Abstract
Paul Foster’s commentary on the Epistle to the Colossians is a valuable contribution to the library of work on the letter. Thanks to an engaging style that is sometimes lacking in commentaries, the book is eminently readable and will be as valuable to a non-academic pastoral readership as it is to scholars.
Commentary on this epistle is always confronted by a cluster of questions concerning authorship, date, provenance and context, with these in turn connected to the various elements of its theology, particularly christology and ecclesiology. Foster cautiously ascribes the work to a later author (i.e., not to Paul), probably writing between 65 and 80 ce, in Phrygia or elsewhere in Asia Minor. He is not only admirably cautious in this decision, as he weighs the various positions and approached, but is also careful to acknowledge the limited significance it has for interpretation, which must deal with the details of the text itself. A distinctive emphasis on christology, displacing any substantive interest in the Spirit, is one of the characteristics of the theology encountered in the letter that he considers to reflect a development from Paul’s own thought. The apparent lack of interest in the Spirit is, of course, a repeated focal point for scholarship on Colossians; what is, perhaps, distinctive about Foster’s approach is the subtlety with which he evaluates this in relation to the christology of the epistle. He presents this, indeed, as a positive quality of theology developing in ‘dialectic’, reflectively adapting to fresh challenges.
Those challenges arise from the Colossian context itself. Foster understands the ‘Colossian Heresy’ to involve the assimilation of Christian teaching to local Phrygian religion, rather than to a variant of Jewish teaching. The multicultural environment of Phrygia may well have absorbed elements of Jewish practice, but it is not adequate to see the problem solely in terms of this; rather, it lies in the tendency to absorb the gospel taught by Paul into a syncretistic framework. While Foster’s analysis here is not unique, it is particularly well-developed, drawing on a range of evidence to support his core claim. It is also crucial to his evaluation of the distinctive importance of christology in the epistle: confronted by such syncretism, the author is compelled to emphasise the uniqueness of Jesus.
One distinctive feature of the commentary is the development of a ‘prosopographical’ study that draws together the limited biographical evidence encountered in (or assumed by) the text for the persons named within it, who are treated as a collective (pp. 90–105). The decision on authorship colours this discussion, since the biographical detail of some individuals, including the named author, consequently has a fictive function of some sort within the epistle. The prosopography is valuable, and undoubtedly adds depth to the detailed study that follows, though given the ‘collective’ emphasis of the method, the reader might expect to have seen more by way of a concluding synthesis to this part of the introduction.
This is a readable and useful commentary, distinguished by the meticulous (and transparent) care with which interpretative decisions are taken.