Description: Brevard Childs here turns his sharp scholarly eye to the works of the apostle Paul and makes an unusual argument: the New Testament was canonically shaped, its formation a hermeneutical exercise in which its anonymous apostles and postapostolic editors collected, preserved, and theologically shaped the material in order for the evangelical traditions to serve successive generations of Christians.
Childs contends that within the New Testament the Pauline corpus stands as a unit bookended by Romans and the Pastoral Epistles. He assigns an introductory role to Romans, examining how it puts the contingencies of Paul’s earlier letters into context without sacrificing their particularity. At the other end, the Pastoral Epistles serve as a concluding valorization of Paul as the church’s doctrinal model. By considering Paul’s works as a whole, Childs offers a way to gain a fuller understanding of the individual letters. Subjects: Bible, New Testament, Pauline Epistles, Literature
Review by Paul E. Trainor
Read the Review
Published 10/11/2009
Citation: Paul E. Trainor, review of Brevard Childs, The Church's Guide for Reading Paul: The Canonical Shaping of the Pauline Corpus, Review of Biblical Literature [http://www.bookreviews.org] (2009).
Adobe Acrobat Reader
 All RBL reviews are published in PDF format. To view these reviews, you must have downloaded and installed the FREE version of Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you do not have the Reader or you have an older version of the Reader, you can download the most recent version now. |
