Wisdom and law in Colossians: Being a study of Jewish wisdom tradition as the conceptual background for understanding wisdom and law in Col 1:3-3:4

Turner, Pat (1998) Wisdom and law in Colossians: Being a study of Jewish wisdom tradition as the conceptual background for understanding wisdom and law in Col 1:3-3:4. PhD thesis, Murdoch University.

Abstract

This thesis, to be examined for the degree of PhD from Murdoch University, concerns the possible impact of the Jewish Wisdom tradition upon the text of Col l:3-3:4. (This section of the text has been chosen because it more or less delineates the extent of sapiential language in Colossians.) The impact of Torah is also to be examined, especially as it concerns the identification of Christ as both Wisdom and Torah. This is to be accomplished by a linguistic study of the sapiential language which occurs in the epistle.

Chapter 1 is the Introduction: Aims and Method in which the goals of the thesis are specified and the methods used to achieved them are outlined. Chapter 2 is the Review of the Current Literature which examines and comments on other work which has been done in this or related areas. Ch3 examines the passages in the OT and other literature pertinent to our research.

Ch 4 outlines a structural analysis of the whole of the sapiential section l:3-3:4. Chapters 5 to 9 are concerned with the exegesis of the passages in question and a study of the grammatical and stylistic structures which tie them together. These provide the evidence for the thesis.

We have become aware of echoed terms, chiastic structures and thematic and linguistic units which carry the Wisdom/Torah motif. These are brought together to show what the writer has been doing all the time. We can see that in his use of wisdom language he has been employing the language in which the opponents couched their position. Furthermore, he has used these terms to build a christology which completely assimilates the tradition which the opponents had been claiming as their own. Instead he has built a solid case for Christ as the embodiment of Wisdom and Torah.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Murdoch Affiliation(s):	Division of Social Sciences, Humanities and Education
Notes:	Note to the author: If you would like to make your thesis openly available on Murdoch University Library's Research Repository, please contact:repository@murdoch.edu.au. Thank you.
Supervisor(s):	Loader, William
URI:	http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/50494

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