Review: The Letter to Philemon in Anchor Bible Commentary Series by Joseph A. Fitzmyer

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I did enjoy this commentary. For readers who are unaware, Fitzmyer is a Roman Catholic but I did not find his tradition really coming out (for instance, his interaction of the word “saints” in Philemon is interpreted to refer to believers in general, not SAINTS, and he did not have any further discussion about that point of saints and SAINTS). In the past I have used various commentaries from this series and I think this volume is one of the better ones (there are some whacky ones in this series). I read this work primarily for my exegetical preparation for preaching, so in terms of it’s usefulness for the exegete I thought that this work was worthwhile in terms of the materials for the readers to interact with, though I feel that there was more that Fitzmyer could have said. By saying that this work is worthwhile, I do not mean that I agree with every interpretative decision made by the author, only that they were not outrageous or out of bounds where he landed. From time to time there were historical, lexical, grammatical and syntactical insights that I gained about the Greek text from reading Fitzmyer, that I didn’t not see on my own.

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