Saturday, December 15, 2012

New "Must Read" on Paul's use of Scripture

There are a lot of fantastic books about how Paul used the Jewish scriptures, which is still a fairly recent area of research in NT scholarship. Some "must reads" include Richard Hays's Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, Francis Watson's Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith, and Christopher Stanley's Paul and the Language of Scripture. Not to mention the monographs of Dietrich-Alex Koch (Die Schrift als Zeuge des Evangeliums) and J. Ross Wagner (Heralds of the Good News). All of these books were written within the last forty years and two of them written in the last ten years. Each of these studies makes crucial contributions to understanding how Paul employed scripture, but there is a new "must read" that merits serious attention from all interested parties.  

This year at SBL I picked up Matthew Bates's The Hermeneutics of Apostolic Proclamation: The Center of Paul's Method of Scriptural Imagination and I am convinced this book belongs on the same shelf as Hays, Watson and Stanley. I'm not finished with it yet, still a couple chapters left, but I have been impressed at every turn. The book is the revision of Bates' Notre Dame dissertation written under David Aune with examiners John P. Meier and Brian Daley. He offers a truly original contribution that is both ambitious and convincingly argued. 

I plan to offer a full review when I'm finished with the book, but for now I'm officially calling for an SBL panel review with respondents Richard Hays, Christopher Stanley, and Francis Watson. A guy can dream . . . 

tolle lege

1 comment:

tahir sumar said...
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