Romans

Edwin Hamilton Gifford, The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, Nabu Press, 2010. (London: John Murray, 1886. Originally in The Speaker's Commentary, 1881).

This very good but hard to find exegetical commentary from the nineteenth century is now available again in an exact reproduction.

Though I have mentioned the inflation of commentaries, and on Romans in particular, I have to mention these two since they are not in English. The first one is not exactly new since the original dates back to the third century. The second if a full length work in three volumes by Romano Penna in Italian.

The use of the Old Testament in Romans has been a fertile ground of investigation for decades, and rightly so since there are about sixty OT “quotations” in Romans. The number varies according to how you define a “quotation” and a few others technical arguments better left out of this post.

Westcott-Hort 1881: Quotation in Rom 2.6 in capitals

The debate is ancient as to whether here and there Paul refers or alludes to some OT passages or not. I have already mentioned the use of Ps 97 in Rom 1.17 as an example.

To the writing of commentaries there is not end.

There are so many commentaries on almost any book of the Bible today that one might as well give up trying to keep up with the field. It gets even worse if you pay more than lip service to working in several languages. For example, not counting commentaries in English, three pretty hefty commentaries came out recently on Luke: Bovon’s last volume of his four volume commentary; Michael Wolter’s volume published by Mohr-Siebeck; Heins Klein’s commentary published by Vandenhoeck, to name only these three.

My present research work is spread mainly over three areas.

Publications

“Romans 1.20: Knowing God Through His Acts in History” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 100/1 (2009): 45–58

Dissertation Abstract. “Evil, Suffering, and the Righteousness of God According to Romans 1–3: An Exegetical and Theological Study” Tyndale Bulletin 59.1 (2008): 153–155

Thanks to an agreement between Google Books and de Gruyter, a good part of my dissertation (written in French) is now available on Google Books.

The complete reference of the book is Erwin Ochsenmeier, Mal, souffrance et justice de Dieu selon Romains 1-3 : Étude exégétique et théologique , Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche 155, de Gruyter: New-York, Berlin, 2007, 23 x 15,5 cm. XII, 392 pages. Relié. ISBN 978-3-11-019696-2.

The book is a revised version of my Ph. D. dissertation presented in March 2007 at the Faculté Libre de Théologie Évangélique de Vaux-sur-Seine (France).