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The Letter to the Ephesians. By Peter T. O'Brien. Pillar New Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999, xxxiii + 536 pp., $40.00.
Peter O'Brien has long been a highly respected and trusted name in evangelical biblical scholarship. With the publication of this commentary on Ephesians, O'Brien has now completed major commentaries on all four of the so-called "prison epistles." In 1982 he published a commentary on Colossians and Philemon for the WBC series and then in 1991 he wrote a massive exegetical treatment of Philippians for the NIGTC series. If insightfulness, substance, and clarity are the marks of a superb commentary, then this volume is truly superb. In my opinion, this installment is his best yet.
Standing against the current of contemporary critical scholarship, O'Brien argues that it was the apostle Paul himself who wrote this letter. In fact, he questions a fundamental assumption made by many scholars who argue for pseudonymity, namely, that pseudonymity was a recognized and accepted practice in the early Church. Drawing on the recent Oxford dissertation by J. Duff, O'Brien asserts that there was no positive evidence at all that pseudonymity was seen as a literary technique accepted by Christians in the first and second centuries. O'Brien also questions the assumption that a document could...