Tag: Pauline Theology

Daily Gleanings: Paul in RBL (2 July 2019)

In the Review of Biblical Literature, Nicholas Elder reviews Channing Crisler’s Reading Romans as Lament: Paul’s Use of Old Testament Lament in His Most Famous Letter (Pickwick, 2016). According to Elder,

The monograph’s central argument is that Paul is thoroughly indebted to the language and logic of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible lament in his letter to the Romans. Crisler employs both biblical scholarship on lament in the Hebrew Bible and Richard B. Hays’s well-known criteria for detecting quotations, allusions, and echoes of antecedent biblical texts in Paul’s writings. [Crisler’s] thesis that “the experience of OT lamenters is echoed in Romans, and those echoes largely shape the way Paul discusses suffering in the letter.”
…
More explanation on the choice of texts and their relationship to each other and Romans as a whole would improve the monograph. Nonetheless, Reading Romans as Lament contributes to the ongoing discussion of Paul’s metonymic recall not only of Jewish Scriptures but also the lament genre. (1, 4)

For the balance of Elder’s review, see RBL‘s website.

In the Review of Biblical Literature, Chris Kugler reviews David Capes’s Divine Christ: Paul, the Lord Jesus, and the Scriptures of Israel (Baker, 2018). According to Kugler, the book

reprises much of [Capes’s] foundational work, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017 [1992]), and argues that Paul’s appropriation of “YHWH texts” with reference to Jesus represents a remarkable development in earliest Christianity and can only indicate that Paul regarded Jesus as fully divine. (1)

Kugler citiques Capes’s sketch of Second Temple Jewish monotheism (3) but also acknowledges the debt that discussions of early high Christology owe to Capes’s work (1).

For the balance of Kugler’s review, see RBL‘s website.

Daily Gleanings (4 June 2019)

Citing personal communication with Andrew Errington, Brian Rosner suggests the following apt analogy on “Paul and the Law”:

Discussing Paul and the Law is a bit like being watched while you carve a chicken: it’s fairly easy to start well, but you quickly have to make some tricky decisions (about which everyone has an opinion), and it’s very easy to end up in a sticky mess with lots of bits left over that no one knows what to do with. Paul and the Law, 25.

Stemming from my prior post about the importance of being aware of your school’s house style, several readers commented on Twitter about the lack of a free PDF version of the SBLHS’s 2nd ed.

For background, SBL did make a PDF version of the SBLHS’s 1st ed. at no additional charge to SBL members.

SBL explains rationale for not doing the same with the 2nd ed., at least thus far:

As with the first edition of the handbook, we anticipate the SBL Handbook of Style will be made available to members on the SBL website. But as with the first edition, we do not expect that to take place for a number of years. In the meantime, to enhance the value of the new handbook, SBL is building digital resources, such as bibliographic tools and spell-checking addons, which requires investing further in that development. (Questions Regarding Digital Editions of the SBLHS 2)

Doubtless, this reasoning won’t satisfy all. But since several folks have commented along these lines, I thought this further information from SBL might be of interest.