(Part 1)
JBTM_13-2_Fall_2016
JBTM_13-2_Fall_2016
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JBTM Book Reviews<br />
111<br />
1 Peter. By Greg W. Forbes. Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament. Nashville:<br />
B&H, 2014. 232 pages. Paperback, $24.99.<br />
Those who are familiar with the previous volumes in Broadman and Holman’s Exegetical<br />
Guide to the Greek New Testament know that reading one of these volumes is like having a<br />
private Greek tutor sitting by one’s side ready to explain all the salient points of the Greek<br />
text. Our tutor for 1 Peter is Greg W. Forbes, serves as lecturer in Greek, hermeneutics, and<br />
New Testament at Melbourne School of Theology in Australia.<br />
As a guide, Forbes enables his readers to navigate through the Greek text of 1 Peter, helping<br />
them with text-critical issues, parsing, lexical issues, syntax, and interpretation. A benefit to<br />
reading this type of book is that Forbes not only presents his understanding of the text,<br />
he also examines other translations. The differences between these translations may seem<br />
trivial at first glance, but Forbes helps his readers understand why these minor variations<br />
in understanding sometimes have significant theological importance. Forbes deftly guides<br />
his readers down the path of evaluating these interpretations so they can arrive at the right<br />
understanding and translation of the text.<br />
Forbes offers readers a quick overview of the material and its structure, followed by a<br />
discussion of each phrase or clause. Each section then provides a detailed analysis of the<br />
text and possible alternative translations found in the major commentaries and English<br />
translations. Forbes then takes his reader through the reasoning process to show why one<br />
translation is superior. While one may not always agree with his conclusions, one should find<br />
his survey and critique of the possible interpretations enlightening.<br />
Forbes’s book will not be the last stop on the journey to understanding 1 Peter, but it<br />
should be one of the first. Although the volumes in the Exegetical Guide to the Greek New<br />
Testament are not intended as replacements for other types of commentaries (e.g., contrast<br />
Forbes’ introduction to 1 Peter of slightly more than three pages long with others that are 20–<br />
50 pages in length), they go beyond the intricacies of the Greek text to explain some customs<br />
and ideas needed to understand the structure and the meaning of the text. For example,<br />
Forbes has two paragraphs explaining the idea of household code in the Greco-Roman world<br />
and its place in the New Testament (77).<br />
Sometimes travelers have to worry about outdated maps leading them astray; this will<br />
not be the case with Forbes’s volume. He uses the fifth edition of the UBS text, which was<br />
still forthcoming when the book was printed. Moreover, his discussions on imperatives and<br />
imperatival participles interact with works by writers like Stanley E. Porter, Buist M. Fanning,<br />
and others. Also, he guides readers to some of the great scholarship of the past like that of A.<br />
T. Robertson and G. A. Deissmann. However, he provides little interaction with the discourse<br />
analysis of Steven E. Runge and Stephen H. Levinsohn.