Book Review: From Rome to Beijing: Symposia on Robert Jewett's Commentary on Romans

Abstract

From Rome to Beijing: Symposia on Robert Jewett's Commentary on Romans. Edited by K. K. Yeo. Lincoln, Neb.: Kairos Studies, 2013. 500 pp. $42.00 (cloth).This book is a selection of essays written by thirty-three leading scholars in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America as a result of a series of symposia that took place in sixteen different cities around the world between 2006 and 2008. Planned by Robert Jewett and K. K. Yeo and supported by Fortress Press, the symposia were devoted to the evaluation of Jewetts commentary on Romans in the Hermeneia commentary series. This book also includes John Barclays response to the commentary and Jewetts following reply to it, published in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament in 2008.The book is divided into fourteen sections, with an introduction by Yeo and Jewett, a total of thirty-three articles from the twelve symposia and the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, and a conclusion by Yeo. It also includes Jewetts twelve responses to the articles in each symposium. The issues that the scholars focus their attention on in their assessments include: (1) the purpose of Romans; (2) the historical-cultural situation of the Roman congregation; (3) rhetorical analysis; (3) the socio-scientific or cultural anthropological approach (for example, shame and honor, Jews and Gentiles); (4) the anti-imperial perspective; (5) theology (for example, law, sin, soteriology, pneumatology, missiology, eschatology, and ecclesiology); and (6) the hermeneutical method. As an extension of the roundtable discussion in the symposia, this book aims to invite scholars around the world to join the discussion by providing this provocative resource. Just as the title indicates, this book is meant to open the interpretive arenas of Romans from Rome to Beijing, far beyond the traditional European and North American perspectives of Pauline studies.Jewett's commentary is the culmination of his twenty-six years of research and reflection and offers a fresh new understanding of Paul's gospel, still relevant to our contemporary global environment. His basic argument is that Romans was written to solicit support in the Roman congregation for the mission to Spain and to establish peace inside the congregation between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians by overcoming ethnocentric prejudices expressed in ancient systems of honor and shame. Jewett reconstructs a conjectural situation of the audience in Rome by employing the socio-cultural framework characterized by the competition of honor, which was the principal point of conflict in the Roman congregation. …