[2] He has written commentaries on Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon, and Hebrews as well as books and articles on aspects of the thought the apostle Paul.
[5] In 2000, a Festschrift was published in his honour, called A Gospel for the Nations: Perspectives on Paul's Mission: Essays Presented to Peter Thomas O’Brien on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday.
Contributors included Paul Barnett, Don Carson, William Dumbrell, Graeme Goldsworthy, Peter Jensen, Andreas Köstenberger, Richard Longenecker, I. Howard Marshall, Ralph P. Martin, Donald Robinson, Moisés Silva, David Wenham, and Bruce Winter.
On 15 August 2016 Eerdmans announced that after internal and external review that "what [they] found on the pages of this commentary runs afoul of commonly accepted standards with regard to the utilization and documentation of secondary sources.
[9] By 4 November 2016 a similar statement was issued by the publishers Zondervan regarding O'Brien's Colossians – Philemon volume in the Word Biblical Commentary series.