Student supervision, a preaching request, and a long interest in the Epistle to the Hebrews have encouraged me to tackle G L Cockerill's new commentary on Hebrews. Published in the New International Commentary on the NT series, it runs to 760 pages and will take a while to work through. I've done this kind of thing before with Hebrews - 30 years ago with the commentary by F F Bruce in this same series.
I know all kinds of folk come past this blog and not everyone will be interested in everything posted here. Poetry or tapestry, Renaissance Art and Kirekegaard, photos and haiku, books of all kinds on many subjects from spirituality to biography, to systematic theology to novels, and most anything else that seems interesting to share. So every now and then a piece of self-indulgent bibliphilia, often on that expensive genre of the biblical commentary.
F F Bruce mentioned above was a remarkably humble and even more remarkably learned Christian scholar who almost singlehandedly in the 1950's into the 1960's demonstrated that it is possible to be a convictional evangelical and an academic professor of Biblical Studies holding his own in scholarly integrity in a secular institution. His background in the Christian Brethren, his deep and wide knowledge of the New Testament world and the classical languages, his expertise in New Testament Greek and intra-biblical knowledge meant that his commentary on Hebrews was one of the great written gifts to preachers and Bible students keen to do justice to this vibrant and urgent document from the early church.
So I bought it for £3.25 (not cheap in the early 1970's), and I read it, one of the first full length commentaries I read, and realised that such daily increments of conversation with expert exegetes accumulated in the mind, enriching, expanding and transforming my approach to the biblical text. That's why I put in the sidebar the commentary I'm reading - a gentle corrective for those who might wonder at my tedium threshold, and an assurance that such disciplined understudying is no more tedious than a shower after a long day, or before another one starts!
And now Cockerill - who is persuaded, so far as any guess has credibility, that Apollos wrote Hebrews. A long slow summer read, another exercise in incremental gains in 'the grace and knowledge of God'. The painting is Rogier Van Der Weyden's 'Deposition'. This is one of the masterpieces of Renaissance Art, amongst the most remarkable depictions of human sorrow in its diversity and the concentrated anguish of loss which feels utterly, and ultimately, irreversible and irredeemable. Hebrews explores the heights and depths of divine mercy, suffering, judgement and love - Van der Weyden depicts the heights and depths of human suffering, compassion, sorrow and love.
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