Why are so many incomplete Bible Commentary Series missing 1 Corinthians?
Could be the level of difficulty that the book poses.
Interesting observations. I think Lynden may be on the right track.
Commentary authors are notorious for writing with their thinking caps on, and they don't want to highlight their obvious hypocrisy when their work on 1 Cor 11:4 gets published.
Don't really know. But things have gotten much BETTER on this book since I went to school and took a class on 1 Cor. Then there was Fee in NICNT, Barrett in Black's/Harper, and Conzelmann in Herm. that was showing its age. Since then Collins (Sacra Pagina), Fitzmeyer (Anchor),Garland (BECNT), Hays (Interpretation) and Thiselton (NIGTC) have come out, and most recently one from Pillar...
SDG
Ken McGuire
Since then
there's also a solid overview by Verbrugge in the new EBC. Morris' treatment in the TNTC is ok.
with their thinking caps on
ARE THESE MY THINKING CAPS?
I'm thinking "Caps Lock".
with their thinking caps on ARE THESE MY THINKING CAPS?
HEHEHEHHEHE
I am very happy with N.T. Wrights treatment of 1 Corinthians in New Interpreter's Bible (12 vols.) I will agree Pillar is pretty good and I do like Hays in Interpretation too (probably higher up than Pillar for me personally).
-Dan
with their thinking caps on ARE THESE MY THINKING CAPS? HEHEHEHHEHE I am very happy with N.T. Wrights treatment of 1 Corinthians in New Interpreter's Bible (12 vols.) I will agree Pillar is pretty good and I do like Hays in Interpretation too (probably higher up than Pillar for me personally). -Dan
Seems like you have your LAUGHING CAPS ON...HEHEHEH[ E ]HEHE (I inserted the missing E for you).
By the way, is N.T. Wright long winded with his stories in the NIB commentary on 1Cor.? I know that in other writings once he goes off telling a story "to make a point" it's kind of hard to stay with him sometimes.
DAL
MY BAD... He did Romans there.. the 1 Corinthians in NIB is J. PAUL SAMPLEY but I stand by saying I like it a lot.
Here is a sample:
1 Corinthians 13:1—14:1a, Encomium on Love OVERVIEW For a letter that could rightly be called a continuous reflection on love–even Paul’s summary injunctions at the end of the letter conclude with “Do everything in love” (16:14 NIV)–the explicit term has been rather infrequent before chap. 13. With its pithy maxim “Love builds up,” 8:1 establishes such a close identification of love and edification that subsequently in the letter the appearance of either term, “love” or “edification,” should call to mind the other. The way love works or functions in the community is to bring about edification or upbuilding (another translation of the same Greek term, oijkodomhv oikodome) of others. Likewise, when Paul encourages edification of others he is simply calling for love to be put into action toward them. Chapter 13, an encomium135 on love, though <Page 950 Ends><Page 951 Begins> not explicitly identifying love as a charisma, or gift,136 extols love and thereby sets the stage for the next chapter’s specific application of love and its inevitable expression or by-product, upbuilding (14:3-5, 12, 17, 26), to the Corinthians’ problematic practices. By the first century, an encomium was a well-established rhetorical device for praising an individual or a virtue. Typically, encomia praise in two ways: by reference to actions as a clue to character (ethos) and by comparison and contrast with other virtues or other praiseworthy persons. Usually, encomia open with a prologue and close with an appeal for emulation. Paul’s panegyric on love meets all these criteria. Some scholars have suggested that Paul did not compose chap. 13 but knew it from elsewhere and incorporated it into his argument.137 Others have posited that one can read from 12:31 to chap. 14 with no interruption of Paul’s argument, that Paul did not compose chap. 13, and that a later redactor of the Pauline corpus put it where it is.138 Surely one can construe chaps. 12—14 in that fashion, but to do so overlooks some distinct functions of chap. 13. First, the chapter gives perspective and balance to the matter at hand–namely, proper use and understanding of spiritual gifts in the Corinthian church. Second, the chapter has many significant links to the rest of the letter so that it also serves to recapitulate several concerns already registered by Paul. Third, rhetorical handbooks saw such a change of pace and concentration as a powerful way of focusing the auditors’ attention. Paul is surely capable of lofty composition, and chap. 13 serves too many of his concerns not to have belonged there from the start. 1 Corinthians 13:1-3, The Prologue Link to: 1 Corinthians 13:1 COMMENTARY The encomium’s prologue (13:1-3), by reference to a series of indisputably important items, establishes love as the sine qua non of the faithful life. It does so by Paul’s reminding the Corinthians of his extraordinary gifts, his grandiloquent abilities, and his potential for extravagant deeds. The auditors are asked to survey Paul as being capable of all these; his history with them allows him reasonably to suggest such a range–and yet lacking love. Without love, all his gifts and powers and actions come to naught in the devastatingly pithy declaration, “I am nothing” (13:2). Imagine the impact of these verses on the original hearers of this letter. First Corinthians has so regularly centered around Paul’s offering of himself as a positive example worthy of emulation. <Page 951 Ends><Page 952 Begins> In 13:1-3 Paul presents himself once again as a model, but this time as a negative exemplar, as one who, though so very gifted, if lacking love, would be of no worth, no value. This rhetorical device, much like the indirect speech noted in chaps. 1—4, allows Paul to lay out some stern warnings to his auditors without risk of unduly offending them and with the added advantage that his application to himself allows, even subtly commends, that others apply the same test to themselves. The auditors can hear much more forceful and blunt criticism of themselves precisely because it is Paul’s critique of his imaginary, contrary-to-fact self. Not surprisingly, the first item is the highly touted Corinthian favorite: speaking in tongues. Paul invites the hearers to imagine him, richly endowed as they know him to be with the gift of tongues (the reference to “tongues of angels” makes clear we are not dealing with linguistic acumen; cf. 14:18-19; cf. also 7:7), but lacking love (which he assumes they know him in fact not to be): He would be a useless, perhaps even an irritating musical instrument whereas, with love, he would have been helpful and even enriching. Paul’s likening his imaginary loveless self to a brassy clanging instrument no doubt anticipates his subsequent development of that image in 14:7-11. Second is a collection of items (already mentioned, e.g., in 1:18—2:16: prophetic abilities, understanding, and wisdom) with which he assumes some Corinthians have very positive identifications. And in regard to those endowments (which the letter has also been careful to remind the Corinthians Paul certainly does not lack), Paul pictures his imaginary loveless self as “nothing” (13:2). Third are two means of gaining social notoriety and presumably status: a giving away of all one’s possessions and some sort of self-immolation (cf. Rom 5:7, where it is said that someone would perhaps die for another; see also Rom 9:3, where Paul imagines himself cut off so that his Jewish brothers and sisters might be included). And without love, neither gains anything. As Paul takes his epistolary walk through their gallery of values, he escalates the shock effect of his own imaginary self-portraits, moving as he does from likening himself to a useless instrument (13:1) to his claim that he is nothing (13:2). Paul’s indirect critique of their self-aggrandizement around tongues, wisdom, and understanding is implicit in his imaginary loveless, negative, contrary-to-fact self-portrait. Extraordinary gifts, grand abilities and skills, extravagant actions–all these, ironically, are emptied of any worth without love. Furthermore, with the mention of each item, the refrains describing lovelessness become more blatantly self-indulgent, more individualistic, and more self-serving. The point, subtly but powerfully made, is that no matter how magnificent the accomplishment, power, or action, when love is missing the exercise in question becomes vain, selfish, fruitless, and individualistic; it does not even serve to accomplish its self-vaunting end. “Without love, I help myself [ojfelou`mai opheloumai] not at all” (13:3). As one Scottish translation captures it: “I am nane the better o it.”139 Love’s quest can never begin with the question “What’s in it for me?” Instead, love looks first to the other and asks, “What is best for you?” “What would help you?” A few verses into chap. 14, Paul, using the same Greek term wjfelevw (opheleo) and modeling love, asks the Corinthians not how they might help him, but how he might help them (14:6). So within a few verses he does the very thing that he prescribes for them. The proper movement of love begins with attention to the needs of the other person. Imbedded within the prologue (13:1-3) are two convictions: (1) Love’s nature is to seek not one’s own needs but the needs of others, and (2) in so doing, love ultimately secures not only the other person but also one’s own self. Directly ahead in the encomium Paul will make this same point; he has already made it in 1 Corinthians (10:24, 33), and elsewhere in his letters he is quite regularly insistent on this same dynamic (Phil 2:1-4; cf. Rom 13:8; 15:1-2). (See Reflections at 14:1a.) <Page 952 Ends><Page 953 Begins> 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, Recitation of the Acts of Love Link to: 1 Corinthians 13:4 COMMENTARY An encomium of a person recounts past actions worthy of praise; an encomium of a virtue depicts its characteristics and how it functions. In 13:4-7, love’s credentials are laid out both positively, with regard for what love does and how it operates, and negatively, with regard to what it avoids and does not do. “Love waits with patience” and while waiting, it is kind and merciful (13:4). Then follows a sequence of declarations of what love is not, declarations that via negativa serve to clarify what is characteristic of love: It is not jealous, not boastful, not puffed up, not behaving disgracefully, not seeking its own purposes, not becoming irritated, not keeping score of wrongs, and not taking pleasure in unrighteousness (13:4-5a). Then with considerable rhetorical flourish Paul concludes the characterization of love by a string of most sweeping claims about love, each beginning with the direct object (pavnta panta, “all things”), thereby emphasizing love’s all-encompassing scope. The “all things” list opens and closes with very nearly the same point about how love functions in the present, thus highlighting these two claims: “Love passes over all things in silence” (v. 7a) and “Love bears [or endures] all things” (v. 7d). On one level these assertions are positive counterparts to the disclaimer that love does not keep track of wrongs; they represent the necessary kind of “running forgiveness” that is ingredient to any sustained relationship. On another level they establish love as the context in which the difficulties and trials of life are met. How do they do so? Because love is never held alone in one’s self; love always involves another; love always links one’s self to another. This reciprocal character of love has already been acknowledged by Paul in 8:3: “If someone loves God, that person is known by God.” Love is a two-way street that provides a context of mutuality, understanding, and relatedness between each person and others, between God and believers, and between believers and believers. And that is the context in which love enables us, with the support of the others who are linked in love, to bear, to endure whatever comes along. This is the same point he already made in 10:13, but this time expressed in terms of love. The other two claims of v. 7–“love believes all things; hopes all things”–tie faith and hope to love in anticipation of v. 13. It is not surprising that faith (the same Greek term for the verb “believe”) and hope should appear here together; they are inextricably tied in Paul’s thought (cf. Gal 5:5-6; 1 Thess 1:3; 5:8). Faith, right relationship with God, is the basis on which one has hope regarding the future, because, through faith, one knows God’s redemption in the present, one can hope–that is, one can confidently look to the future in anticipation of God’s completing the work that God has already begun in the present (cf. Phil 2:12b-13). Love’s believing all things describes neither a willing disregard for reality nor naïveté nor gullibility. It is probably best to take this statement as a posture of openness along the lines of 2 Cor 5:7: “We walk through faith, not through sight.” Certainly, to hope all things must be grounded in this confidence in God toward the future, a confidence whose basis is neither visible nor directly <Page 953 Ends><Page 954 Begins> knowable, a theme to which Paul returns in 13:12. On the theological level, “walking by faith” describes a way of living in trust upon the God who is “for us” (Rom 8:31; cf. 1 Cor 11:24)–that is, the God who is benevolently disposed toward humans, who brings into being the things that do not exist, and who brings life out of death (Rom 4:17). (See Reflections at 14:1a.) 1 Corinthians 13:8-13, Comparison and Contrast of Love with Other Virtues Link to: 1 Corinthians 13:8 COMMENTARY The next standard feature of an encomium compares the virtue, in Paul’s case, love, to others: “Love never ends/fails.” Tongues, the favorite of some Corinthians, and prophecy, Paul’s alternate favorite, which he is about to advocate in chap. 14, along with knowledge, which will become the topic a few verses later, are limited, even finite; tongues and prophecy are functions that serve the particular needs of a given community within time and history, but whose scope is limited to human performance. Faith and hope are enabled by God’s grace, but God does not “believe,” and nowhere does Paul say that God “hopes.” God does love, however, and so do believers. So love’s being and existing is tied to God’s very self, and in loving, believers participate with God in a special, unique, even reciprocal way. Love never ends because God’s eternal love is the ground and matrix for all human loving. Paul’s eschatological convictions shape what he says here. The present, graced as it is with God’s love alive in the community at Corinth, is still only a partial reflection, like that of a mirror whose glass is not clear, of what is yet to come. Paul thinks believers live with a present down payment (2 Cor 1:22; 5:10), with partial insight, or as he will develop it in chap. 15, with the perishable and mortal but in full anticipation of the imperishable and immortal. Paul’s vision stretches from his recognition that all believers are somewhere on a pilgrimage from being children in the faith, as he thinks the Corinthians are (3:1), to the time when maturity or the perfect arrives (13:10), to that time when believers no longer walk by faith but by sight, when in the eschaton they see “face to face” (13:12). So Paul anticipates that faith, as important and central as it is, will someday be transcended <Page 954 Ends><Page 955 Begins> by the most intimate presence with God. In the meantime, Paul offers himself once again as the model of the person who is no longer a child, who has set aside childish things (13:12). When the perfect arrives, when believers see face-to-face, then Paul expects to exchange his own partial knowledge for a full knowing, then his knowing will correspond to the knowing (God’s, assumed but not stated) that has preceded and made possible Paul’s partial and proleptic knowing (13:12). Corinthian interest in “knowing” and “knowledge” is once again put in perspective: Paul, who exceeds them in knowledge as he also excels them in tongues, acknowledges that he knows only “in part” and that the knowledge yet to come, at the end of the ages, so far surpasses present knowledge (note that this same sort of argument will be undertaken in chap. 15 when present glory is contrasted with future glory) as to put present knowing in a modest perspective. But all of this reflection about the partial and the perfect, the present and future knowledge, the now and then, is designed to put love and the “now” in perspective: “But now remain faith, hope, and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love” (13:13). The famous Pauline triad is most clearly present here (cf. Rom 5:1-5; Gal 5:5-6; Col 1:4-5; 1 Thess 1:3; 5:8). At the heart of the Christian life are these three. Paul cannot imagine life in Christ without each part of the triad being in place and fully functioning; all three must remain whatever else may come and go or change or however different one believer is from another. How is love greater than faith and hope? Faith, the right relation to God, makes love possible (Gal 5:6), so love presupposes faith. Does that suggest that faith is really greater? Paul has already given the cue when he introduced this whole comparative section of the encomium: “Love never fails/ends” (v. 8). Hope, a conviction and a yearning lodged in the heart of the individual, clearly ends when that for which one hopes is finally achieved. Faith, also a human commitment, though not possible without God’s grace, may end; one may fall from faith (cf. Gal 3:3-5). By contrast, love, grounded as it is in God and a signal and eternal characteristic of God’s commitment toward all creatures, is the one disposition that believers share most fully with God. And that love is eternal. Love is “greatest” in three senses. First, its eternality, allowing it to be present fully now and yet guaranteed to be present also when the eschatological time brings about that toward which we have believed and hoped, establishes it as superlative. Second, it is greatest when Paul thinks of the Corinthian fascination with gifts, each of which is transient. Faith, hope, and love endure; gifts do not. Gifts are finite; they are given to persons who employ them for a period within the community. Love is the matrix of the life of faith; God’s love for people becomes the force that enables them to love others. Third, the “greatest” lack of the Corinthians is love. They are well endowed with gifts, as Paul recognized already in the thanksgiving (1:7). They are quite zealous regarding spiritual matters; Paul acknowledges that, and he urges them to “seek to abound in building up the church”; if one keeps in mind the connection Paul has made in 8:1, that love builds up, one can see that he is in effect saying that they should seek to abound in loving one another (cf. 16:14). They have become too fixated on gifts and have failed to live love toward one another. In that sense, also, the greatest need for them is love. (See Reflections at 14:1a.) 1 Corinthians 14:1a, The Encomium’s Conclusion, the Appeal for Emulation Link to: 1 Corinthians 14:1 An encomium typically ends with a call for hearers to be like the person praised or to put in practice the highlighted virtue. Paul follows the expectation: “Pursue love” (14:1a). Curiously, the term “love” makes no further appearance until 16:14 and 24, but the Pauline connection between love and upbuilding is so fully established (cf. 8:1) that he no longer needs to use the word “love”; he can (and does) now shift to “building up,” “edification” (14:3-5, 12, 17, 26), and he is in fact talking about love without using the term. He can shift his focus to edification not only for rhetorical purposes (the rhetorical handbooks warn about overusing a term and recommend substituting another for it)140 but also for his paraenetic purposes (he is interested not in lip service to a virtue, but in the real practice of love that by its very nature and function results in the upbuilding of others and in the edification of the church). REFLECTIONS 1. Paul’s encomium of love is one of the loftiest expressions in literature. Its function is to place love, in many of its aspects, in the center of the community’s reflection, which location is itself symbolic of love’s centrality to the life of faith. Love is the absolutely indispensable feature of the believing life (13:3); without love, no matter how many possessions one has or how prominent one is, one is lost and as good as dead. Some of Paul’s assertions about love call for reflection. (1) “Love always protects” (NIV); “Love bears all things” (NRSV); “Love passes over all things in silence” (13:7a). In this pithy statement Paul captures an essential characteristic of love: Not only does love not keep score of past better and worse moments and actions, but it also looks the other way, as it were. When we reflect even about friendship we know that our friendships continue precisely because we are willing to give our friends a break, to give them the benefit of the doubt, and even to overlook slights or inadvertences. If friendship depends on that, then how much more so love. In extreme circumstances, however, love may not call for passing over something in silence; it may not allow us to look the other way and ignore it. When, for example, a person is abused physically, emotionally, or sexually, this verse cannot be invoked as a reason for the victim to bear it or for the perpetrator to be protected. In matters of fundamental justice and the protection of less powerful persons preyed on by others, love requires that its handmaiden justice be brought to bear. Then, love must protect the victim, not the victimizer. Therefore, love “bears all things” insofar as they do not harm another of God’s creatures. Churches have an obligation to be counted foursquare on seeing that love is always hand in hand with justice. There is an irony about love: The very capacity to overlook, not to keep score–which is so vitally important to the functioning of love and to the wholeness of community–leaves love vulnerable to exploitation. And the community of believers, one and all, must be eternally vigilant to avoid or expose that exploitation–in a loving fashion. (2) There is an ambiguity about love that resists common sense: In seeking the good of the other, one finds one’s own good. Intuition would suggest that we take care of ourselves first and if anything or any time is left over, then we turn to others. But Paul supposes that one’s good is not achievable apart from the well-being of others in the body of Christ to which all believers equally belong. So there is a circularity to love, starting from God’s love of us, which love renews us and remakes us whole, and moving ineluctably until it gains expression toward others as a way of responding in thankfulness to God’s love. In that sense, love cannot be held; it cannot be seized; it is realized fully only in its being shared with someone else. We who have been fully <Page 956 Ends><Page 957 Begins> loved by God honor and relish that love most completely only in the sharing of it with others. So, to look after the interests of others is inescapably to benefit all persons in the community and therefore to benefit oneself. This sense of caring for others, however, can become a smoke screen for failing to attend to one’s own needs, for hiding one’s own desperation and deficiencies. Ideally, Paul supposes that believers ought to have accurate self-assessments, to know where they stand, where their strengths and weaknesses are, and to build upon the strengths and actively work to shore up the weaknesses. As great as it is, love founders when it is used as an excuse either to avoid proper self-care or to cloud proper self-assessment. Without the proper self-testing that Paul has consistently expected, love cannot properly engage the self one truly is with the needs of another. There is an analogy in what Paul says about knowing and being known (13:12). God knows us perfectly; what we now know is partial and filled with enigmas, but Paul anticipates that the time is coming when he will know as Paul himself is known already by God. God’s knowing, like God’s loving, precedes and gives power to our knowing and our loving. Our partial knowing, like our so-far only partial loving, is capable of improvement and growth by God’s grace until that end time when we will know as we are known and love as we are loved. (3) If mountains come and go, but love endures; if love is greater even than faith and hope, then not only does our loving endure beyond us but our loving is our enduring legacy as well. Granted, our loving and its legacy can take many forms. If we took it seriously that our loving was our enduring legacy, then what reorganization would be needed in our lives, in our stewardship of our time, energy, and resources to honor and maximize that legacy? 2. This chapter, or part of it, is read at many wedding ceremonies–and appropriately so, because Paul has recognized some fundamentals about love no matter how it is understood. But it would be a mistake to assume that Paul here has in mind romantic love that is powered by one’s yearning for and infatuation with a marriage partner. The love of which Paul writes so eloquently is a love that does not originate in one individual and reach out to another. Rather, the love celebrated in this text comes from God, claims us, and through us reaches out to others, not simply to another person whom we wish for our spouse. The love about which Paul writes, then, can never find its sole object in another single individual but reaches out through and beyond that other person. It is therefore surely appropriate to read this passage at weddings where love is affirmed between two individuals, but never without the sense that the love between those two is first not of their own origination but also that its goal can never be fully realized in its focus on one another. True love, as Paul sees it, always begins with God and always reaches beyond one’s self to others. The Pauline notion of love never stops on just one other person, no matter how special, but reaches through the loved one(s) to God’s broken world in which this new couple now pledge to make their life together. 3. A commonplace in the history of art depicts Faith, Hope, and Charity (from the Latin caritas, for “love”) as three women. You can see them, for example, in El Greco’s Modena Triptych, in which they stand together in the foreground of the crucifixion. In this same painting, El Greco employs a further artistic convention when he depicts Charity (Love) as being surrounded by numerous children clinging to her legs and being carried in her arms. Artists have long understood that love is known by her offspring and characterized by having children too numerous to count. <Page 957 Ends><Page 958 Begins>
Thank you all for the guidance.
I'm not sure this is really true. In my Logos library the 'league table' looks like this, with 1 Corinthians mid-table, with the same number of commentaries as Revelation and Galatians:
Of course quite a number of users have limited commentary sets, and so a missing volume really sticks in the craw.
Of course, there's that big elephant standing in the middle of the room: WBC (1Co).
Hermeneia seems to have completely forgotten about the first part of the OT. And you're going great in Luke until ....
Then you scan the publishing dates which appear to be when I was still doing all-nighters preparing for college exams.
After Albright became the pariah of the smart ones, Anchor views the NT as starting in Mark.
As a customer, when I see a bunch of volumes not yet published, the lesson is 'don't plan on it'.
Although not part of a series, Kenneth Bailey's 'Paul Through Middle-Eastern Eyes' is a recent, significant and insightful commentary.
https://www.logos.com/product/32342/paul-through-mediterranean-eyes-cultural-studies-in-1-corinthians
With no disrespect to the scholar's chosen to do 1 Corinthians and Acts in WBC, I must say I am disappointed that they agreed to do the work and have taken so long to get it done (that being said, perhaps when they are released they will have such a depth a scholarship that the wait will have been well worth it). And I have known through introductions of so many commentaries that sabbaticals have been taken to undertake such large works and I realize not every author can find the luxury of one. I remember one person stating they had been in contact with the author of the Acts volume and they had much of it done. We much remember too that sometimes it is fight with an editor too... a massive work may be delivered which is seen to be out of the scope of series, (I believe I read someplace that Tyndale's Isaiah volumes were to be written by one author who delivered a massive three volume work considered unsuitable for the IVP series).
Since you started with the jokes...My initial thought was to respond to the question in the discussion title; and the answer was going to be....
wait for it...
ok. Now:
right before 2nd Corinthians. [:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D][:D]
I'd like some more commentaries on the apocryphal books. That's where the real void is.
Peace, Josh! *smile* I'm a bit captivated by your unusual statement! What IS your canon?
I love the apocrypha; however, I can't get quite as excited about it as I do my Canon of 66 books ... *smile*
I think the apocrypha's great, maybe not in the 'hand of God' sense.
Yesterday's discovery according to ICC-Matthew was that jewish men absolutely feared being married to the same woman for their whole lifetime (thus the disciples' comment on divorce). Of course, the citation, wouldn't you know it, was Sirach about ugly women that were worse than a man's greatest fears. Then ICC went on to say (and this I'd like to see the source) that Israelite men had the benefit of dumping their wives; gentile men didn't (I presume one of the jewish writings).
Since you started with the jokes...My initial thought was to respond to the question in the discussion title; and the answer was going to be.... wait for it... wait for it... ok. Now: right before 2nd Corinthians. with their thinking caps on ARE THESE MY THINKING CAPS?
right before 2nd Corinthians.
Well admittedly I find parts of the apocrypha less than helpful, there are parts that are pure gold. But there are parts of the 66 books that are less useful. Now when I say parts i mean mostly verses not books. People have gotten very off track pulling out one verse from context, as well as some of the more painful verses. like Psalm 137 calling blessed those who commit infanticide (I do know the Orthodox fathers always interpreted the little ones as to be the sins of the Babylonians but it is dancing around the text to make it more palatable). Paul appears to quote the Wisdom of Solomon, and all in all the apocrypha gives us a good understanding of the 400 silent years. Indeed 1 Macabees was thought almost as high of as scripture by Martin Luther.
Peace, Josh! *smile* I'm a bit captivated by your unusual statement! What IS your canon? I love the apocrypha; however, I can't get quite as excited about it as I do my Canon of 66 books ... *smile*
I hold to the so-called "Protestant" canon of 66 books. However, I think the apocrypha (while not "God-breathed") is certainly worthy of study for Christians. The additions to Daniel are probably my favorite.
Can't we just agree to agree?[;)]
I thought it was right after Romans !
After Romans ! is Romans 2.
