The Danger of Obscuring the Text

As I was preparing to teach Romans again, I came across the following reminder from Doug Moo. 

The interpreter of Romans is faced with the danger that the text of what Paul himself wrote will become obscured by the reams and reams of material that other people have written about the text. Thomas Hobbes is reputed to have said, “If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.” Certainly it is easy for the interpreter of Scripture to substitute broad reading in books about the text for deep reading in the text itself. In no book of the Bible is this more of a temptation than in Romans, and I hope I have not succumbed to it.

(The Epistle to the Romans, New International Commentary on the New Testament [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), xviii.