Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 56:3 (Sep 2013)
Article: Response To Stanley E. Porter
Author: Verlyn D. Verbrugge

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JETS 56:3 (September 2013) p. 585

Response To Stanley E. Porter

Verlyn D. Verbrugge*

* Verlyn Verbrugge is senior editor at Zondervan, 5300 Patterson Ave., S.E., Grand Rapids, MI 49530.

First, I offer my sincerest apology to Porter for not having located his article on the textual-critical issue in Rom 5:1, which has been published in two separate places. For some reason, neither publication showed up in my searches for articles on Rom 5:1. I am not sure why. It is perhaps equally surprising that neither of the two Romans commentaries published since 1991 (the year of Porter’s JBL article) in which authors are encouraged to deal significantly with textual-critical issues (NICNT and BECNT series) makes any reference to that article. Moreover, I acknowledge the careless spelling errors that pervaded my footnote 3; editors need proofreading too, as I know only too well—but Porter presumably knows this, too, since within two years of publishing his Idioms of the Greek New Testament, he felt a need to submit a “second edition with corrections.”

If anything good may come of this interchange, it will be that both articles—Porter’s in JBL and mine in JETS, plus this subsequent exchange—will get more exposure than either of these articles would have by itself, now that a controversy has developed. Controversy has a way of producing exposure. When one scholar takes another one to task, people remember and take note, and I suspect that commentators presently working on Romans will now need to examine both sides of this issue and make a determination as to which article presents the stronger case. Porter insists that the internal evidence in the book of Romans points to the use of the subjunctive ἔχωμεν in Rom 5:1, whereas I have argued (and I would still argue) for the indicative ἔχομεν.

Moreover, I scoured a large number of commentaries, both older and contemporary, found in a local theological seminary library, but I somehow missed the 1901 James Denney commentary on Romans in The Expositor’s Greek New Testament, which thoroughly supports the article I wrote. But similar to what happened with Porter’s JBL article, Denney’s commentary was not noted in either of the International Critical Commentaries on Romans (Sanday and Headlam in 1911, published only ten years after The Expositor’s Greek New Testament, and Cranfield in 1975). Perhaps it was from Denney’s comments on Rom 5:1 that the late Bastiaan Van Elderen, the NT professor from whom I learned the importance of payin...

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