Indeed, the bibiography on its own is excellent!

All six are grammatically correct.

You can research each one. They are all known grammatical constructions.

Referring to the first 3, not the latter 3? I’ll defer to your judgement there; maybe I’m too rigid. Many thanks again.

Those are all correct grammar.

You appear to just not be familiar with the idioms employed.

Some more minor ones and then a few that aren’t errors but which I feel read a bit cleaner with minor amendments (IMO):

Page 323: says “this verse is of no use establishing” instead of ‘for/in establishing’.

Page 329 (paragraph 1): says “sit a then-eternal throne” instead of ‘sit on/upon a then-eternal throne’. 

Page 352 (paragraph 2): says “This is not a very strong evidence”, where ‘a’ is not necessary.

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Then there were three non-error ones that I thought were worth bringing up, regardless. Could just be a matter of personal style, so no need to even respond regarding these if you disagree:

Page 326: says “So the Christian’s options were aplenty”, which I think reads a bit better as “the Christians’ options”, even though both make grammatical sense and make the same basic point.

Page 337 (preceding the block quote): says “precisely here that we find Paul say”, which might be better expressed as “precisely here that Paul says” or “here that we find Paul saying”.

Page 374: says “was already made twice now” which I think reads better as “has already been made twice now”.

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Anyway, thanks for the read. Very happy with my purchase and learned a lot of new details from this follow-up work.

And worth asking about.

Because, yes, in technical literature validity refers to structural soundness (in the common tongue) and soundness to premise validity (in the common tongue). It’s just that this distinction can be confusing to those not up on the technical dialect.

Ah. Yah. I wasn’t sure if it was worth bringing up, hence my hesitation. I take your point. That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.

Indeed I do often but not always, and for a reason.

Hence, I could say what you suggest but most readers would be confused as that isn’t familiar English to most readers. And if I were to be that hyper-precise, I could not say “the reasoning” is valid but “the argument” is valid, since otherwise I’d be mixing up vocabularies as well.

So I use colloquial discourse instead, and with as much precision as is necessary for expert readers not to be confused, nor inexpert readers to be confused (or lost).

Since you understood my point, obviously I had no need of the obfuscating vocabulary. So, I succeeded.

While anyone else will understand an argument form that is sound (not a specific example of the use of that form) can still lead to an unsound argument by virtue of an unsound (i.e. dubious, shaky) premise. So they won’t be confused either.

It’s a literary win-win.

And that’s the goal of a writer writing to both audiences at the same time. Which should describe most historians most of the time. This isn’t a technical treatise in philosophy. It’s a history book written for multiple audiences.

The top of p. 134 reads as follows: “The reasoning is sound. The problem is that the premise is not.”

I was unsure about the wording here since, in the parlance of logic, the property of soundness relates to the truth of the premises, given that they are situated in a valid argument (i.e., the conclusion follows from the premises if they are true).

I wonder if a more accurate rendering of the idea would be something like: “The reasoning is valid but unsound since it relies on a false premise.”

I noticed this because typically you employ the proper distinction between validity and soundness, which is probably why this jumped out at me. Or I could have missed something and your original wording is preferable. Either way, excellent book!