Major Review: 1 Peter: A Commentary

With Commentaries already published on Matthew, John, the Acts of the Apostles, Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Revelation, Keener now places us further in his debt with this fresh examination of 1 Peter. As readers make their way through this hefty book, those who have sampled Keener’s previous interpretive work will find themselves in familiar territory. He brings the same socio-cultural-historical sensibilities to this volume that we have learned to associate with his work more generally. Given the range of commentaries and commentary series available today, the question naturally arises: What kind of commentary is this? For Keener, clearly, the craft of commentary writing centers squarely on locating and grasping a work like 1 Peter in its literary-historical world. Indeed, the index of “ancient sources”—Old Testament apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus and Philo, mishnaic and Talmudic literature and other rabbinic writings, works from the early church, books discovered at Nag Hammadi, and a wide-ranging collection of other Greek and Latin sources—runs over sixty pages, and references to these sources are distributed across the commentary on almost every page.