Wright - Colossians and Philemon: Tyndale New Testament Commentaries

I well remember my first meeting with a biblical commentary. I was eighteen years old at the time, and was asked to lead a Bible Study group of six or eight contemporaries. The book we were to study was the letter to the Colossians, and the commentary which was lent to me was that by H. M. Carson, in the Tyndale series. It was just what I needed: lucid, informative, stimulating. I little thought then that I would one day be asked to write the volume that would replace it; and, when that invitation came, I accepted with a sense of gratitude, hoping that I might be able to do for another generation what Carson had done for me.

Study of Paul in general, and of Colossians in particular, has moved on by leaps and bounds in the last twenty years, and in starting again from scratch to work on the text I have tried to take account of what has been thought and written in the intervening period. This means, among other things, that I have made use of several works that, due to the different designs of various series, are able to include a wealth of technical detail that is outside the scope of this book: I think particularly of the commentaries of Lohse, Schweizer, OBrien and (on Philemon) Stuhlmacher. I have frequently found, however, that older writers such as Lightfoot, Abbott and Williams still have a rich contribution to make, and are in no way superseded by more modern studies.

My debt to Professors G. B. Caird and C. F. D. Moule extends far beyond my grateful use of their respective commentaries. Both of them have given generously of their wisdom and friendship and have helped me to understand not only the New Testament but the very nature of Christian scholarship. There are no words to express my sadness at George Cairds untimely death, which took place just after I had written the first draft of this preface. I had been looking forward eagerly to his comments on what I had written, and can now only guess at what they might have been. If this book reflects in any small way the academic rigour which he practised and taught, and the excitement which I always felt in exploring the New Testament under his guidance, I shall be proud.

Faced with the choice of basing the commentary on either the Revised Standard Version or the New International Version, I chose the latter, not because it is necessarily better but because, in my recent experience, a great many Christians have begun to use it. I have ventured to say from time to time where in my opinion its generally fine rendering of Paul could be improved. One of the good things about the plethora of modern translations currently available is that, by their very differences, they force readers of the Bible to ask searching questions about what the original text actually said. It seems to me, in this context, that the purpose of a commentary is (ultimately) to answer such questions by giving the text back to the reader uncluttered by a mass of glosses. To that end, this book has two aims: first, to clear up potential ambiguities or obscurities, so that the reader is able to hear, as nearly as possible, what the text itself says; second, to open the readers eyes to see the text, and those parts of Pauls thought which it reflects, as a whole, over and above the mass of detail. In order to achieve these objects, I have not hesitated to give my own interpretation of several major questions which are raised by the text itself. All interpreters need to arrive at some position or other from which they can survey the land before them, and I hope that those who have accustomed themselves to looking at Colossians from other angles will at least try to see it from this perspective and assess whether it makes any more sense.