Review of Acknowledging the Divine Benefactor

Review of Acknowledging the Divine Benefactor April 22, 2017

Over at RBL is my review of  Terrance Callan, Acknowledging the Divine Benefactor: The Second Letter of Peter.

I’m planning to spend a lot of time in the future on 2 Peter and Jude, so this was great to read. In sum:

I find Callan’s commentary to be a careful and deliberate application of Vernon Robbin’s socio-rhetorical method to the text of 2 Peter. Such a method is useful for explicating the rhetorical force and various textures of a given text. However, sometimes one feels swamped by the number of technical terms such as “rhetorolects” and neologisms such as “eschatography,” which might not make it user-friendly to students. In addition, the exegetical analysis moves quickly between textures, which does create quite a bit of repetition in places. That said, Callan has produced a judicious and robust commentary of 2 Peter, and his socio-rhetorical method is certainly a tool that can shed new light on such a text.


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