In the Review of Biblical Literature, Nicholas Elder reviews Channing Crisler’s Reading Romans as Lament: Paul’s Use of Old Testament Lament in His Most Famous Letter (Pickwick, 2016). According to Elder,
The monograph’s central argument is that Paul is thoroughly indebted to the language and logic of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible lament in his letter to the Romans. Crisler employs both biblical scholarship on lament in the Hebrew Bible and Richard B. Hays’s well-known criteria for detecting quotations, allusions, and echoes of antecedent biblical texts in Paul’s writings. [Crisler’s] thesis that “the experience of OT lamenters is echoed in Romans, and those echoes largely shape the way Paul discusses suffering in the letter.”
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More explanation on the choice of texts and their relationship to each other and Romans as a whole would improve the monograph. Nonetheless, Reading Romans as Lament contributes to the ongoing discussion of Paul’s metonymic recall not only of Jewish Scriptures but also the lament genre. (1, 4)
For the balance of Elder’s review, see RBL‘s website.
In the Review of Biblical Literature, Chris Kugler reviews David Capes’s Divine Christ: Paul, the Lord Jesus, and the Scriptures of Israel (Baker, 2018). According to Kugler, the book
reprises much of [Capes’s] foundational work, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017 [1992]), and argues that Paul’s appropriation of “YHWH texts” with reference to Jesus represents a remarkable development in earliest Christianity and can only indicate that Paul regarded Jesus as fully divine. (1)
Kugler citiques Capes’s sketch of Second Temple Jewish monotheism (3) but also acknowledges the debt that discussions of early high Christology owe to Capes’s work (1).
For the balance of Kugler’s review, see RBL‘s website.
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