Holy Scripture in the Qumran Commentaries and Pauline Letters

Paul's Engagement with Deuteronomy: Snapshots and Signposts*

“…While his insistence that one must consider the evidence of Hebrew texts and other versions is well taken (1997: 142), such evidence probably would have passed into Paul's hands via Greek texts. In the end, his study simply does not contain enough exegetical demonstration from the Pauline letters themselves to justify the overthrow of the relatively well-established hypothesis of Paul's reliance on a Greek text (note also the criticism of Stanley 1998;Dunn 1999;Wagner 2001;Swanson 2002;Wagner 2003: 7-8, all of whom fault Lim for his imbalanced presentation focusing more on Qumran than on Paul). Lim has offered a salient warning against naive presumptions of textual stability, but has not effectively demonstrated the impossibility of identifying at least some of Paul's own exegetical alterations to the generally Septuagintal text of his biblical quotations.…”