Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Book Notes: Roetzel on 2 Corinthians

    I’ve given up the enterprise of reading this book through from cover to cover, so these notes are based on using it as reference while I’m reading 2 Corinthians itself.

    The fact is that I found the book impossible to read straight through.  As I mentioned previously in using it as a comparison to Matera’s commentary, Roetzel divides the book into five letters:

    1. A Letter of Appeal for the Offering (8:1-24)
    2. First Letter Defending Paul’s Ministry ( 2:14-7:4)
    3. Second Letter of Defense or The Letter of Tears (10:1-13:10)
    4. The Reconciling Letter (1:1-2:13; 7:5-16; 13:11-13)
    5. Offering Letter to the Churches of Achaia (9:1-15)

    I find this reconstruction unconvincing not because it isn’t well thought out.  In fact, it proposes a rather interesting set of correspondence.  What I find unconvincing is any theory of why it would have been combined in the way it was by any redactor.  I simply see no logic, and Roetzel doesn’t seem to provide any, for why anyone should join the various letters together in this particular fashion. In my view, that is a fatal flaw.  What does the letter mean as constructed?  Why would one construct it in that particular way.

    Since Roetzel then writes the commentary according to his reconstruction, one almost is required to accept the reconstruction in order to read it comfortably.  Now that isn’t necessarily a criticism.  I suspect Roetzel would say that a person who follows the canonical form is requiring people to accept that (re)construction.  (See his comments on hypotheses on pages 24-25.)

    Using the index, one can still find the commentary useful in studying particular passages, and the introduction to the whole book as well as the introductions to the various sections are still quite useful.

    Due to space constraints, the commentary covers many of the major theological issues in the book very briefly.  That will actually be a feature to many readers, especially to pastors who are trying to prepare a sermon.  On the other hand, the pastor doing sermon preparation will have to work through the table of contents to find where his or her particular passage is covered.

    The language of the commentary is commendably clear, easy to read, and the referencing is light, and does not use footnotes.  That makes individual sections easy to read and to follow, again an advantage to the pastor of Sunday School teacher wishing to find the answer to some issue of interpretation.  Omissions in the discussion are entirely due to the size of the commentary.  You’ll find a great deal of information for the size of book involved.

    In the final analysis, I would have to say that I cannot overcome the negative factor of the book’s arrangement, and that goes back to my personal evaluation of the author’s hypothetical reconstruction of the book.  Were one to accept his reconstruction, the same things that I find annoying might be seen as helpful.

    As it stands, I must say that I prefer Matera’s commentary in all ways, and give this one three stars out of five.

  • Respect for Other Prayers

    According to the Christian Post:

    About a dozen delegates did not attend the prayer of Johari Abdul-Malik.

    “I’m going to be somewhere else saying the Lord’s Prayer,” Delegate John Cox (R-Ashland) told CBN News. “It’s just not something that I feel like I can condone as an individual.”

    Yet when I get into conversations on the topic of public Christian prayers, I’m regularly told that other people shouldn’t be bothered. They can just observe a moment of silence.

    Concerns surrounding the prayer were not driven by the fact that it was a Muslim prayer but by the troubling associations the imam has.

    Sorry, but I don’t believe it. The explanation given, that two of the 9/11 hijackers attended the same mosque, at a time when Johari Abdul-Malik wasn’t there, just doesn’t wash for me.

  • Christian Carnival CCCXVIII Posted

    … at RodneyOlsen.net.  Check it out!

  • Special Prices on Resources for Students at Bibles.com

    I’m not a student (at least in the traditional sense), but looks good.  Check it out.  (HT:  New Testament Resources)

  • On the Old Testament and Vengeance

    Peter Kirk linked to my post on “an eye for an eye” in responding to David Ker’s post What to do with the vengeance in the Old Testament? Skip it!

    As a result I’ve been able to follow a rather substantial number of posts discussing this issue.  One of these comes from John Hobbins, who tells us that one can’t be a “New Testament only” Christian.  I’m glad he used the word “only” because we all should be New Testament (or covenant) Christians.  As it is I can agree with him completely.  Dr. Platypus gets somewhat more helpful as he discusses the value of some of the difficult passages, especially in the Psalms.  Bob MacDonald also provides some good thoughts and resources.

    I emphasized Old Testament rather strongly in my studies and would certainly not want to be without it as part of my spiritual life.  I wanted to link in three more posts that provide videos of presentations made recently by one of my undergraduate professors, Dr. Alden Thompson.  I also am the publisher of his book Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?  You can regard this as a semi-commercial announcement.

    I have not yet watched this set of videos, but having both taken classes from Alden as an undergraduate, and must more recently hosted him as teacher of several seminars, I have no doubt that he will make a valuable contribution to this discussion.  One of the things he says regularly is:  “You may not like the Old Testament, but Jesus did!”

    Links to the videos:

    Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

    The presentations were at the Toledo First Seventh-day Adventist Church.  If you’re harboring some denominational prejudices I’d urge you to lay them aside for the time it takes you to benefit from Alden’s teaching.

  • Divining the Voice of God

    I spend a good deal of time talking in my book (When People Speak for God) about discerning God’s voice and also about the way that people use the phrase “God told me” and its like in a manipulative way.

    Today on the Spectrum blog, James Coffin has a post titled Divining the Voice in My Head, in which he suggests that some of the people in scripture might have been engaging in the same practice:

    Anyway, as I read the scriptures, I wonder if maybe the people in Bible times weren’t given to the use and misuse of the “God told me” expression just as we are now. Maybe even more so. “God told” people a lot of things back then, it seems. And judging just from the context and the ethics of the advice given, I think it possible that there may have been times when God gets the credit for something that came from other sources. …

    He continues by discussing the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar and their interactions.  It’s well worth reading.

  • REB Module for e-Sword

    I previously reviewed e-Sword and found it a pleasant surprise in the free Bible software category.  Note that my review was written in 2006, within a few days of my starting this blog, and a great deal has happened since then.  Hopefully I will manage to write an updated review soon.

    June 20, 2026: I like to preserve old posts rather than delete them, but I have removed all links from the following. At one time there was an REB module for eSword, but the links are no longer valid and I cannot find such an edition. The closes thing available is on the Internet Archive, which you can browse. The old post, without the links, is shown below for reference.

    But there is more exciting news.  I got an e-mail today from Thought-Sight Consulting regarding an REB module for e-Sword.  You can go straight to the purchase page here, but the first page I linked has a great deal of valuable information.

    Many of us object to paying for modules to add to free software, but if you want the REB, you’re going to have to pay.  It’s under copyright, and the publishers are not giving permission for free distribution.

    From my previous post.

  • Hobbins on Leviticus 25

    John Hobbins is starting a series on Leviticus 25.  It looks interesting.

  • Church Sign: An Eye for an Eye

    An Eye for an Eye church sign
    An Eye for an Eye Church Sign

    At first glance, this is a good sign for a Christian.  After all, Jesus replaces “an eye for an eye” with “Do not resist the one who is evil” (Matthew 5:38-39).

    But I think it illustrates the way we fail to understand certain phrases as they were intended.

    “An eye for an eye” or lex talionis was originally also a way to keep the whole world from going blind.  It was intended not to mandate revenge, but to limit it.  Modern Christians understand it as some sort of command to mass mayhem, and are thankful that Jesus overruled it.

    But in fact Jesus simply moved us further along the same path.  Limiting revenge was good.  Forgiveness was even better, though in justice we still find some value in the idea of proportional penalties.

    This sign demonstrates a quite frequent response to the Old Testament, and in many cases to other things that are old.  In seeing the New Testament as good, these Christians have to see the Old Testament as bad.  It is almost as though there was no grace for thousands of years and then suddenly at the appearance of Jesus God’s grace came into being.

    But in fact the grace that Jesus taught was also taught in the Old Tesament, with the teaching accommodated to time and place.

    So yes, I think Jesus improved on the attitude of “an eye for an eye.”  But “an eye for an eye” was, in its time and place, also a forward looking measure of justice.

  • Is Canonical 2 Corinthians a Hypothetical Reconstruction?

    As I’ve noted before, I’m now reading Calvin J. Roetzel, 2 Corinthians, in the Abingdon New Testament Commantaries series.  I want to emphasize here that I accept the use of historical-critical methodology in Bible study.  That does not, however, force me to find all critical theories plausible.  I’m arguing against this specific set of theories, not against historical-critical methodologies generally.

    In arguing against the unity of the book, Roetzel says:

    … Most [scholars who argue for the integrity of the book] side with Kümmel that the canonical version of 2 Corinthians was Paul’s original epistle, and they tend to ignore the hypothetical nature of their own construction even while repudiating the hypotheses of others (Kümmel 1965 [Introduction to the New Testament. Nashville: Abingdon, 1965], 292).  — p. 25

    This seems to me to be an odd statement.  Though it is not explicit, it appears to aim to place all views on a level playing field, from unity to the five letter hypothesis.  But that doesn’t seem the correct approach.

    If I have a letter with an essentially unified textual history, in this case meaning that the partitioning of the letter is nowhere evident in the textual history as we have it, then we might give at least slight preference to the notion that it is, in fact a letter.  When it fulfills all the forms, that suggestion is strengthened.

    I suppose that the idea that the letter is a unity is, indeed, an hypothesis, but it seems a rather obvious one.  Suggestions of Paul’s changes of mood and/or rhetorical intention are based on observing the text based on this first and most obvious hypothesis.

    On the other hand multiple letter hypotheses are immediately much more complicated.  First one has to assume that someone combined multiple letters into one, cutting out the salutation of at least one and the conclusion of another.  If we assume five letters, then the situation becomes more complicated.

    There are clearly shifts or seams in 2 Corinthians.  The question is why?  The problem for multiple letter hypotheses, I think, is to answer the question not just of why such seams are there (which they answer by proposing multiple letters), but also just why someone should put the document together in this way.

    I don’t see this addressed anywhere.  What is the purpose of the redactor?  If he wishes to preserve all the letters why not just copy them in succession?  If he has some theological purpose, then the question goes right back to the start–what is the meaning of the text as it stands?  (I would welcome comment from someone who has spent more time studying New Testament than I have.)

    I’m suggesting two things.  First, that the hypothesis that the letter as we have it is a unity should be privileged in discussion to some extent, because it is supported by the best possible evidence–that’s what the letter looks like now.  Second, that a theory that involves redaction must also explain the actions of the redactor.  Simply producing plausible pieces and providing a chronology for them does little without some reason why they would have been combined as they were.

    Let me illustrate from some texts where I feel I’m on more solid ground.  Many people try to solve the chronological differences between Genesis 1 and 2 by attributing them to two sources.  Now I believe they are from two sources.  I think the evidence is fairly solid for that.  But having said that, I have solved nothing regarding the difference in chronology between the two chapters, because I still must think about a redactor who somehow thought that putting them together made sense.  So now I must ask about his motivations and what message he intended to convey bringing them together.

    In the case of Isaiah, we again have a composite book, but here were have a hypothesis for why redactors would want to add to the book.  Very likely there was a school of prophets or scribes who preserved Isaiah’s work and added to it from time to time.  Their motivation is to preserve the prophet’s (or prophets’) words. They are not cutting pieces out and combining them, but rather putting the pieces together, generally as they were.

    I don’t see any similarly plausible hypothesis for 2 Corinthians, which makes me find the arguments for unity much more plausible in view of the lack of solid reasons for someone to sew the book together from two to five pieces as various theories suggest.