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The Letters to Philemon, the Colossians, and the Ephesians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Captivity Epistles is unavailable, but you can change that!

This volume completes Ben Witherington’s contributions to the set of Eerdmans socio-rhetorical commentaries on the New Testament. In addition to the usual features of these commentaries, Witherington offers an innovative way of looking at Colossians, Ephesians, and Philemon as interrelated documents written at different levels of moral discourse. In Philemon we see Paul using moral discourse in...

behavior, both philosophy and praxis, ascetic praxis related to visions and doxological experiences.18 The weakness of the theory that the opponents held some sort of gnosticizing syncretistic view has been amply shown by Dunn. In particular there is certainly no evidence that Paul is polemicizing against dualism of some sort, which is characteristic of Gnosticism.19 It is far more plausible that he is dealing with some sort of ascetic Jewish piety.20 There was a substantial Jewish presence in the
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