This is the tenth volume in the Blackwell Bible Commentary series. The commentaries, we are told, have as ‘their most distinctive feature … that they will present readers with many different interpretations of each text, in such a way as to heighten their awareness of what a text, especially a sacred text, can mean and what it can do, what it has meant and what it has done, in the many contexts in which it operates’ (p. xii). This concern with the broad reception of texts has become widely popular with students of the Bible and is now such a force in biblical interpretation that it has recently brought forth an Oxford handbook devoted to the subject, one of whose editors, Christopher Rowland, is the editor of the Blackwell series.

Anthony Thiselton, the author of the volume under review, is as well qualified as any individual to contribute to such a series. Not only is he one of Britain's leading expositors of biblical hermeneutics but also in his commentary on 1 Corinthians, published in 2000, he was keen to discuss the reception history of that text. Thiselton begins his book by devoting a short discussion to the work of Hans Robert Jauss, whom he describes as the main founder of reception criticism, highlighting Jauss's anti-objectivist stance to interpretation and his developed sense of a shifting horizon on the part of the individual interpreter as he or she encounters new and surprising interpretations of a particular text. Modern interpreters can find themselves ‘provoked’ by older schemes of interpretation, not least when faced by perspectives which do not accord with their own. So, for instance, in the Thessalonian correspondence this is particularly the case with the apocalyptic language of that text. Thiselton also refers to the work of Ulrich Luz who spoke of the history of the influence of a text, influence which would include not only the way in which a text had been interpreted in commentaries but also its place in liturgy, hymnody, law and art. In contradistinction to Luz's particular brand of reception history, Thiselton notes that the Blackwell series examines influence that is not exclusively Christian.

After a brief introduction to the two epistles, which is broadly historical-critical in orientation (Thiselton covers, albeit briefly, the question of the pseudonymity of 2 Thessalonians), we move to the commentary itself. This proceeds section by section. There is a brief introduction to each of these, setting out some of the major issues of discussion (again broadly historical-critical in orientation), and then we proceed to a selection of various commentators, theologians, authors and others who have been influenced by the Thessalonian correspondence. The division is chronological rather than thematic (apostolic Fathers and patristic era, the medieval period, the Reformation and Post-Reformation eras, the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century – references to more recent authors are restricted to the introductory pieces of each section), and centres on a cluster of authors (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Augustine, Bede, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Estius, Jonathan Edwards, John Newton, the Wesley brothers, Benjamin Jowett and J. B. Lightfoot), though many others are mentioned, including Margery Kempe, Melanchthon, Milton, Richard Baxter, Coleridge, Keats and Yeats, to mention but a few. All the individuals discussed have a brief biographical entry at the back of the book.

The discussion of the interpretations of the various authors is broadly descriptive and Thiselton makes no attempt to comment on the ‘truth’ of any one interpretation, reflecting editorial policy. The book is certainly instructive, especially when dealing with some of the more controversial passages in the epistles (1 Thess. ii.14–16; 1 Thess. iv.13–18; 2 Thess. ii.1–12), showing how there is a striking continuity in the types of controversies that individuals have seen in them. Not all evidence of the receptions of these texts is straightforwardly religious, though the vast majority is, and nearly all is to be found in words (in a variety of genre ranging from commentaries to poems and hymns) rather than images (the only reference to the latter is on p. 212 where Thiselton discusses the Trinity College Apocalypse). Such a balance probably reflects the relative lack of pictorial representation of the Thessalonian epistles, rather than the author's expertise. Sometimes it is not clear, at least not to the present reviewer, how evidence for reception or use had been adduced (for example the view that Yeats's The Second Coming, which famously begins, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’, is influenced by the reference in 2 Thess. ii to the loss of restraint, though space has probably prevented Thiselton from engaging in a more detailed justification of his opinion) but in the main such issues do not arise, and one can marvel at the range of reference and the apparent extent of influence, though perhaps we should be alive to the fact that ‘influence’ is an altogether more nebulous concept than either use or reception, and so more difficult to detect.

This volume, as is the case with all the volumes in the Blackwell Commentary series, raises a number of questions about reception history more generally. What in the end is its purpose? The delineation of a variety of lived responses to the text so as to show how extensive and various have been those responses? If yes, to this, what are we to do with this carefully accumulated information, gathered together, one has to say, on the basis of selection processes whose guiding principle is not always easy to discern? To come to possibly obvious conclusions about the fissiparous and complex nature of texts and the effect upon their understanding (to talk about the effect of a text is perhaps more controversial) of different interpretative contexts (in this volume as in all the Blackwell volumes, no doubt for lack of space, almost nothing is said about the specific contexts in which reported interpretations are being made)? Are the priorities historical (the relationship between texts and contexts) or hermeneutical (the problematic nature of interpreting texts)? The editors' reluctance to instruct their authors to make judgements about individual interpretations may be admirable, and certainly is realistic given the space available, but does such a view run the risk of turning these volumes into little more than an erudite Cook's tour of a selection of readings of biblical books? Thiselton, I sense, is not keen to advocate such a view. Citing Luz's assertion that ‘the biblical texts do not have a simple fixed meaning’, he argues, noting Umberto Eco's distinction between open and closed texts, that Luz's view is problematic when it comes to some texts in the Bible which are strongly kerygmatic in content. But he does not go on to discuss how 1 and 2 Thessalonians might be construed along that spectrum of possibilities, and it is difficult to get a strong sense of his views in the commentary section of his work, though historical-critical concerns head up each section of the commentary.

There is little doubt that reception history will form a significant element in the future of biblical studies, but defining what its purpose is or its guiding principles might be, and indeed why, for instance, scholars trained in biblical studies rather than historians or literary critics or whoever else are best qualified to do it, given their training, remain considerable issues. Anthony Thiselton cannot be expected to address these questions here, though he has in part addressed them elsewhere, and we should, in the end, simply admire the considerable show of learning on display in this volume, which will be an important resource for future interpreters of the Thessalonian correspondence.