Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Catholic Epistles, Theology of

I've written earlier about the task of considering, writing, and even applying a theology of the Apostolos (= Acts + General Epistles). I'm glad to see more attention given to the canonical function of the General Epistles as a whole in the following works:

Peter H. Davids, “The Catholic Epistles as Canonical Janus: A New Testament glimpse into Old and New Testament Canon Formation,” BBR 19.3 (2009): 403-16.

David R. Nienhuis, Not by Paul Alone: The Formation of the Catholic Epistles and the Christian Canon (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007).

Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr and Robert W. Wall (eds.), Catholic Epistles and Apostolic Tradition (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009).

I think this is a new and mostly uncharted sphere of research!

1 comment:

Esteban Vázquez said...

I've written earlier about the task of considering, writing, and even applying a theology of the Apostolos (= Acts + General Epistles).

And again I must ask: it is really the case that "the Catholic Epistles and Acts comprised a literary unit in the Ancient Church called the 'Apostolos' and you can find manuscripts that contains these writings and lectionary readings based around them"? To the best of my knowledge, "Apostolos" is the designation for the lectionaries containing Acts and both the Catholic and Pauline Epistles, but excluding Revelation (see Aland and Aland, Text of the NT, p. 163). This is still the case with our epistolaries in the Orthodox Church, which indeed still bear the name "Apostolos" (Sl. Apostol'). If lectionary manuscripts have surfaced that contain the Acts and the Catholic Epistles alone under that name, and which aren't simply incomplete Apostolos manuscripts lacking the second half of the book (the Pauline Epistles always come after the Catholic Epistles), I would be most interested to learn of them!