Thursday, April 02, 2009

Tony Thiselton Reviews Joseph Fitzmyer's New Commentary

Over at RBL, Anthony Thiselton reviews Joseph Fitzmyer's new 1 Corinthians commentary in the Anchor Bible series.

The next major 1 Corinthians commentaries to look forward to will be Andrew Clark in the WBC and Bruce Winter in the NCCS.

3 comments:

Sean said...

What about Ellis for the ICC?

John Mark Inman said...

The last part was interesting.
"this is an excellent commentary but in many respects a predictable one. It is accurate, fair, and reflects a wealth of scholarship, but understandably there seems to be
little new that has not been said before.

Is that where we are with every book or just 1 Corinthians?

It seems like there a lot of guys spending a decade on 900 page commentaries. Is there good money in this? I wouldn't think so. Why so many commentary series? Does every series started have to be finished? Can a couple of series be merged and select the best volumes?

Seems like a whole lot of effort not to say anything new.

Fongster said...

Hi... if you want to hear something 'new' on 1 Corinthians, you should check out Brian Rosner and Roy Ciampa's upcoming commentary under the PNTC series. Sat in Rosner's NT class last year and found that he offered a fresh take on 1 Corinthians - that in the letter, Paul was writing to the Corinthian Church, which had failed to live up to its true calling as the fulfillment of the eschatological people of God, and that it had mainly compromised in the big areas of sexual immorality and idolatry - two areas which in Jewish thought particularly characterised the Gentiles. In another words, the background of Paul's thinking in 1 Corinthians is more 'Jewish' and OT than what is commonly thought. For a preview of their central thesis, see Roy Ciampa and Brian Rosner, 'The Structure and Argument of 1 Corinthians: A Biblical and Jewish Approach', NTS 52 (2006): 205-218.