Product Description

Designed to bring students, teachers, pastors and general readers up-to-date and up-to-speed, this dictionary presents more information than any other single work, dealing exhaustively with Pauline theology, literature, background and scholarship.

Product Details

From Library Journal
On the heels of its successful Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (1992), Inter-Varsity presents this companion volume on Paul and his writings. It is a collection of 200 well-written, thorough, and informed articles on Pauline themes from Abraham to justification to wrath; epistles, as well as relevant critical and background issues such as Hellenism; social-scientific research; and the canonicity of the epistles. Among the members of the international team of 108 contributors are prominent contemporary evangelical scholars. Several of them have written extensively elsewhere on the topics they present here (James Dunn on Romans, F.F. Bruce on Paul in Acts, and Ben Witherington on Christology). The scholarship evident behind the articles is not presented at the expense of readability. Thus, this work is accessible to both scholarly and lay readers. Highly recommended for all seminary libraries and for academic and public libraries where there is sufficient interest.
- Craig W. Beard, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham Lib.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Great Resource
One of the best resources you can buy, thorough research, good scholarship and a wide range of authors. Can't go wrong with this resource.

Nice!
Got this For my son-in-law it is a book he has wanted for a long time!

Excellent Reference for Modern Pauline Scholarship.
`The Dictionary of Paul and His Letters' is a superb reference source if your primary objective is the study of Paul's writings. As a one-volume source, unlike, for example, the six volume Anchor Bible Dictionary, it is a far less expensive reference of all Pauline issues on your desk. For most people, the very best aspect of the volume is its dedication to contemporary scholarship. This focus has many good points and a few problems.

The only problem I see with its `contemporary' focus is that some important works on Paul may not cited. This is only a theoretical concern, as my biggest fear, that the article on `Mysticism' would not refer to Albert Schweitzer's important `The Mysticism of St. Paul', but it does.

On the other side of the coin, all major articles include generous bibliographies to both books and articles in English, German, and French. I find no references to Italian articles, but if there were important articles written in Italian, I believe they will be here.

While some major Pauline scholars such as Ed Sanders and N. T. Wright are missing from the list of contributors, there are many authorities that do weigh in. Foremost among these are James Dunn, F. F. Bruce, and David Wright. There are over a hundred contributors, so I'm certain I'm unfamiliar with many major authorities. From what I know, the credentials of the contributors are impeccable.

While I learned early in my elementary school years that an encyclopedia was always a good place to start a research project, it was often not enough for first class work, but there were always things an encyclopedia could do which no other reference could do quite as well. And, this volume does a great job on those tasks.

First, as already mentioned, it has great bibliographies on all major articles. My only complaint is that since all the entries run together (no break to a new line when beginning with the author's name), the bibliographies are hard to read. I commonly miss an important reference when my aging eyes skip over the lines just a bit too quickly.

Second, the text has superior cross-referencing. Every time a word or phrase is used which is itself the subject of an article, the word or phrase is asterisked. I don't recall that even the mighty Encyclopedia Britannia did so well in cross-referencing. I know the Britannia's bibliographies were not nearly as good.

Third, there are lots of useful articles with information you simply don't find anywhere else, at least not with a certain amount of luck. Two examples stand out. The first is a list of Pauline colleagues, all those co-workers mentioned in Acts and in Paul's own letters, with indications of their roles. The second is the list of Old Testament citations in Paul, divided by those where the quote from the Septuagint is exact and those where the quote is paraphrased. Most of this is reprinted from classic papers on the subject, primarily by E. E. Ellis.

There is one area where one needs to use additional references. While there are excellent articles on each of Paul's letters, they do not constitute complete exegeses of the letters. Fortunately, again, the bibliographies offer excellent lists of full commentaries; however, they are not complete and they are limited to `modern' exegeses. The bibliography on Romans, for example, does not include either N. T. Wright's very long commentary in `The New Interpreter's Bible' or references to classical commentaries such as those by Martin Luther or John Barth. Second, I would not entirely trust the information here on very early Judaism, for example. On the other hand, long general articles about, for example `Law' are extremely good guidance on research on this subject going back over 100 years.

This book will not replace more specialized works, but it will do an excellent job of helping you find and understand the mountain of scholarly research on Paul from the last century.