(Part 1)

JBTM Book Reviews
111
1 Peter. By Greg W. Forbes. Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament. Nashville:
B&H, 2014. 232 pages. Paperback, $24.99.
Those who are familiar with the previous volumes in Broadman and Holman’s Exegetical
Guide to the Greek New Testament know that reading one of these volumes is like having a
private Greek tutor sitting by one’s side ready to explain all the salient points of the Greek
text. Our tutor for 1 Peter is Greg W. Forbes, serves as lecturer in Greek, hermeneutics, and
New Testament at Melbourne School of Theology in Australia.
As a guide, Forbes enables his readers to navigate through the Greek text of 1 Peter, helping
them with text-critical issues, parsing, lexical issues, syntax, and interpretation. A benefit to
reading this type of book is that Forbes not only presents his understanding of the text,
he also examines other translations. The differences between these translations may seem
trivial at first glance, but Forbes helps his readers understand why these minor variations
in understanding sometimes have significant theological importance. Forbes deftly guides
his readers down the path of evaluating these interpretations so they can arrive at the right
understanding and translation of the text.
Forbes offers readers a quick overview of the material and its structure, followed by a
discussion of each phrase or clause. Each section then provides a detailed analysis of the
text and possible alternative translations found in the major commentaries and English
translations. Forbes then takes his reader through the reasoning process to show why one
translation is superior. While one may not always agree with his conclusions, one should find
his survey and critique of the possible interpretations enlightening.
Forbes’s book will not be the last stop on the journey to understanding 1 Peter, but it
should be one of the first. Although the volumes in the Exegetical Guide to the Greek New
Testament are not intended as replacements for other types of commentaries (e.g., contrast
Forbes’ introduction to 1 Peter of slightly more than three pages long with others that are 20–
50 pages in length), they go beyond the intricacies of the Greek text to explain some customs
and ideas needed to understand the structure and the meaning of the text. For example,
Forbes has two paragraphs explaining the idea of household code in the Greco-Roman world
and its place in the New Testament (77).
Sometimes travelers have to worry about outdated maps leading them astray; this will
not be the case with Forbes’s volume. He uses the fifth edition of the UBS text, which was
still forthcoming when the book was printed. Moreover, his discussions on imperatives and
imperatival participles interact with works by writers like Stanley E. Porter, Buist M. Fanning,
and others. Also, he guides readers to some of the great scholarship of the past like that of A.
T. Robertson and G. A. Deissmann. However, he provides little interaction with the discourse
analysis of Steven E. Runge and Stephen H. Levinsohn.