Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 26:3 (Fall 2022)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

SBJT 26:3 (Fall 2022) p. 184

Book Reviews

1 Peter. 2nd ed. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. By Karen H. Jobes. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022, xx + 374 pp., $46.99 hardcover.

Since its publication in 2005, Karen Jobes’s commentary on 1 Peter in the BECNT has been the standard evangelical commentary on this letter. This second edition is a full revision in which Jobes especially includes “more textual-critical information for some of the quotations of the OT in 1 Peter” and adds an introductory section on the OT in 1 Peter as “a subject that deserves continuing study” (xi-xii). Indeed, throughout her commentary, Jobes elucidates the significance of OT quotations and allusions in 1 Peter. Therefore, this review will focus on these aspects of 1 Peter and compare this second edition to the first edition, so that evangelical seminary students and pastors may understand this commentary’s value while considering whether to consult it.

Jobes’s three-page introduction to “The Use of the Old Testament in 1 Peter” is a welcome addition to this second edition of 1 Peter (45–47). Jobes cites the most important monographs and articles that have been published since 2005 and affirms their contributions to the study of 1 Peter. She agrees with Patrick Egan that “Isaiah’s prophecy forms a biblical narrative substrate of 1 Peter” (46). Commenting on 1 Peter 2:4–5, Jobes adopts Egan’s argument that the macrostructure of Isaiah 40–66, which presents, respectively, God’s Suffering Servant (Isa 40–53) and God’s servants (Isa 54–66), informs “the close relationship between the unique, foundational Living Stone and the living stones” (149). She provides a lengthy block quotation from Egan as further support for her claim, retained from the first edition of this commentary, that Jesus “is the paradigm by which Christians write large the letters of his gospel in their lives,” since Egan argues that Peter’s interpretation of Isaiah 53 “‘make[s] a christological point as a basis for further ecclesiological ramifications’” in 1 Peter 2:21–25 (196). On the other hand, Jobes rightly pushes back against Egan’s rejection of scholars’ “strong consensus on diaspora as the primary motif of Christian identity” in 1 Peter 1:1 (70). Jobes

SBJT 26:3 (Fall 2022) p. 185

thus incorporates others’ recent insights about the use of the OT in 1 Peter into her ...