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Liuwe H. Westra The Apostles' Creed: Origin, History, and Some Early Commentaries Instrumenta Patristica et Medievalia 43 Turnhout: Brepols, 2002 Pp. 603. euro95.
Originally commissioned to write a commentary on a number of anonymous credal texts as a companion volume to a major text edition prepared by M. Parmentier for Corpus Christianorum, Westra has undertaken and largely completed a comprehensive review of the origin and development of the Apostles' Creed "as a formula" (403) before its final seventh century formulation in the Textus Receptus. This is a substantial and methodically precise study that bases itself on the Latin texts and engages all the major scholarship in the field. Westra uses only critically edited versions of the creeds, and where these are lacking, he has himself supplied a critical edition.
Concerning the origins of the Apostles' Creed (21-72), the author takes up and closely considers the revisionist views of M. Vinzent and W. Kinzig but basically agrees with the position of J. N. D. Kelly, who connects the Apostles' Creed to a fusion of Christological and Trinitarian formulae sometime between 150-250 in Rome from where it spread through the...