Text, Readers, and the History of Interpretation
Stephen Westerholm
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546
© 2022 Stephen Westerholm
All rights reserved
Published 2022
ISBN 978-0-8028-8221-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
2. Other Early Greek Manuscripts
4. Supplementary Materials in Manuscripts
2 The First Readers of Romans and the “Paul within Judaism” School
1. Faith and Assemblies in Rome
3. Ethnicity and the “Paul within Judaism” School
4. The Ethnicity of Paul’s First Readers and His Reasons for Writing Them
5. … and the “Paul within Judaism” School?
1. Peter Abelard (ca. 1079–1142)
2. Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274)
1. John Colet (ca. 1467–1519) and Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536)
3. Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560)
1. Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705)
5. Augustin Calmet (1672–1757)
11. Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer (1800–1873)
13. Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893)
14. John William Colenso (1814–1883)
7 History of Interpretation: Conclusion
Appendix: The Apostle and the Doctor
Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Texts
Commentators on the Bible today are latecomers to a conversation that has been ongoing for centuries. We do well not to barge in at once with our own views. Common courtesy, a decent respect for the opinions of others, and the realization that wisdom was not born, and will not die, with us all demand that we inform ourselves of what others have been saying before we enter the conversation.
“Part of the aim of [the Illuminations series of commentaries] is to alert the reader to the history of conversation surrounding biblical texts and to invite the reader to join that conversation.”1 It was, indeed, this distinguishing feature of the series that tempted me to enter the crowded field of commentators on Romans. The studies that follow in this book represent my efforts to inform myself of the earlier conversation before embarking on the commentary itself.
A commentary requires a text to interpret; I begin with the text and textual history of Romans. But even this study overlaps ...
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About Romans: Text, Readers, and the History of InterpretationA wide-ranging study of the interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Romans throughout history, from Origen to Karl Barth. In anticipation of his Illuminations commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, Stephen Westerholm offers this extensive survey of the reception history of Romans. After two initial chapters discussing the letter’s textual history and its first readers in Rome (a discussion carried out in dialogue with the Paul-within-Judaism stream of scholarship), Westerholm provides a thorough overview of over thirty of the most influential, noteworthy, and representative interpretations of Romans from nearly two thousand years of history. Interpreters surveyed include Origen, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Locke, Cotton Mather, John Wesley, and Karl Barth. Bearing in mind that Paul did not write for scholars, Westerholm includes in his study interpreters like Philipp Jakob Spener and Richard Baxter who addressed more popular audiences, as well as an appendix on a remarkable series of 372 sermons on Romans by beloved British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones. A further aim of the book is to illustrate the impact of this New Testament letter on Christian thought, supporting Westerholm’s claim that “the history of the interpretation of Romans is, in important areas and to a remarkable extent, the history of Christian theology.” |
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