Commentary on the Minor Pauline Epistles.

• Author: Komline, Han-Luen Kantzer
• Position: Book review

Commentary on the Minor Pauline Epistles. By THEODORE OF MOPSUESTIA, translated and edited by ROWAN A. GREER. SBL Writings from the Greco-Roman World, vol. 26. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2010. Pp. xliv + 839. $89.95 (paper).

Theodore of Mopsuestia, known simply as "The Interpreter" in the Syriac Church. is often regarded as the leading representative of the "Antiochene School" of exegesis that flourished in the fourth and fifth centuries. In his commentary on Ephesians, he spoke of the esteem Christians should have for the apostle Paul in superlative terms: we must pay close attention to understand the discussions of one whose teaching we ought to consider more distinguished than anyone else's" (pp. 232-33). What Theodore has to say in his Commentaries on the Minor Epistles of Paul deserves attention, therefore, as much for what it reveals about his own perspectives and priorities as for the light it sheds on the minor Pauline letters.

Though Theodore seems to have commented on most of the Christian Bible, and fragments from many of his commentaries have been preserved in the catenae, only his Commentary on the Minor Prophets has survived completely in the original Greek. Beyond this, we have a handful of Theodore's works in something close to a complete text: Theodore's Commentary on John is preserved in Syriac; Robert Devreesse has reconstructed Theodore's commentary on Psalms 1-81 from the Greek and Latin catenae; and Theodore's Commentary on the Minor Pauline Epistles, probably composed sometime during his episcopate (392-428), comes to us in a Latin translation whose origins remain a mystery. With the publication of this new volume from Rowan Greer, which joins Robert C. Hill's translation of Theodore's Commentary on Psalms 1-81 in the Society of Biblical Literature's Writings from the Greco-Roman World series, each of these texts is available in modern English.

The present volume comprises, along with Greer's translation, notes, and introduction, a version of Henry B. Swete's critical text and apparatus from 1880-82 on facing pages. Swete's version has been slightly modified for this volume: the Latin and Greek, in cases where Greek fragments exist, are displayed in parallel columns and Swete's original text has been emended in certain places. Greer appends a helpful note to the introduction (pp. xxix-xlii) detailing the changes made.

Greer's brief and elegant introduction (pp. ix-xliv), consistent with his earlier work...