Bible

As I have said before, I have not offered to present papers at conferences the last few years (bad career move!). I am breaking this habit. Since I will be at the Tyndale Fellowship NT study group this coming July and since there was a free spot, I volunteered to step in. My paper will be “The Great Commission (Matt. 28.19–20) in History and Today or Why the Great Commission is not the Duty of All Believers.”

Mark Keown. Congregational Evangelism in Philippians: The Centrality of an Appeal to the Fabric of Philippians. Paternoster Biblical Monographs. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008.

“It was a shock to me in my early theological study to hear that Paul gives no direct appeal for general evangelism to his congregations. As I had heard innumerable sermons assuming this very thing and had preached such messages myself, this led to some serious self-questionning.” (p. 1).

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.