Colossians: Authorship, Rhetoric, and Code
Overview
In this study guide Janice Capel Anderson introduces readers to key issues in the interpretation and reception of Colossians. Anderson first explores the issue of Pauline authorship. She challenges readers to reflect on why the question of authorship has dominated scholarship as well as why and how interpreters create “stories” about the letter’s author(s). Second, Anderson examines the letter’s rhetoric and context. She asks readers to consider how the letter constructs and seeks to persuade its addressees past and present.
Anderson also surveys several pictures of the first audience and “opponents” and the impact these pictures have on interpretation. Finally, she delves into the functions of the household code of Col. 3.18-4.1, its reception, and the ethics of interpretation. Anderson attends to recent feminist and empire-critical perspectives as well as the ancient setting of the Lycus River Valley, home to the cities of Colossae, Laodicea, and Hierapolis.
Thought experiments and exercises set the stage for each chapter and engage readers in active thought.
Key Features
- Presents concise commentary on the text while inviting the reader to explore further
- Explores a variety of historical, textual, and theological issues
- Guides readers through a number of interpretive options
Praise for the Print Edition
This book is a graduate student’s dream, a professor’s treasure, and an inquiring lay person’s priceless guide for study and reflection. By any measure this is the best up-to-date summary of Colossians scholarship available. It is comprehensive, clear, stylistically graceful, balanced, expansive, suggestive and provocative. The extensive bibliography that is appended is alone worth the price of the book. Five stars.
—Calvin J. Roetzel, University of Minnesota, USA
Significant breakthroughs in research about Colossae and in the interpretation of the Letter to the Colossians have been made in the last three decades. Janice Capel Anderson has mastered the array of new materials to distill an insightful, clear and beguiling introduction to the New Testament letter. Students and pastors will find here the most up-to-date literary, rhetorical, feminist and historical foundations for an appreciation of this intriguing writing.
—Alan Cadwallader, Charles Sturt University, Australia
Product Details
- Title: Colossians: Authorship, Rhetoric, and Code
- Author: Janice Capel Anderson
- Series: T&T Clark’s Study Guides to the New Testament
- Publisher: T&T Clark
- Publication Date: 2018
- Pages: 136
- Resource Type: Study Guide
- Topic: Colossians