Review: David Lincicum, The Commentarial Impulse
David Lincicum, The Commentarial Impulse: Interpretation and Actualization in the Pauline Tradition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2025. ISBN 978-0-8028-8420-6. $45.99/£35.99 (hardback).
Dr David Lincicum is associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. He has been working away at Paul’s reading and interpretation of (Old Testament) Scripture for twenty years or more, and this welcome volume brings together eight previously published essays and four new ones, all focused on his central theme. His title, The Commentarial Impulse, expressed his central conviction, that when Paul cites and echoes Scripture, he does so not merely to comment ‘neutrally’ on it, after the fashion of much academic commentary, but in order to interpret it in the light of Jesus as Messiah. That may sound blindingly obvious, but he goes beyond that observation to argue that Paul represents our first Christian commentator on Scripture, and thus prepares the ground for later Christian commentary.
The opening essay, ‘The Commentarial Impulse’ sets out this thesis lucidly and clearly, noting differences between the Alexandrian tradition of philological commentary and the hellenistic and Roman commentaries which are not simply repeating the source’s content, but ‘producing[ing] new knowledge’ (3). He observes Paul doing this in Rom 10:5-9 and 4:1 (I think he could have observed that the whole of Rom 4 looks like a carefully constructed ‘sermon’ on Gen 15:6, quoted in v 3) as examples, and notes C. H. Dodd’s important little book According to the Scriptures on ‘text plots’ in the OT re-read in the NT. Like Professor Dodd, Dr Lincicum understands the impulse to read Scripture through a Jesus-coloured lens to go back to Jesus himself. This chapter alone is worth reading, and I found myself stimulated and helped as one who is a commentator myself, writing the Word Biblical Commentary on Acts (vol 1 is available).
The following chapters then develop the central idea, that Paul is in the hellenistic and Roman tradition of commentating in order to interpret, in discussing a variety of passages and issues: how Paul reads Scripture (ch. 1); a sympathetic, and critical, discussion of Rendel Harris’ hypothesis of early Christian use of testimonia, collections of scriptural texts gathered to facilitate preaching and teaching (ch. 2); questions of how Paul uses Scripture, engaging with intertextuality and ‘effective history’ (better known to many as the German Wirkungsgeschichte) (ch. 3); Paul’s interpretation of Genesis (ch. 4) and Deuteronomy (ch. 5—he has a monograph on this, of course); the way Paul uses Scripture to shape Christian identity in Rom 6 (ch. 6); how Paul actualises the past in the present situation post-death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, I think coining the term ‘presentifying’ for this activity (ch. 7); the question of whether identifying a letter as pseudepigraphical (he takes Colossians as a ‘test case’) makes mirror-reading it for author, audience and situation more complicated (which he thinks, against many who think identifying a text as pseudepigraphical only complicates the question of authorship) (ch. 8); a conversation between Paul’s reading of Elijah in Rom 11 and Justin Martyr’s reading in his Dialogue with Trypho (ch. 9); a reception study on how the indisputed Paul‘s reading of Scripture influences later reading of Scripture, including Ephesians, Hebrews, the Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp and (negatively, since there seems little Pauline influence in the use of Scripture) the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas (ch. 10). A fascinating brief Afterword follows, reproducing a (very erudite) sermon on ‘Reading Scripture in the Messianic Community’. This summary does not even scratch the surface of a rich, thoughtful and deeply interesting book. Dr Lincicum’s fine grasp of the secondary literature is impressive (the bibliography alone is 34 pages), and he writes lucidly and clearly throughout.
This is a very valuable collection of essays which libraries will certainly want to have available. In place after place there are insights, bon mots, and stimulating ideas. He suggests that ‘Paul’s letters form a roadmap to the Scriptures of Israel’ (7). I was very struck by his observation that ‘To read a text as Scripture means in some way to inhabit it, to find oneself addressed by it, to say, as Israel did when the law was read at Sinai, “we will hear and we will do it”’ (193). Dr Lincicum is clearly reckoning to read Scripture Christianly, and others who want to do so—or do not—will find much to profit in this volume.
