_:ne32fa0c11d5e4ba0bf69537c6e813860xb20
<http://schema.org/reviewBody>
"Richard Longenecker&#x27;s WBC is a lot like Bruce&#x27;s NIGTC in some ways, but I&#x27;m less satisfied with it. I detest the format of the WBC, which doesn&#x27;t help, but I also have more problems with how Longenecker carries out his task as a commentator. Like Fee, he tries to find middle ground between the New Perspective and the traditional view, and I thought he gave up more ground to the New Perspective than I thought the evidence warrants. I&#x27;ve seen reviewers criticize him of trying to reconcile the two approaches in a way that leads to outright contradictions, but I didn&#x27;t notice anything like that myself in the parts I read. In any case, Longenecker has an excellent command of the Jewish background to this letter. He&#x27;s been criticized (by D.A. Carson, for example) for being weak in his treatment of passages dealing with the Holy Spirit (something you certainly wouldn&#x27;t find with Fee).&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;Longenecker supports a relatively early date for the epistle and the South Galatian provenance (which I think is almost certainly correct), but he works out the chronology in comparison with Acts in an idiosyncratic way, one that I&#x27;m unconvinced of (and not even sure if it works). He does defend the historicity and complementarity of both Galatians and Acts. Yet Longenecker thinks Paul unfairly caricatures his opponents, a view that I find at odds with the high view of scripture that he otherwise seems to hold.&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;Longenecker tries to read Galatians as a formal Greco-Roman oration (i.e. what&#x27;s called rhetorical analysis), an approach that seems to me to be entirely arbitrary. It may well be that some of the forms of Greco-Roman argumentation affected Paul&#x27;s training, which was largely Semitic teaching form the Jewish rabbi Gamaliel. But trying to fit the whole structure of Paul&#x27;s letter into this kind of oration format seems a bit of a stretch to my mind. Until Fee, I considered this the second most important commentary to have, after Bruce. But I think Fee captures his strengths well enough that I&#x27;m considering selling this volume once I have Moo&#x27;s BECNT."
<https://bestcommentaries.com/book/4016>