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Morna D. Hooker, Arguing with Scripture: The Rhetoric of Quotations in the Letters of Paul. By Christopher D. Stanley. 208 pp. New York and London: T & T Clark, 2004. isbn 0 5670 2630 2. Paper £19.99, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 57, Issue 1, April 2006, Pages 267–271, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flj071
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How could the original—mostly Gentile—recipients of Paul's letters possibly have understood what he was trying to say? This question has often occurred to me when I have been struggling to comprehend a passage in his writings which seems to assume that his readers will not only be familiar with Scripture, but will be able to follow complex arguments of the kind that were employed by contemporary Jewish exegetes. It is, however, a question that commentators generally leave unanswered. Now Christopher Stanley attempts to deal with it in a book that asks why Paul used Scripture in some of his letters, not in others, and examines the impact that Paul's quotations might have made on his audience. Whereas Stanley's earlier book, Paul and the Language of Scripture (CUP, 1992) looked at Paul's citation technique, and dealt with issues such as whether or not Paul was quoting from memory, and his changes to the text, the focus of interest now is on the people to whom his letters were addressed. What was Paul trying to do when he quoted from Scripture?
