The Art of Commentary Writing: Reflections from Experience
Abstract
JSNT 29.3 (2007) 313-321 Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) http://JSNT.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/0142064X07076312 The Art of Commentary Writing: Reflections from Experience Margaret Y. MacDonald Department of Theology, Box 5000, St Francis Xavier University Antigonish, NS, B2G 2W5, Canada mymacdon@stfx.ca Writing the commentary on Colossians and Ephesians (2000) for the SacraPagina (SP) series has undoubtedly been the most difficult exercise of my scholarly career. At times I felt chained to my desk, with my head spinning with manuscript variations, alternate readings, issues of trans- lation,interpretativedilemmas,andmore.BecauseIhaddone considerable work on Colossians and Ephesians before the commentary and because thebibliographyofsecondarysourcesfor these works was not as immense as with the undisputed Paulines, at the outset I felt that the task would be fairly manageable. Moreover, the SP series calls for an exposition of the text with a specific methodological perspective. In my case, this would be a social-scientific perspective; my initial impression was that this would simplify the task considerably--there would be some issues and themes that could reasonably be left to one side. My initial thoughts, however, were misguided on several counts, and my commentary project turned out to be far more demanding than I ever