Customer Reviews

Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith

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Professor Watson is one of the most consistently overlooked, but truly great, Pauline scholars working today. In the generation after Dunn, Sanders and Wright, I don't know of anyone else who is as good an interpreter of the New Testament who has as strong a grasp of the secondary literature and the pseudepigrapha, to say nothing of his extensive reading in hermeneutics and contemporary literary theory, especially biblical intertextuality.

In this work he combines his interest in hermeneutics with his mastery of the Pauline writings and other second temple sources to provide a stimulating portrait of Paul the interpreter of Israel's scriptures. I must confess that when I saw that he was going there, I was afraid that I had wasted my money. It's almost axiomatic that people who teach biblical studies for a living see figures in the Bible as those who taught biblical studies for a living.

But what sets Watson's work apart is his sensitivity to the text and willingness to follow Paul's logic (as alien as it might be to the average 21st century reader) rather than impose his own. You get the sense that he appreaciates Paul's argument in Romans 1-4 and wants to understand it rather than use it as an ideological club, which is refreshing.

His chapter on Hab. 2:4 as the hermeneutical key to the scriptures in Romans and Paul's antithetical hermeneutic alone is worth the price of admission. His discussion of how Paul understood the Abraham narrative vis-a-vis election sent me back to rethink intertextual linkages throughout the Bible.

I'm not finished with this massive (500 pages or so) tome yet, but it has supplanted every other book on my reading list until I am.

This book may be the one that establishes (or perhaps better, publicizes) Watson as one of the pre-eminent Pauline scholars in the world. I'd recommend it instead of most of the horrible introductions to Paul on the shelves today if someone came to me seriously wanting to know how he thought and why he thought it.