Barclay and the Bible

It has been a bit, but as promised there will be a series of reviews coming your way in the next few days. While there is a very good chance I am the only one who cares, I am treating this as a disicpline in which I practice summarizing the arguments of a work, and remembering the work itself. This time through I want to strongly endorse John Barclay's work entitled Colossians and Philemon which is a very aptly named study guide. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Barclay's work, he is an excellent New Testament scholar, currently in Brittain at the University of Durham. He has siginificant knowledge of the New Testament, early Christianity (he is one of the leading Josephus scholars), is well versed in postmodern lit-theory and looks just like this photograph: His work on Colossians is primarily focussed on the first two of these gifts, although there are hints of the third throughout. This book is tough to summarize for several reasons, first being that it is not really a commentary of Colossians. Barclay does not go verse by verse throughout the book and give us background, or his personal reading of the text. Rather, and this is the second reason this book is tough to summarize, Barclay attempts to give an overview of the scholarship surrounding Colossians while providing insight to the debates in Pauline scholarship. For example, Barclay begins by giving a very lucid reading of how Pauline Colossians really is, is Paul the author or not? Barclay while admitting that there is no real, clear cut, historically viable solution to this problem, rightly calls the entire debate into question, "Perhaps with our intense concern to demarcate a 'Paul' from 'non-Paul' we are working with an artificial or anachronistic notion of individual uniqueness..." Throughout this work Barclay is able to provide key pieces of historical research, combined with larger argument, to help his readers navigate through the scholarship. This book is an excellent resource for any pastor who wants to know where to situate the commentary's they are using, or who would like to better understand the "big picture" of Colossians. Very, very, helpful book that reads quickly and makes you wish more of this sort of work were available.