Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Galatians: A Commentary. By Martinus C. de Boer. NTL. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011, xxxiv + 461 pp., $50.00.
Martinus C. de Boer, Professor of New Testament at VU University Amsterdam, offers a new commentary on Galatians in The New Testament Library series. The structure of the commentary is fairly intuitive, but it can be difficult to navigate through when trying to isolate individual verses since it is organized around paragraphs. In addition, it includes nineteen supplementary excurses addressing various interpretive issues along the way. For this review of the commentary, I will focus on the major themes and emphases of de Boer's interpretation of Galatians rather than atomistically address the exegesis of selective passages.
In a manner similar to J. Louis Martyn's famous Anchor Bible commentary, de Boer argues that the key to understanding Galatians is to recognize Paul's apocalyptic language. Taking this approach, de Boer provides a unique analysis with many surprising interpretations along the way, and so this commentary is not a mere repackaging of Martyn. For de Boer, Galatians is an "apocalyptic sermon" (p. 71). Certainly, there is no denying that there are apocalyptic elements in Galatians. For instance, the letter begins with a strong statement of temporal dualism ("the present evil age" in Gal 1:4). There is also a contrast between "the present Jerusalem" and "the Jerusalem above" (Gal 4:25-26), and Galatians contains key apocalyptic vocabulary (e.g. ... and ... in Gal 1:12, 16; 2:2; 3:23).
However, when reading de Boer's commentary one wonders how historical his presentation of apocalyptic actually is. For one, de Boer mistakenly assumes that apocalyptic carries strong connotations of discontinuity. The "fullness of time" when Christ was born (Gal 4:4) marks the "end" of that time; "a clean break with the past" (p. 262). One can see a glimpse into the nature of de Boer's emphasis on discontinuity in his comments on Gal 1:16 where Paul states that the Son was revealed (...) "in me." Rather than interpreting "in me" as implying "to me" or "through me," as most commentators do, de Boer offers the idiosyncratic interpretation: "in my former manner of life" (p. 93). For de Boer, Paul personifies the discontinuity between the ages; his former manner of...