The last fifty years have seen a shift of emphasis in New Testament scholarship. When the task was to establish the text and to discuss the authenticity of the documents, linguistic and historical considerations came first. Now that these things are approaching a settled state it has become possible, and necessary, to give more attention to the theological and religious content of the New Testament. Hence the New Testament is re-examined by scholars in this new series. Each volume takes a book of the New Testament and, after an introduction on general matters, goes through the text in great detail, commenting especially on theological matters, relating the contents to the life and worship of the early Christian communities. It is assumed that students have their own Greek text beside the open commentary. The text on which the commentary is based is the Kilpatrick-Nestle edition.
This is a theological commentary on the Greek text; on the foundation of linguistic detail is based a doctrinal exposition. The first section of the Introduction is on the religious ideas of the epistles, and frequent allusion is made throughout the commentary to works on New Testament theology. There are special notes on many of the important theological terms such as 'knowledge', 'mystery', pleroma, as well as on linguistic points, such as the use of the reflexive pronoun. But attention is devoted also to critical and introductory matters, and this is, it is believed, the first commentary on Colossians and Philemon to discuss in some detail the theories of Professors E. J. Goodspeed and J. Knox. The commentary is documented with references to works in English, French and German, for those who wish to follow up the study in greater detail. But the aim has been to make the exposition as far as possible self-contained and intelligible to a reader with no other books before him than the
