The Epistles of 2 Corinthians and 1 Peter (eBook)

Newly Discovered Commentaries

J. B. Lightfoot (Autor)

Ben Witherington III, Todd D. Still (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016 | 1. Auflage
362 Seiten
IVP Academic (Verlag)
978-0-8308-9959-3 (ISBN)

Infos

InterVarsity Press is proud to present The Lightfoot Legacy, a three-volume set of previously unpublished material from J. B. Lightfoot, one of the great biblical scholars of the modern era. In the spring of 2013, Ben Witherington III discovered hundreds of pages of biblical commentary by Lightfoot in the Durham Cathedral Library. While incomplete, these commentaries represent a goldmine for historians and biblical scholars, as well as for the many people who have found Lightfoot's work both informative and edifying, deeply learned and pastorally sensitive. In addition to the material on the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of St. John, published in volumes one and two, respectively, there were fragments on 2 Corinthians and 1 Peter. Lightfoot was well known as a Pauline expert given his commentaries on Galatians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon, and fragments of his work on Romans, 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians were published posthumously. It is therefore a delight to have his notes on 2 Corinthians available for the first time. Lightfoot was also interested in the life and work of Peter. The introduction to his commentary on 1 Peter provides insightful analysis of the chronology and context of the epistle. Lightfoot seeks to demonstrate that Peter knew Paul's work and that these two great apostles were in harmony regarding theology and ethics.Now complete, these three commentary volumes reveal a scholar well ahead of his time, one of the great minds of his or any generation.

Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828-1889) was an English theologian, preacher, canon of St Paul's Cathedral and bishop of Durham.

Autor

Todd D. Still (PhD, University of Glasgow) serves as Charles J. and Eleanor McLerran DeLancey Dean and the William M. Hinson Professor of Christian Scriptures at the George W. Truett Theological Seminary of Baylor University. He previously occupied the Bob D. Shepherd Chair of New Testament Interpretation at Gardner-Webb University's School of Divinity and served on faculty at Dallas Baptist University. In addition to numerous articles, reviews and Bible study materials, Still is the author of Thinking through Paul: A Survey of His Life, Letters, and Theology, coauthored with Bruce W. Longenecker, Philippians Philemon, and Jesus and Paul Reconnected: Fresh Pathways into an Old Debate. He has also coedited Tertullian Paul (with David Wilhite) and After the First Urban Christians (with David G. Horrell). Beyond the classroom, Still is committed to and involved in local churches. A licensed and ordained Baptist minister, he has had the opportunity to preach and teach in many congregational and conference settings and has served in a variety of ministry capacities, including music minister, youth minister, Sunday school teacher, chaplain and pastor. Still lives in Waco, Texas with his wife and two sons. Ben Witherington III (PhD, University of Durham) is Jean R. Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary. A prominent evangelical scholar, he is also on the doctoral faculty at St. Andrews University in Scotland.Witherington has written over forty books, including The Jesus Quest and The Paul Quest, both of which were selected as top biblical studies works by Christianity Today. His other works include The Indelible Image, Women and the Genesis of Christianity, The Gospel Code, A Week in the Life of Corinth and commentaries on the entire New Testament. He also writes for many church and scholarly publications and is a frequent contributor to Patheos and Beliefnet.Witherington is an elected member of the prestigious Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, a society dedicated to New Testament studies. He is a John Wesley Fellow for Life, a research fellow at Cambridge University and a member of numerous professional organizations, including the Society of Biblical Literature, Society for the Study of the New Testament and the Institute for Biblical Research. He previously taught at institutions like Ashland Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt University, Duke Divinity School and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.An ordained pastor in the United Methodist Church and a popular lecturer, Witherington has presented seminars for churches, colleges and biblical meetings around the world. He has led numerous study tours through the lands of the Bible and is known for bringing the text to life through incisive historical and cultural analysis. Along with many interviews on radio and television networks across the country, Witherington has been seen in programs such as 60 Minutes, 20/20, Dateline and the Peter Jennings ABC special Jesus and Paul—The Word and the Witness. Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828–1889), also known as J. B. Lightfoot, was an English theologian, preacher, canon of St Paul's Cathedral and bishop of Durham. His writings include essays on biblical and historical subject matter, commentaries on Pauline epistles and studies on the Apostolic Fathers as well as four posthumously published volumes of sermons.Lightfoot attended King Edward?s School in Birmingham before attending Trinity College in Cambridge where he was elected a Fellow of his college. He became a tutor of Trinity College in 1857 and later a professor of divinity, editing the Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology from 1854 to 1859. In 1871, Lightfoot became canon of St. Paul?s Cathedral, preaching regularly and participating in various ecclesiastical activities.

Textauszug

Foreword

In 1978, I (BW3) was in the Durham Cathedral cloister visiting the Monk’s Dormitory that then, as now, served as a display room for important artifacts and manuscripts. It was also something of an archival library. I was a young doctoral student of Charles Kingsley Barrett and had already come across the name of J. B. Lightfoot on various occasions. Indeed, I had bought a reprint of his classic Philippians commentary while I was still in seminary in Massachusetts several years earlier. While perusing the various display cases, I came across an open notebook that displayed Lightfoot’s comments on a notoriously difficult passage in Acts 15, and I wondered whether there were more of this sort of meticulous exegetical material, written in Lightfoot’s own hand, somewhere else in that library.

Naturally, I was interested, since there were no publications by Lightfoot that directly dealt with Acts, and certainly no commentaries by Lightfoot on Acts. I mentioned this discovery to Professor Barrett, who himself was an admirer of J. B. Lightfoot. In fact, in the early 1970s he had written a Durham University Journal article in which he praised Lightfoot as arguably the foremost scholar of the New Testament of his era.1 Somehow, however, nothing more happened in regard to this matter, and in truth, I forgot about it.

I mentioned in passing seeing this material some years later to Professor J. D. G. Dunn, who was then serving as the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University. Still, nothing more came of it. Yes, there was a celebration of the centennial of Lightfoot’s death in 1989, planned and organized by the tireless efforts of Professor Dunn, that produced a fine special issue of the Durham University Journal, published in 1990, with various articles about the legacy of Lightfoot.2 There was even a fine monograph done by G. R. Treloar on Lightfoot as a historian.3 Although it was clear that Treloar had read and studied some of Lightfoot’s unpublished work on Acts, the primary sources had not been completely read or studied, much less published.

On my sabbatical in the spring of 2013, when I was scholar-in-residence in St. John’s College at Durham University, I decided to try to see just what Lightfoot materials might still be gathering dust in the cathedral library. I must confess, I was not prepared for what I found. There, in the Monk’s Dormitory in a tall bookcase—whose lower compartment was crammed with Lightfoot files, folders, letters, pictures, inkwells and more—sat not only three brown notebooks of Lightfoot’s detailed exegetical lectures on Acts numbering over 140 pages, but also a further gigantic blue box full of hundreds of pages of additional Acts materials, including a lengthy excursus on the authenticity of the Stephen speech. But even that was not all.

There was also a whole blue box full of hundreds of pages of Lightfoot’s exegetical studies on the Gospel of John, two notebooks on 1 Peter, lectures on 2 Corinthians and finally a further notebook of Lightfoot’s reflections on early Judaism. All were in Lightfoot’s own hand, all done in great detail and none of it, except the first four or five pages of the introduction to Galatians contained in the first Acts notebook (which Kaye and Treloar excerpted and published in a Durham University Journal article in 19904), had ever been published—until now.5

It is important to say at this juncture that this material would still be unpublished were it not for (1) the capable help of the Durham Cathedral Library staff, especially Catherine Turner (now retired) and Gabrielle Sewell; (2) the hard work of Jeanette Hagen, a recently minted PhD graduate in New Testament from the University of Durham, who did much of the painstaking work reading and transcribing this material; (3) the generosity of Asbury Seminary, Baylor University (through an Arts and Humanities Faculty Development Program Grant administered by the office of the vice provost of research) and Willard J. Still, who helped to pay for the digitalization and transcription of these materials; and (4) our friends at InterVarsity Press, in particular Andy Le Peau, Jim Hoover, Dan Reid and David Congdon, who saw the value of letting this material see the light of day so it might provide valuable help for our understanding of the New Testament, help from an unexpected quarter.6

From where exactly did this material come? The answer is from Lightfoot’s lecture notebooks. When Lightfoot served as fellow (1851), tutor (1857), Hulsean Professor of Divinity (1861) and Lady Margaret’s Professor (1875) at Cambridge University, he gave several series of lectures on Acts, the Gospel of John, 1 Peter and 2 Corinthians (among other subjects). The first Acts notebook, which also includes notes on Galatians, begins with these words—“Lenten Term, 1855.” Over time, as he continued to lecture on these great New Testament texts, Lightfoot would revise his lectures, further annotate them, change his mind on a few things and add things.

When Lightfoot became bishop of Durham in 1879, he brought all of his Cambridge work on the New Testament, and much else, with him. This is how these materials eventually came into the possession of the Durham Cathedral Library. Lightfoot had been lecturing on Acts and John and other parts of the New Testament for more than twenty years when he left Cambridge for Durham, and the impression one gets from these unpublished manuscripts is that, having already published commentaries on Galatians (1865), Philippians (1868), and Colossians and Philemon (1875), Lightfoot’s views on Acts, John, 2 Corinthians and 1 Peter were mostly formed by the time he came to Durham. Indeed, one finds in these same Acts notebooks some of the materials that went into Lightfoot’s Galatians commentary and his fragmentary commentaries on certain Pauline letters (namely, Romans, the Corinthian and Thessalonian correspondences, and Ephesians).7

In his own lifetime, Lightfoot was a widely recognized expert in the Pauline corpus, having published landmark commentaries on Galatians, Philippians, and Colossians and Philemon before beginning his tasks as bishop of Durham in 1879. It is then something of a surprise that his very interesting work on 2 Corinthians was never found and published, when in fact fragments of his work on Romans, 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians were published posthumously in a volume titled Notes on Epistles of St. Paul from Unpublished Commentaries.8 It is thus a true windfall that we can now bring to the light of day Lightfoot’s work on 2 Corinthians, though sadly it too is fragmentary. What is especially ­evident in this commentary is its contradiction of the suggestion that Lightfoot was almost entirely a historian and not a theologian. While one may be forgiven for thinking that when reading the first volume in this series, on the Acts of the Apostles, there can be no excuse after reading the second and third ones.

But, of course, this was stressed some time ago by C. K. Barrett. Consider this quote from Barrett’s well-known essay “J. B. Lightfoot as Biblical Commentator.” After saying that Lightfoot is a master of historical-critical exegesis, he adds:

Thus historical exegesis has not only the negative function of saying to the modern theologian or moralist, “No, you may not base your proposition on that text,” but the positive function of providing solid ground for inferences relevant to ages long after the original truth was stated. Lightfoot assumes—and if the assumption is valid he may be vindicated not only as a philologist and a historian but also as a theologian—that the language and the historical circumstances of Scripture have a quality of universality that gives them a perennial applicability. . . . There remains for him however an absolute qualitative distinction between the words of Scripture and all other words, and it is this, together of course with his splendid scholarly equipment, that places him securely in the line of great biblical expositors, from Origen and Chrysostom to Calvin to Bengel.9

We are also very happy to be able to present Lightfoot’s work on a very different epistle indeed, and a non-Pauline one, namely 1 Peter. Lightfoot believed that the two great apostles were indeed Peter and Paul, the former for the Jews, the latter for the Gentiles. He also thought that these two documents upon which he offers commentary in this volume well represented the two great leaders of early Christianity. After presenting some of Lightfoot’s necessary prologomena to 2 Corinthians, we set forth his commentary itself. We follow the same protocol with the materials on 1 Peter.

The commentary on 1 Peter takes us up to 1 Peter 3:21. It is in many ways richer and fuller throughout than the 2 Corinthians commentary. This is the case for at least two reasons: (1) Lightfoot basically eschews detailed attention to text criticism, except where needed, and focuses instead on verse-by-verse exegesis of the text, and (2) he forgoes the interesting paraphrases we find at points in the 2 Corinthians manuscript and deals more deeply with theological and ethical matters raised by 1 Peter. Nevertheless, Lightfoot is interested in showing...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.11.2016
• Reihe/Serie: The Lightfoot Legacy Set
• Reihe/Serie: The Lightfoot Legacy Set
• Mitarbeit: Assistent: Jeanette M. Hagen
• Verlagsort: Lisle
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sonstiges ► Geschenkbücher
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
• Schlagworte: 2 Corinthians • Bible • bible commentary • Biblical Criticism • Biblical Studies • Catholic Epistles • Commentary • Discovery • Durham Cathedral Library • Durham University • Durham University Library • General epistles • History • J.B. Lightfoot • JB Lightfoot • King James Bible • kjv bible • Lightfoot commentaries • NT epistles • Paul • pauline epistles • Pauline letters • Peter
• ISBN-10: 0-8308-9959-6 / 0830899596
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8308-9959-3 / 9780830899593