CONTENTS

Cover

A Quick Introduction to the New Testament

Copyright

A Quick Introduction to the New Testament

People have been reading and studying the New Testament for as long as its documents have been in existence. Even before all twenty-seven canonical New Testament books were written, some found the interpretation of the available documents more than a little challenging (see the comment of 2 Pet. 3:15–16 regarding Paul). A distance of two millennia, not to mention changes of language, culture, and history, have not made the task any easier. The torrential outpouring of commentaries, studies, and essays across the centuries, all designed to explain—or in some cases, explain away—the New Testament documents, makes the task both easier and harder. It is easier because there are many good and stimulating guides; it is harder because the sheer volume of the material, not to mention its thoroughly mixed nature and, frequently, its mutually contradictory content, is profoundly daunting to the student just beginning New Testament study.

This introduction provides little more than a surface history of a selection of the people, movements, issues, and approaches that have shaped the study of the New Testament. The student setting out to come to terms with contemporary study of the New Testament must suddenly confront a bewildering array of new disciplines (e.g., text criticism, historical criticism, hermeneutics), the terminology of new tools (e.g., form criticism, redaction criticism, discourse analysis, postmodern readings), and key figures (e.g., F. C. Baur, J. B. Lightfoot, E. P. Sanders). Students with imagination will instantly grasp that they do not pick up New Testament scrolls as they were dropped from an apostolic hand; they pick up a bound sheaf of documents, printed, and probably in translation. Moreover, the text itself is something that believers and unbelievers alike have been studying and explaining for two millennia.

PASSING ON THE TEXT

At the beginning of his gospel, Luke commentsb that “many others” had already undertaken to write accounts of Jesus (Luke 1:1–4). Although some scholars have argued that there was a long period of oral tradition before anything substantial about Jesus or the early church was written down, the evidence is against such a stance: the world into which Jesus was born was highly literate.[1] From such a perspective, the existence of the documents that make up the New Testament canon is scarcely surprising.

These documents were originally hand-written on separate scrolls. There is very good evidence that the writing was in capital letters, without spaces, and with very little punctuation. Printing was still almost a millennium and a half away, so additional copies were made by hand. In theory, this could be done by professional copiers: in a scriptorium, one man would read at dictation speed, several scribes would take down his dictation, and another would check each copy against the original, often using ink of a different color to make the corrections. This kind of professional multiplying of copies was labor-intensive and therefore expensive. Most early Christian copies of the New Testament were doubtless done by laypeople eager to obtain another letter by Paul or a written account of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That brought the price down: Christians were investing their own time to make their own copies, and they were not having to pay large sums to professional scribes. On the other hand, the private copy made by an eager and well-meaning layperson was likely to include more transcriptional errors than copies made and checked in a scriptorium.

As the numbers of copies of New Testament documents multiplied, three formal changes were soon introduced. First, the scroll gave way to the codex, that is, to a book bound more or less like a modern book, which enabled readers to look up passages very quickly without having to roll down many feet of scroll. Second, increasingly (though certainly not exclusively) the capital letters (scholars call them “uncials”) gave way to cursive scripts that were messier but much more quickly written. And third, because the early church, even within the Roman Empire, was made up of highly diverse groups, it was not long before the New Testament, and in fact the whole Bible, was translated into other languages. These “versions” of the Bible (as translations are called) varied widely in quality.[2]There were no copyright laws and no central publishing houses, so there were soon numerous Latin versions, Syriac versions, and so forth, as individuals or local churches produced what seemed necessary for their own congregations.

Today the printing press churns out thousands of identical copies. When each copy is written by hand, however, if the work is of substantial length, each copy will be a little different than all others because the accidental mistakes introduced by successive copying will not all congregate in the same place. The challenge of producing a copy that is perfectly true to the original soon multiplies. A slightly later Christian, making a copy of a copy, spots what he judges to be mistakes in the manuscript before him and corrects them in his fresh copy. Unfortunately, however, it is possible that some things he thought were mistakes were actually in the original. For instance, it is well known that there are many grammatical anomalies in the book of Revelation. The reason for this is disputed; there are three major theories and several minor ones. But a later copyist might well have thought that errors had been introduced by intervening copyists and “corrected” them to “proper” grammar—thereby introducing new errors.

Two further “accidents” of history and geography have helped to determine just what material has come down to us. First, just as the Roman Empire divided between East and West (stemming from the decision of Emperor Constantine to establish an eastern capital in what came to be called Constantinople), so also did the church. In the West, because it was not only the official language of Rome but also tended in time to squeeze out Greek as the lingua franca, Latin soon predominated in the church. Initially, there were many Latin versions, but toward the end of the fourth century, Damasus, Bishop of Rome, commissioned Jerome to prepare an official Latin version that would be widely distributed and sometimes imposed throughout the churches of the West. This Latin version, revised several times, became the Vulgate, which held sway in the West for a millennium. By contrast, Greek dominated in the East, in what eventually became the Byzantine Empire. Inevitably, Greek manuscripts were used and copied much more often under this linguistic heritage than in the West, until Constantinople fell to the Muslim Turks in 1453. Many Eastern scholars then fled West, bringing their Greek manuscripts with them—a development that helped to fuel both the Reformation and the Renaissance.

Second, the material on which ancient books were written (i.e., their equivalent of paper) decomposed more readily in some climates than in others. The most expensive books were made of parchment, treated animal skin. Higher quality parchment was called vellum. More commonly, books were made of papyrus, a plant that grew plentifully in the Nile Delta. Papyrus has the constituency of celery or rhubarb. Long strips could be peeled off, pounded, and glued together to make sheets. Although parchment is tougher than papyrus, both materials are organic and thus readily decompose, especially when there is moisture in the atmosphere. So it is not surprising that the best caches of really ancient manuscripts come from the hot, dry sands of Egypt.

So just what textual evidence has come down to us? There are about five thousand manuscripts or parts of manuscripts (some of them mere fragments) of all or part of the Greek New Testament, and about eight thousand manuscripts or parts of manuscripts of versions. All of this evidence can be classified in various ways. For example, one can break it down according to writing material (parchment or papyrus). More importantly, uncial manuscripts of the Greek New Testament (i.e., those written in capital letters) number under three hundred, whereas there are almost three thousand miniscules (manuscripts not written in capitals). In addition, there are over two thousand lectionarries—church reading books that contain selections of the biblical text to be read on many days of the ecclesiastical year. Other sources include quotations of the Bible found in the early church fathers, and short portions of New Testament writings on ostraca (pieces of pottery often used by poor people as writing material) and amulets,[3] ranging from the fourth to the thirteenth century. Similar breakdowns can be put forward for all the versional evidence. Although most of this material springs from the thousand-year period between A.D. 500 and 1500, the earliest fragments come from the first half of the second century.

It is useful to observe that of all the works that have come down to us from the ancient world, the New Testament is the most amply attested in textual evidence. For example, for the first six books of the Annals, written by the famous Roman historian Tacitus, there is but a single manuscript, dating from the ninth century. The extant works of Euripides, the best-attested of the Greek tragedians, are preserved in 54 papyri and 276 parchment manuscripts, almost all of the latter deriving from the Byzantine period. The history of Rome by Velleius Paterculus came down to us in one incomplete manuscript, which was lost in the seventeenth century after a copy had been made. By comparison, the wealth and range of material supporting the Greek New Testament is staggering.

The printing press made the hand-copying of manuscripts forever obsolete. The first printed edition of the Greek New Testament appeared on 10 January 1514. It was volume 5 of a polyglot Bible commissioned by the cardinal primate of Spain, Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros (1437–1517). Printed in the town of Alcalá, called Complutum in Latin, the work came to be known as the Complutensian Polyglot Bible. Volume 5 also contained the first printed Greek glossary, the progenitor of countless lexicons that have been published since then.[4] But although the Complutensian Bible contained the first Greek New Testament ever printed, it was not the first one to be published (i.e., both printed and put on the market). That honor belongs to the edition prepared by Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536), a Dutch scholar from Rotterdam. Erasmus managed to complete the edition and have it out by 1516. The volume contains hundreds of typographical errors and was based primarily on two inferior twelfth-century manuscripts kept in a monastery in Basle.

Erasmus continued to prepare fresh editions that corrected many of the earlier typos, editions that were based on a few more Greek manuscripts. The best of these was a tenth-century miniscule. It was better than his other manuscripts, being a copy of an early uncial, but because it was rather different from the other manuscripts he had at hand, Erasmus did not rely on it very much. His definitive fourth edition (1527) was prepared after Erasmus had consulted the Complutensian. It boasts three columns: the Greek, the Vulgate, and Erasmus’s own Latin translation. His fifth edition (1535) abandoned the Vulgate, but so far as the Greek text is concerned, it was largely indistinguishable from his fourth edition.

All the early editions of the Greek New Testament were copies or adaptations of the work of Erasmus. Robert Estienne (whose last name often appears in the Latinized form, Stephanus) published four such editions of the Greek New Testament, three in Paris (1546, 1549, and 1550) and the last one in Geneva (1551), where as a Protestant he spent his last years. His first two editions were a mix of the Erasmian and Complutensian editions; his third (1550) was much more like the fourth and fifth editions of Erasmus and included, for the first time, a critical apparatus, variant readings, printed on inner margins, of the fourteen Greek manuscripts that were his base, plus readings from the Complutensian Polyglot.[5] This third edition was destined to exercise an astonishing influence. In 1553 it was reprinted by Jean Crispin in Geneva, who introduced only a halfdozen changes to the Greek text. Théodore de Bèze (Beza), successor to Calvin in Geneva, published nine editions of the Greek New Testament. These editions contain some new textual evidence collated by Beza himself, but they are very similar to the third and fourth editions of Stephanus. The King James translators (1611) depended heavily on Beza’s editions of 1588–89 and 1598.

Then, in 1624, the brothers Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevir published in Leiden a compact edition of the Greek New Testament largely taken from Beza’s 1565 edition. The Elzevir brothers’ second edition, dated 1633, boasts (in what would today be called an advertising blurb) that the reader now has “the text which is now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted”: the words we have italicized reflect the Latin textus receptus, referring to a commonly received text, and thus a standard text. This is the “received text” which, more or less, stands behind all English translations of the Bible until 1881. This textual tradition is grounded in what was at the time a mere handful of mostly late miniscule manuscripts.

The following centuries uncovered the vast amount of textual evidence already briefly summarized. The work of the textual critic is to sift this evidence and look for patterns in the attempt to uncover what reading is closest to the original, which of course we do not have.[6] Textual critics have organized this vast manuscript evidence into text types: patterns of readings thought to reflect the textual tradition of a particular locale. Inevitably, if a manuscript was transported to another locale and a further copy was made using both this transported manuscript and manuscripts from the local region, it was possible to generate a copy with “mixed types.” A small group of manuscripts with even stronger affinities, usually some evidence of direct borrowing, is sometimes called a family.

As a discipline, textual criticism begins with the work of Richard Simon, a French priest studying and writing at the end of the seventeenth century. Then, in 1707, John Mill, an Anglican theologian, produced, two weeks before his death, a beautiful edition of the Greek Testament, the product of decades of work (the latter part of which was enriched by the writing of Richard Simon). It reproduced the “received text” unaltered, but the apparatus, which took up more space on each page than the text itself, included not only parallel passages but the readings of all available manuscripts, versions, and printed editions. This edition also included succinct summaries of all the known data regarding the origin and textual descent of each book of the New Testament canon, plus descriptions of all New Testament manuscripts then known to be extant, plus comments on all translations.

In some ways, however, the crucial figure at the head of textual criticism is Johann Albrecht Bengel, a Swabian pietist. His edition of the Greek New Testament, published in 1734, offered not only a text that differs in countless passages from the “received text” (though most of the changes were unimportant), but also a substantial “critical apparatus.” Here Bengel presented the most important of the textual variants in five groups, depending on their importance (a practice not unlike that followed in some editions of the Greek Testament today). His evaluation of what was most likely original corresponds to a high degree with similar judgments made today. Bengel formulated rules or principles on which he based his decisions, and in large measure these have stood the test of time.

For example, Bengel recognized that the number of manuscripts with a particular reading was a matter of little importance. After all, the many manuscripts might be largely late, or belong exclusively to one textual tradition. It is important to weigh when manuscripts were written, and how many text types support a reading (usually representing textual traditions in different parts of the world). Bengel understood that the most important question a text-critic can ask is this: Which reading is most likely to have generated all the others? Moreover, because on the whole scribes tended to eliminate perceived difficulties, Bengel formulated the rule, “The more difficult reading is to be preferred over the easier” (Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua).

Of course, none of these rules is absolute. For a start, one must try to distinguish between unintentional errors that copyists made, and intentional changes. Intentional changes were often motivated by the desire to “improve” the text, under the assumption that some earlier scribe had made a mistake. Under such an assumption, Bengel’s rule works very well: the more difficult reading is likely to be more original. But where there is an unintentional error—for instance, where a scribe became sloppy and accidentally inserted three words from a previous line and then carried on—then clearly the same rule does not work. The “more difficult reading” is the one with the unaccountable insertion, but even though it is more difficult, it is certainly not more original. The complexity of the text-critical task can be met only by scholars who spend an extraordinary amount of time in the manuscripts themselves, becoming deeply familiar with the writing, scribal corrections, and tendencies of individual manuscripts. The discipline is never merely mechanical. It calls for both vast knowledge and sound judgment.[7]

Intrinsic to these arguments, and progressively worked out during the next century, are two pairs of distinctions. First, one must distinguish between external evidence (i.e., what readings are supported by what manuscripts) and internal evidence (i.e., what arguments from the text itself can be advanced in defense of this or that reading). Second, with respect to the internal evidence, textual critics came to distinguish between intrinsic probability (i.e., what the author is likely to have written, as judged by his observed proclivities) and transcriptional probability (i.e., what copyists were likely to have put down, whether in an intentional or an unintentional change).

This brief account of the rise of textual criticism does not begin to do justice to the countless scholars who toiled diligently on specific texts, still less to a handful of luminaries—for example, Brian Walton (1600–61), Richard Bentley (1662–1742), Johann Jakob Wettstein (1693–1754), Edward Harwood (1729–94), Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745–1812), Lobegott Friedrich Constantin von Tischendorf (1815–74), and the combined work of Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828–92). Today the most important center for textual criticism of the New Testament, both for the comprehensiveness of its holdings and for the astonishingly high percentage of texts now digitized, is the Institut für Textforschung in Münster.

The overwhelming majority of contemporary textual critics adopt a position labeled eclecticism. That simply means that they choose (the Greek for the verb “to choose” is eklegomai) the reading on the basis of what they perceive to be the best fit once all the evidence, internal and external, is carefully evaluated. But there are two minority groups. One continues to support the “received text,” if not in the form published by the Elzevir brothers, then at least the “majority text,” that is, readings that are supported by the greatest number of manuscripts.[8] The other minority group promotes thoroughgoing eclecticism. Its members discount the external evidence (i.e., they do not think that any consideration should be given to arguments regarding which manuscripts or groups of manuscripts support any reading); all of their focus is on the internal evidence.[9]

Whatever the ongoing scholarly disputes, serious Christian readers today are equipped with astonishingly accurate and detailed information in their printed Greek New Testaments. The overwhelming majority of the text of the Greek New Testament is firmly established. Where uncertainties remain, it is important to recognize that in no case is any doctrinal matter at issue. Of course, textual variants may raise the question as to whether a particular doctrinal stance or historical datum is or is not supported in this or that passage, but inevitably one can appeal to parallel passages where the text is secure to address the larger doctrinal or historical issues. In terms of the availability and range of textual evidence, owing to the large number of manuscript discoveries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we are incomparably better off than Christians have been for almost nineteen hundred years.[10] Perhaps too, it is worth speculating that, in God’s providence, we are better off without the originals, for we would almost certainly have treated them with idolatrous reverence focused more on the mere artifact than on what the manuscript actually said.

LONGSTANDING INTERPRETIVE TRADITIONS

A perennial danger among contemporary students of the New Testament is to overlook the two-thousand-year history of debate and interpretation generated by these twenty-seven books. The pressure to be up-to-date with the voluminous contemporary literature, combined with the penchant endemic to twenty-first-century Western culture to revere the innovative, even the faddish, and be suspicious of the traditional, conspires to blind us to our connections with twenty centuries of Christian readers. Moreover, both conservative and liberal scholars are inclined, for different reasons, to focus on the most recent centuries. On the conservative side, many (not least evangelicals) are sometimes tempted to think that serious theological reflection began with the Reformation and that, provided one does careful exegesis, there is not much to be learned from historical theology anyway. On the liberal side, many treat the period before the Enlightenment as a swamp of superstitious and unscientific interpretation now safely abandoned by our much greater learning.[11]

Obviously, one short introduction cannot pretend to do justice to this long tradition. What follows is not a comprehensive catalog of interpretive developments across a millennium and a half, but a highly selective summary of a handful of important people and movements that proved influential in the interpretation of the New Testament and some small indication of the impact of the New Testament documents in history.

1. One of the most important developments was the collection of the New Testament documents into groups (Did the Pauline writings, or some of them, ever circulate together? Cf. 2 Pet. 3:15–16) and into the canon of the New Testament itself. Debates during the first centuries of the church as to what should be included in the canon dealt with issues that are still addressed in any competent contemporary introduction to the New Testament. For instance, the church fathers refused to admit to the canon any book they judged pseudonymous (i.e., ostensibly written by someone such as Paul, when in fact it was not), and that refusal embroiled them in issues of authorship. In short, not only interpretive issues but also technical matters of “introduction” occupied the interest of the church from the beginning.

2. From its inception, Christianity inevitably defined itself, at least in part, against the background of the various forms of Judaism prevalent in the first century. Just as the worldwide movement we refer to today as “Christianity” has a wide diversity of forms and commitments, many of which would be considered only marginally Christian by some others in the movement, so also first-century Judaism was highly diverse, and some of its forms were zealously condemned by other branches as apostate. Full discussion of the relations between the early Christians and Judaism is therefore necessarily complex.

Most of the first Christians, of course, were themselves Jews. As rising numbers of Gentiles were added to the church, and as the earliest Christians reflected on what God had accomplished by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, various tensions inevitably developed among those who grappled with such issues (see Acts 15 and Gal. 2:11–14). The New Testament documents chronicle some of the early developments, as Christians came to recognize that if Jesus is the exclusively sufficient ground of salvation, then certain features intrinsic to Judaism, such as circumcision, or features widely observed in Judaism, such as kosher food restrictions, could not be mandated of all believers. Moreover, if Jesus’ sacrifice dealt with our sin, then the role of the temple sacrifices could not go unchallenged. Christians were thus driven to think through their own relationship with the Mosaic covenant. If the Lord Jesus had inaugurated a new covenant in his blood (Luke 22:20; 1 Cor. 11:25; cf. 2 Cor. 3:6; Jer. 31:31–34), then the Mosaic covenant must be thought of as the old covenant (cf. 2 Cor. 3:6; Heb. 8:13).

Such reflections as these, already glimpsed in the pages of the New Testament, bred ongoing discussions between Jews and Christians in the second century. The most eloquent of these discussions comes from the pen of Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) in the book Dialogue with Trypho. It tells of Justin’s conversation with a learned Jew, Trypho, and some of his friends. It not only shows Justin’s desire to win Jews as well as Gentiles to Christ but also how a second-century Christian apologist interpreted the Old Testament in the light of the New to construct a whole-Bible theology.[12]

3. At the same time, the first Christians were soon winning Gentiles to Christ. The book of Acts reports the expansion, identifying Antioch as the city with the first strong church of mixed race of which we know anything substantial (Acts 11:19–30; 13:1–3; 15:1–35). Paul understood his role to be apostle to the Gentiles (Gal. 2:7–10). He was capable of evangelizing Jews and others who attended local synagogues (see especially the report of his evangelism in the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, Acts 13:16–43), but he was called primarily to evangelize Gentile pagans, whether ordinary folk in small towns (Acts 14:8–18), sophisticated urbanites (Acts 19), or intellectuals (Acts 17:16–34). In such contexts he inevitably confronted various “philosophies”: the Epicureans and the Stoics are mentioned in Acts 17:18, but there were many others. At the time, the word philosophy did not call to mind an esoteric discipline in which students are taught substantial doses of skepticism and not much constructive content. In the ancient world, philosophy meant something like what we mean by “worldview.” Various teachers taught competing worldviews, and Christians earnestly sought to evangelize men and women who held these diverse pagan worldviews.

In one sense, the Roman world of the first three centuries of the Christian era was highly pluralistic. To keep the peace, the Romans made it a capital offense to desecrate a temple—any temple. But the plurality of religions and worldviews was monolithic in at least one regard: these diverse religions agreed that there was no one way to god. On this there was strong agreement, for it was “an axiom of Greek culture that the cosmos was total (including the gods), perfect and changeless. Its harmony was endlessly repeated. Human error could be corrected by education.”[13] In consequence, most Greeks thought that Christianity was notoriously bigoted and narrow. Thus, the pagan Celsus insisted on the equal validity of diverse ancient customs and beliefs, over against Origen’s insistence on the unique superiority of Christianity. Porphyry argued, “No teaching has yet been established which offers a universal way for the liberation of the soul.”[14] One scholar puts it this way:

All the ancient critics of Christianity were united in affirming that there is no one way to the divine…. It was not the kaleidoscope of religious practices and feelings that was the occasion for the discussion of religious pluralism in ancient Rome; it was the success of Christianity, as well as its assertions about Christ and about Israel…. By appealing to a particular history as the source of knowledge of God, Christian thinkers transgressed the conventions that governed civilized theological discourse in antiquity.[15]

Thus, from the beginning Christians worked out their theology and interpreted their most sacred and authoritative documents within the context of disagreement, mission, cross-cultural communication, and competing claims.

4. Moreover, even within the fledgling movement itself, various aberrant positions soon arose, forcing Christian leaders to decide which were minor variations and which had to be condemned as thoroughly outside the Christian camp, regardless of what their proponents claimed. Thus, in one of the earliest of the New Testament documents, Paul warns about “a different gospel” that is really no gospel at all and pronounces his “anathema” on all who teach it (Gal. 1:6–9); while in one of the latest of the New Testament documents, John can describe the departure of a certain group that had once belonged to the church but that had departed over certain doctrinal and ethical issues as proving, by their departure, that they had never really belonged to Christ’s people—for if they had, they would not have left (1 John 2:19). The early church was prepared to excommunicate not only those who refused to turn from gross moral turpitude (1 Cor. 5:1–13), but also those judged to be blasphemers (1 Tim. 1:20).

But although doctrinal and ethical disputes helped the church clarify its thinking from the beginning, it was soon beset by Gnosticism, a movement that was so large and so culturally supported that it proved to be a serious threat. Early voices of the movement (some scholars label them “proto-gnostic”) constitute part of the background to some of the later New Testament documents,[16]but the movement crested in the second and third centuries. The most substantial cache of gnostic documents conveniently available in English translation is from Nag Hammadi.[17] An hour or two of quiet reading of these works discloses a very different world from that of the New Testament. The gnostic documents display ideas about human origins far removed from those in the New Testament or in the entire Bible. Usually matter is seen to be intrinsically bad; salvation is secured, not by the substitutionary death of a sacrifice, but by knowledge of one’s true identity; and secret rites abound.

In all these domains, then, Christian apologists in the second and third centuries were called upon to understand their times and to use the Christian Scriptures to refute what were, from an orthodox perspective, insupportable and dangerous heresies. Perhaps the best known of the apologists is Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, who devoted five volumes to the detection and overthrow of various forms of gnosticism. Though he wrote toward the end of the second century, in his youth he had listened to Polycarp, who had in turn been a disciple of John.

But for our purposes, the importance of the subject is found not only in its intrinsic interest but in two related matters. The first is that, under the influence of Walter Bauer,[18] a substantial body of contemporary opinion argues that in the earliest church there was no real distinction between orthodoxy and heresy. Fledgling Christianity was sufficiently robust and inclusive to avoid such distinctions, which were later and rather nasty developments, owing more to the fact that “orthodoxy” gained the ear of the Emperor Constantine than to any intrinsic superiority in its arguments. This argument has been refuted many times. Bauer himself examined only the texts from the second century on. Not only was he mistaken with respect to the second century, but he displayed more than a little cheek by referring to the second century as earliest Christianity[19]— and the evidence already briefly scanned demonstrates that even in the earliest books of the New Testament, Christians were willing and able to distinguish between true and false teaching.

The second matter of some importance is the influence of The Jesus Seminar, whose work has been disseminated in the mass media. Most of the scholars connected with The Jesus Seminar not only accept the Bauer thesis but go farther and argue that the earliest strata of Christian teaching actually support gnosticism and often present Jesus as rather more akin to a traveling Cynic preacher than anything else. The historian Philip Jenkins has it right:

The problem with these reconstructions is the suggestion that both orthodoxy and Gnosticism are equally ancient and valid statements of the earliest Christianity, which they are not. What became the orthodox view has very clear roots in the first century, and indeed in the earliest discernible strands of the Jesus movement; in contrast, all the available sources for the Gnostic view are much later, and that movement emerges as a deliberate reaction to that orthodoxy.[20]

5. Sometimes contemporary scholars give the impression that genuinely “critical” thought on the New Testament is of relatively recent provenance. It would be truer to say that the framework out of which “critical” thought has been undertaken has shifted again and again during the last twenty centuries, largely depending on the epistemological and cultural givens of the time. Christians did not have to wait until the eighteenth century, for example, before pondering the relationships among the gospels. Already in the second century Tatian (c. 110–72) produced his Diatessaron, essentially a harmony of the four canonical gospels. His work was used in the Syrian church as a guide for its liturgy until the fifth century.

6. It would be tedious to chart the interpretation of the New Testament espoused by every important patristic theologian or movement. This is not, after all, a volume of church history. Nevertheless, it is important for today’s students of the New Testament to have some awareness of others who have studied the New Testament before them, to feel a part of an ongoing stream of New Testament interpretation and to know something of its continuities, its disputes, and its connections with certain events and interpretive approaches.

By the end of the third century, the two most influential approaches to the study of the Bible were centered on Alexandria and Antioch respectively. The Alexandrian schoolwarmly embraced philosophy as a weapon in the arsenal of Christian apologetics, especially philosophy descended from Plato. Often resorting to allegorical method in their exegesis, the Alexandrians sometimes flirted with a view of the Trinity that bordered on tri-theism (belief in three Gods). By contrast, the Antiochene school favored a more literal, rational, and historical exegesis. As a result, they insisted that some parts of Scripture have more doctrinal and spiritual value than others and felt no need to extract such value from the less fecund parts by resorting to allegory. In general, they approached the subject of Christology by beginning with Christ’s true humanity. The more radical fringe of the Antiochenes tended to see Christ, not as the God-man, but as a man indwelt by God.

The patristic period cast up more than its share of theologians and other Christian thinkers who took their primary cue from their reading of the Bible. Some of the contributions of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Jerome have already been mentioned. The most stalwart defender of orthodox Christology was Athanasius (c. 296–373), an Egyptian by birth but Greek by education. He produced both theological apologetics, not least in defense of the full deity of Christ, and many commentaries on biblical books. The Council of Nicea (325) gave us the Nicene Creed, which stood against the teaching of Arius to the effect that the Logos (“Word” in John 1:1) was “made,” insisting rather that Christ is of the same “being” as his Father. John Chrysostom (c. 344–407), bishop of Constantinople, was renowned for his expository preaching, which then multiplied his influence in published form—hundreds of his sermons have been preserved, along with practical and devotional writings and 236 letters. We are not so fortunate with the literary remains of Origen (c. 185–254), Alexandrian theologian extraordinaire. Most of his works have not come down to us, but we are aware of major commentaries from his pen, plus apologetic works, text-critical work (some have called him, not Bengel, the father of New Testament text criticism), and one of the first systematic theologies. Though elements of his theology were later condemned by some synods (e.g., the Synod of Constantinople of 543), and certainly his Alexandrian deployment of allegory seems forced by Antiochene standards (let alone by later standards), there is a fresh vitality in his writing that still bears pondering.[21] Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 265–339) has been called “The Father of Church History.” Owing to his extensive quotations of sources, sometimes the only access we have to important earlier documents is his Historia Ecclesiastica. In addition to his history, he wrote numerous apologetic books.

And what shall we make of Augustine of Hippo in North Africa (354–430), the single most influential figure of the first four centuries after the apostles? His expositions of the Psalms and of John’s Gospel can still be read with profit, and his Confessions—simultaneously a highly personal document and a mature theology—is still among the classic Christian works of all time. When the Roman Empire began to fall apart after the sack of Rome in A.D. 410, Augustine’s The City of God was simultaneously a refutation of the pagan accusations that Christians were ultimately responsible for the disaster and an interpretation of Roman and Christian history to show that there are two “cities,” an earthly, human city with all of its own loves and aims, and the city of God, which alone endures forever. This eschatological reading of both Testaments and of the contemporary history proved a hugely stabilizing factor for Christians as the foundations of order were progressively swept away.

The point of this summary is to drive home the fact that Christians were a profoundly textual people from the beginning: their access to the unique history and unique Person by whom they were saved was above all textual. The Old Testament pointed to Christ; the New Testament told of him. Christian teachers and pastors therefore gave themselves to the study of these documents, wrote commentaries on them, and sought to commend them and defend them. This does not always mean that these church fathers were in perfect agreement; still less does it mean that each one was always right. But this is the early part of the heritage that any student of the New Testament assumes when he or she begins the task of studying, interpreting, and teaching these twenty-seven documents.

7. One historical “hinge” that must be noted is the role played by Constantine, the first (nominally) Christian Roman emperor.

During its first three centuries, the church multiplied by the power of the Spirit, manifested in its preaching and in the quality of the life of its members. The church enjoyed no governmental advantages or support; frequently it suffered grievously under imperial persecution. For the Christians, this marked not defeat but victory, for they were the followers of One who died an ignominious death on a cross and yet was vindicated in the resurrection. Moreover, they remembered that he himself had taught, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (Mark 12:17; cf. Matt. 22:21; Luke 20:25). Before that time, the authority of religion and the authority of the state were more tightly linked, often identified. Ancient Israel was, at least in theory, a theocracy. But Jesus established a kingdom which, when fully consummated, would embrace everything in heaven and earth, but which, until then, would be contested. His people on earth would be called forth from every language and tribe and nation but would not constitute a nation with geographical borders here on earth. Christians would find themselves living as citizens of two kingdoms, and they would owe allegiance to both: to Caesar, they should give what is his due; and to God, what is his due. Of course, if Caesar overstepped the mark and claimed more allegiance than was his due, Christians would be called to obey God rather than any human being. Nevertheless, the principle was put in place by the Master himself: we are citizens of two realms, we live in two cities, and the tensions are to be borne, even unto death, until the kingdom of God is consummated.

But shortly after he emerged victorious by defeating Maxentius in 312 at the battle of Milvian Bridge north of Rome, Constantine decreed full legal toleration for Christians. The church began to enjoy imperial favor. Previously confiscated property was restored, there were various exemptions for the clergy, financial aid flowed to Christians, and some bishops began to enjoy civil jurisdiction. The bishop of Rome, already preeminent among the bishops, could only gain in authority by these arrangements.

The tension between the civil and the ecclesiastical authority never disappeared, of course, and it kept changing its shape for more than a millennium, as individual monarchs and popes proved peculiarly able or influential. Nevertheless, the fundamental tension between the claims of Caesar and the claims of God, developed by Paul to help Roman Christians see that the authority of the state is God-ordained (especially Rom. 13:1–7) and by John to help Christians see that the state can wrongly claim idolatrous allegiance (so Revelation), remained in place and led, in due course, to a variety of theories of the distinction between church and state.[22] These developments have materially shaped, in various ways, not only the religious but also the political heritage of many countries that have long enjoyed a substantial number of Christians. The political and religious realities in which we work out our discipleship can often be traced back, in convoluted ways, to distinctions made in the New Testament itself.

8. One of the crucial developments that took place during the first few centuries was the rise of “monarchical bishops.” Within the period when the New Testament documents were written, the labels “pastor” (which simply means “shepherd”), “elder,” and “bishop” (sometimes “overseer” in modern English versions) all referred to the same people, that is, those primarily responsible for the leadership of local congregations. As early as the beginning of the second century, however (and there are hints of this trend even earlier), some bishops or pastors came to have a measure of authority over other local congregations. Those who gained such oversight came to be called bishops, while those who did not retained the labels elder and pastor only. The reasons for the rise of monarchical bishops are doubtless complex, but some of them sprang from good motives, even if the result was rather more dubious. The number of Christians was growing so rapidly, and churches were being planted so frequently, that the level of training of many local Christian leaders was not very high. Partly to accommodate the need for teaching, a class of traveling Christian preachers arose who went from church to church.[23] But who was to authorize such travelers? Inevitably, some shysters arose, fluent in God-talk, who found this was an agreeable way to earn a living, even though they were woefully unqualified. Others were doubtless sincere and thought they were helping churches, but their vision of their own competence outstripped the reality. Some were frankly heretical. And worse, in many instances local church leaders were insufficiently knowledgeable and mature to distinguish those who could genuinely help from those who were incompetent or even dangerous. So it is not surprising that a second-century document gives instructions as to which traveling preachers or “prophets” were to be accepted as genuine and which were to be dismissed. The genuine ones did not stay too long, did not ask for money, and taught faithful Christian doctrine (cf. Didache xi).

Inevitably, under these circumstances some local pastors turned on occasion to the most knowledgeable bishop/elder/pastor in the vicinity, who then began to have a veto power over who was licensed to teach and preach in an entire area instead of in his congregation alone. Although they provided a valuable safeguard, eventually such bishops gained distinctive roles and authority unknown in the New Testament.

The reason why this is important for our purposes is that it is difficult to understand how the early church came in time to settle its disputes over what the apostles actually taught, without grasping the rising roles of bishops and occasionally of other noted teachers. The most serious disputes called together bishops from every region of the Empire in crucial “ecumenical councils” made up primarily of bishops from the whole (Roman) world, the oikoumenē. The seven councils that most Christians recognize to be truly “ecumenical,” with their dates and the subjects with which they primarily wrestled are: Nicea I (325), Arianism; Constantinople (381), Apollinarianism; Ephesus (431), Nestorianism; Chalcedon (451), Eutychianism; Constantinople II (553), Three Chapters Controversy; Constantinople III (680–81), Monothelitism; and Nicea II (787), Iconoclasm.[24]

9. These councils on doctrinal issues understood themselves to be deciding what the truth of some issue really was. When the Council of Nicea (325) decided on appropriate terms to talk about the deity of Christ, or the Council of Chalcedon (451) deployed certain terms that have become standard in discussion of the Trinity, the participants did not think of themselves as inventing new theology or even as discovering new truth in the Bible that no one had ever seen before. Rather, they were adjudicating conflicting interpretations of the Christian message and trying to formulate biblical truth in a way that made ambiguity or outright error in that domain much more difficult.

Similarly, when in the sixteenth century the Reformers worked hard to articulate a doctrine of justification that they felt was rigorously in line with Paul and with the rest of the Bible, it is not that no one had believed in justification before or had failed to see how important it was. The theme constantly recurs during the patristic period.[25] But it took the disputes at the time of the Reformation to call forth a lot of detailed work. The reasons that generate doctrinal controversy may be ugly and painful, but God not infrequently uses such controversies to bring renewed theological strength and clarity of vision and understanding to his people. Such controversies therefore become part of the web of the history of the interpretation of the New Testament, indeed, of the whole Bible.

10. After the Roman Empire fell, standards of literacy declined sharply in the West. Latin, long dominant, virtually snuffed out remaining vestiges of what was once a deep knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. As the Middle Ages progressed, many local clergy were abysmally trained; countless rulers, even powerful ones, were illiterate or semi-literate. Perhaps the greatest centers of learning were the monasteries, although the quality of the work done in them varied a great deal. Nevertheless, for hundreds of years these were the centers where manuscripts were copied (even when they were poorly understood), where hymns were created, where commentaries and theological treatises were written.[26]

Across the centuries, the church changed structurally and modified its teaching in many important ways, and inevitably these changes and modifications fed back into the way people handled the New Testament. Organizationally, the first really great schism was between the Western (or Latin) church, and the Eastern (or Orthodox) church. It is impossible to assign a beginning date to the division, but the date assigned to the final separation is usually 1054. Located primarily in the countries of Eastern Europe, the Orthodox church tends to organize itself nationally (hence the Greek Orthodox Church, the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, etc.) while recognizing the honorary primacy of the patriarch of Constantinople. Its distinctive doctrines and features need not be traced here.[27] In the West, primacy was gradually assigned to the bishop of Rome. What became the Roman Catholic Church soon embraced considerable diversity and faced the challenges of both failures and various renewal movements, the most powerful of which produced fresh schisms at the time of the Reformation.

Nevertheless, it is crucially important to understand that what became the Roman Catholic Church as we think of it today did not happen overnight. For instance, prayers for the dead began about 300. The title “Mother of God” was first applied to Mary by the Council of Ephesus (initially in order to defend the deity of Christ), but prayers directed to Mary, to dead saints, and to angels rose in popularity around 600, while the dogma of the assumption of Mary—that she ascended bodily into heaven—was not promulgated as a dogma (a teaching orthodox Catholics must believe) until 1950. The practice of sprinkling holy water with a pinch of salt in it and blessed by a priest, arose around 850. The College of Cardinals was established in 927. Canonization of dead saints was first undertaken in 995 by Pope John XV.[28] The doctrine of transubstantiation was proclaimed as dogma by Pope Innocent III in 1215 (though its roots stretch back much farther). The Bible was forbidden to laypeople and was actually placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Council of Valencia in 1229. Purgatory, which was taught by Gregory I in 593, was promulgated as dogma by the Council of Florence in 1439. The immaculate conception of Mary was proclaimed by Pope Pius IX in 1854, and the infallibility of the pope in his teaching office on matters of faith and morals at the first Vatican Council in 1870.[29]

Some of these items will strike many contemporary readers as far removed from the New Testament. But that is just the point. Once such items have become entrenched as established orthodoxy, such orthodoxy is likely to be the framework in which one reads the New Testament unless one rigorously attempts to distance oneself from one’s theological heritage, self-consciously attempting, so far as it is possible, to read oneself into the frames of reference of the biblical writers. That is one of the things that takes place during any reforming movement.

11. As a rubric, “the Middle Ages” covers countries and centuries so diverse and complex that generalizations regularly call forth a “Yes, but” from scholars familiar with the period. On the one hand, the Middle Ages gave us the Crusades and a broader conflict with Islam, some of the most immoral popes, the first rounds of the “Black Death” (bubonic plague), institutionalized illiteracy among the masses, and rising superstition of the most appalling sort (one thinks of the hungry search for magic-endowed Christian relics and the rising traffic in indulgences). On the other hand, the Middle Ages gave us some glorious hymns, some soaring conceptions of God (reflected not least in the design and construction of cathedrals), some theologians of immense gift and erudition, and, toward the end of the period, some reformers of perception and courage who urged a whole-hearted return to the Bible (e.g., Jan Hus [1373–1415] in Czechoslovakia, John Wycliffe [c. 1329–1384] in England), not a few of whom were martyred.

At the risk of generalization, the theological contribution of the Middle Ages was not so much in the domain of penetrating commentaries as in two other fields. First, this extended period produced a stream of mystics (e.g., Bernard of Clairvaux [1090–1153], Julian of Norwich [c. 1342 to after 1413]). Some of this mysticism succumbed to barely controlled subjectivism, but at its best it gave us a corpus of hymns still being sung, in translation, today. Bernard, for instance, wrote “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” “Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee,” and “Jesus, Thou Joy of Loving Hearts.”

Second, and still more important for our purposes, was the stream of theologians, including Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, William of Ockham, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus.[30] The most influential of these by far was Thomas Aquinas (1224–74), and the best known of his works is his Summa Theologiae, which is simultaneously a systematic compendium of the data of Christian revelation as he understood them, a revision of Augustinian epistemology along Aristotelian lines, and an evangelistic work aimed at Muslims. Despite the enormous influence his work has wielded, especially but by no means exclusively within Catholicism, his categories belong rather more to the domains of philosophy and systematics than to rigorous exegesis. To take one small example: Although earlier Christian theologians, stretching back to the patristic period, had sometimes distinguished moral, civil, and ceremonial law, it was Aquinas who developed this tripartite division of Old Testament law to establish the patterns of continuity and discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments. This tripartite division, which was subsequently picked up and developed by John Calvin and others, offers many helpful insights, but it is not demonstrably the set of categories with which the New Testament writers themselves are operating when they work out the patterns of continuity and discontinuity between the old covenant and the new. Questions about how to conceive the relationships between the two Testaments are of course perennial, and the influence of Aquinas in this area as in numerous others is with us still as we read our New Testaments.

We have already mentioned that during the first few centuries of the church a remarkable debate arose between the Alexandrian and the Antiochene schools of interpretation—the former a champion of allegory in exegesis (though what was meant by “allegory” in those days was more flexible and less defined than in many contemporary treatments), and the latter insisting on a more direct or literal exegesis. During the Middle Ages a more systematic classification of different methods of biblical interpretation was codified. One must distinguish four levels of biblical interpretation (and different authors put them in different order): the literal sense, which teaches us what happened; the allegorical (sometimes called the tropological) sense, which teaches us what to believe; the moral sense, which tells us what to do; and the analogical (occasionally called the eschatological) sense, which tells us where we are going. Not infrequently such distinctions were tied to a mystical spirituality.[31] Inevitably they also had the effect of making the Bible a closed book, reserved for experts, rightly interpreted only by the authorities of the church, and closed to most laypeople (after all, the printing press had not yet been invented).

12. The Renaissance, a period of European history that historians customarily attach to the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, witnessed a “rebirth” (which is what renaissance means) of classical culture. The printing press was invented, the influence of which cannot easily be overstated. Constantinople fell to the Muslim Turks in 1453, which sent not a few scholars scurrying to the West, bringing their Greek manuscripts with them. The rise of learning and the founding of several European universities trumpeted the call, Ad fontes—“to the sources.” The study of Greek and Hebrew became commonplace; the authority of Latin was increasingly displaced. The renewal of interest in both Christian and pagan foundational documents produced a growing number of informed and highly literate “humanists” who were more than willing to criticize the clerical abuse then rampant at almost every level of the Catholic Church. By and large, the humanists in northern Europe became more interested in the classical Christian texts (the New Testament and the patristics) than in the classical pagan texts, and they have thus sometimes been labeled “Christian humanists.” The most influential of these was Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom we have already met.

Those influenced by the Renaissance also became increasingly suspicious of the four interpretive levels that had been justified by the theologians of the Middle Ages. They wanted to read the primary sources for themselves, and they tried to read them more “literally” or more “naturally.”[32]

13. Scholars still dispute the nature of the relationships between the Renaissance and the Reformation (sixteenth century). Certainly the demand for reform increasingly voiced by Christian humanists contributed to the growing unrest in Western Christendom. That fact generated the old saw that “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.” Moreover, many younger humanists converted to Protestantism, including such leaders as Ulrich Zwingli (d. 1531), Philipp Melanchthon (d. 1560), John Calvin (d. 1564), and Theodore Beza (d. 1605).

The Reformation emphasis on sola scriptura (“Scripture alone”) embraced in practice several emphases. Over against the Catholic view that revelation is a deposit entrusted to the church, a deposit of which Scripture is only a part, the Reformers insisted that while there is much to learn from Christian tradition, much indeed that holds us to account, only the Bible has final authority. The Bible must not be domesticated by the tradition. This emphasis had two complementary effects: (1) Ideally, the Scriptures should be studied in the languages in which they were written; and (2) the Scriptures should be disseminated as widely as possible, which meant that vernacular translations should be prepared. The aim of the Bible translator William Tyndale (strangled and burned in 1536) was to make the ploughboy as knowledgeable in the Bible as the high prelates of the church. Moreover, insistence on “Scripture alone” prompted the Reformers to study once again what constitutes Scripture, and this led to the rejection of the Apocrypha as part of the canon. The fact that the Catholic Church adjudged these books (the exact number of them is somewhat disputed) to be canonical or “deuterocanonical”—that is, canonical in a secondary sense—was not a sufficient reason for hanging onto them. Indeed, at one stage in his life Martin Luther questioned the authority of the canonical James (“a right strawy epistle,” in his famous phrase).[33]

Partly under the influence of Renaissance learning, the Reformers learned to be suspicious of the fourfold hermeneutic they had inherited. This does not mean they became crass literalists. They could recognize (as all good readers can) metaphors and other figures of speech. They wrestled with what would today be called typology. The fact that the Bible is often talking of eternal things in the categories of everyday temporal things prompted Luther to think of Scripture as a litera spiritualis. One may doubt that this is the most helpful analysis, yet it is vital to recognize that although the Reformers dismissed as artificial the fourfold interpretive approach defended in the Middle Ages, they were not unaware that the “natural” reading was not always straightforward. Moreover, the efforts of both Luther and Calvin (to go no farther) to write both commentaries on books of the Bible and expositions of Christian doctrine had the effect of tying doctrine to the Bible itself. Indeed, Calvin’s enormously influential Institutes of the Christian Religion was meant to be a kind of accurate introduction to what the Bible teaches. This work wrestles endlessly with Scripture yet works out its doctrinal formulations in interaction not only with issues of importance when Calvin was writing but also in interaction with eminent Christian thinkers throughout history. In conjunction with Calvin’s commentaries, the Institutes taught many generations of believers what to believe and how to think. Inevitably, works such as these constituted models for the interpretation and the teaching of Scripture. It became impossible to try to understand the New Testament, let alone the entire Bible, without reflecting on such work.[34]

THE RISE OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY[35]

The changing shape of biblical study, and New Testament study in particular, during the last four centuries is a story far too complex to be compressed into a few pages. So in this section and the next we will attempt brief probes into two areas that we hope will serve as useful test cases of the broader developments.

If theology is disciplined discourse about God, one might think that biblical theology is disciplined discourse about God that is based on the Bible. In that sense, of course, there has been biblical theology as long as there has been a Bible or any part of it. But the actual expression “biblical theology” was first coined, so far as we know, in a book by W. J. Christmann published in 1607 and no longer extant. The title was Teutsche biblische Theologie (“German Biblical Theology”). Apparently, it was a rather brief volume of proof-texts drawn from the Bible to support Protestant systematic theology. This use of “biblical theology” continued in some circles for another century and a half.

It was not long before other uses appeared. In his Pia Desideria (1675), P. J. Spener, and later the Pietists he influenced, distinguished theologia biblica (his own theology) from theologia scholastica, the prevailing Protestant (Lutheran) orthodoxy that had returned to the Aristotelianism Luther had rejected. Thus, “biblical theology” took on an overtone of protest, of being “more biblical” than the prevailing dogmatics. In the second half of the eighteenth century, under the influence of English Deism and the German Aufklärung (Enlightenment), a handful of theologians once again protested against the prevailing dogmatics—now, however, not in favor of Pietism but in favor of rationalism. Several of these works aimed to extract from the Bible timeless truths in accord with reason, while framing them in a way that was still largely, if sometimes uneasily, acceptable to the ecclesiastical establishment. By far the most influential of these theologians was Johann P. Gabler, whose inaugural lecture at the University of Altdorf, An Oration on the Proper Distinction Between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology and the Specific Objectives of Each (1787), captured the rising mood and precipitated the next step. Gabler charged that dogmatic theology, constantly changing and perpetually disputed, is too far removed from Scripture. The biblical theology that he himself was recommending would be a largely inductive study of the biblical text. Such study, he contended, would be much more likely to gain widespread assent among learned and godly scholars, and it could in turn become the foundation on which fresh systematic theology would be constructed. Thus, Gabler’s primary appeal was not that the Bible must first be read historically or that the documents must be set out in historical sequence (though a little of this is implicit in what he said) but that biblical theologians may properly go about their task without being directly bound by doctrinal considerations[36]—an epoch-making suggestion at the time and one that has earned him the sobriquet “father of biblical theology.”

The first part of Gabler’s proposal, the invitation to inductive study of the biblical documents in a manner removed from dogmatic control, was rapidly taken up in many European universities; the second part, that fresh dogmatics be built on this new foundation, was largely ignored. Indeed, the more that scholars worked at a merely descriptive level without reflection on the importance of the analogia fidei (the “analogy of the faith”)—the longstanding commitment to read the Bible within the framework of historic confessionalism—the more the diversities within the Bible achieved prominence. The differences between the two Testaments, for example, became so obvious under such a régime that in 1796 G. L. Bauer produced, not a biblical theology, but an Old Testament theology, followed in 1800–1802 by a two-volume New Testament theology. Although biblical theologies (i.e., whole-Bible biblical theologies) continued to be written for another half-century and even into the twentieth century, the move was away from them.

The tendency toward atomism in biblical theology has continued in certain strands of the discipline to the present day. Thus, by “New Testament theology” many writers mean the distinctive theologies found in the various New Testament writings: the theology of Paul, the theology of Matthew, the theology of Luke-Acts, and so forth. The atomism becomes yet more pronounced when three further tendencies are taken into account. (1) Many scholars who defend the atomism are persuaded that some of the New Testament documents are pseudonymous. The result is that “the theology of Paul,” for instance, is based on an ostensibly authentic four or seven of the thirteen letters in the New Testament that bear Paul’s name, while there are distinguishable theologies of, say, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, and the Pastoral Epistles, all judged to be pseudonymous. (2) Many scholars are convinced that they can isolate a source used by both Matthew and Luke, often designated “Q.” This in turn leads to attempts to write a theology of Q. (3) A variation of the second tendency occurs where scholars are convinced that some part of a New Testament document reflects an unassimilated or even contradictory source or editorial accretion. Similar source criticism is applied to other New Testament documents. Atomism triumphs, and it becomes harder to see the big picture and how the various New Testament (not to say biblical) documents might relate to one another.

Inevitably, then, biblical theology felt the impact of historical criticism. We shall reflect a little more on the nature of historical criticism in the next section. In some ways, however, we have already stumbled into the subject, and some of its further effects on biblical theology may be usefully probed here. Perhaps the most important intersection took place around the middle of the nineteenth century. In Tübingen, the great German scholar F. C. Baur undertook a fresh examination of how the Pauline Epistles, Acts, and the Gospels came to be written. To this task he brought more than a little philosophical naturalism (i.e., he was averse to admitting any appeal to the supernatural in any historical questions), and he advanced reasons for dating the various New Testament books on the assumption that his re-creation of early church history was correct. This early history, he claimed, saw the church emerge as a minor Jewish sect, then a major Jewish sect, then a peculiar Jewish sect in that it was admitting Gentiles under a variety of conditions; eventually it broke from Judaism to take on a life of its own. The New Testament documents, he argued, fit somewhere along the axis of this trajectory. The debates between the church and Judaism gradually rose in intensity and were soon hot and furious, but once the division took place, the debate died down until eventually it is attested only in barely remembered historical strands. On this basis, for instance, Baur dated Acts well into the second century (by which time the fight was over, so the tone is very different from, say, Galatians). The bearing of all this work on biblical theology was most clearly seen in 1864, when Baur’s own New Testament theology was published posthumously. The combination of a rigidly developmental reconstruction of early church history and a fairly radical naturalism meant that the New Testament documents could not be thought of as revelatory in any proper sense. They could not be judged to reflect a coherent theological system; rather, they give evidence not only of historical and theological development but of something more: the various layers prove historically interesting but in some ways mutually incompatible. For the same reason, they could not be viewed as theologically binding.[37]

This historicist impulse came to a head in what came to be called “the history-of-religions school” (die religionsgeschichtliche Schule). Here valiant efforts were made to show that all religious movements and the documents they generate are themselves shaped by other religious movements and documents, whether the new ones merely take over antecedent material, or modify it, or react against it. All of this was judged to be responsible historical criticism, that is, a deployment of critical reason that refuses to appeal to supernatural causes to account for the documents that make up the Christian Bible. We may study what first-century people thought were supernatural events and revelations, but critical study will show these first-century judgments to be primitive and naive. The bearing of these developments on New Testament theology came to a head, perhaps, in the blistering and influential little book of W. Wrede, Über Aufgabe und Methode der sogenannten neutestamentliche Theologie (“Concerning the Task and Method of So-Called New Testament Theology”).[38] Wrede argued that to treat each book of the New Testament separately was absurd, because each book provides too little information to enable an interpreter to reconstruct the entire “theology” of its author. The only responsible way forward is to construct, as best we can, the history of early Christian religion and theology. Any unified New Testament theology, let alone biblical theology, is a chimera.

One must not think that these voices at the leading edge of the most skeptical criticism (not to say of dogmatic unbelief) were the only voices. In the nineteenth century, the most penetrating attempt at New Testament theology that sought to build on the Old Testament was probably that of J. C. K. von Hofmann.[39] In the first decades of the twentieth century, the most influential figure in the same heritage was doubtless Adolf Schlatter.[40] No less than their more skeptical opponents, these scholars recognized the historical nature of the New Testament documents, but they insisted that Godhad acted in history and therefore that a commitment to philosophical naturalism could not deal fairly with the evidence. They judged their works to be “critical” in that their conclusions were not naive leaps but extensively justified positions authorized by the texts.

Other voices soon assumed greater prominence. First, Karl Barth found the works traceable to the historical and naturalist impulse utterly arid and pastorally useless. He diminished the importance of historical research for the understanding of the Bible and focused on theological interpretation, remaining more interested in systematic theology than in biblical theology.

Second, Rudolf Bultmann tried another path to bridge the gap between historical understanding and theological usefulness. He adopted the naturalism and historicist approach of Wrede, but instead of concluding, with Wrede, that theological synthesis was thereby ruled out of court, he “demythologized” the texts of everything he judged that “modern man” could no longer believe (essentially everything supernatural) in order to uncover what he held to be the real and essential kernel of the New Testament—a certain form of existentialism. The result is that God, faith, revelation, and much else besides become redefined. The language is the language of orthodoxy, but the substance is the substance of Heidegger. Astonishingly influential in the middle of the twentieth century,[41] Bultmann’s work is now largely read out of historical interest, not because he is widely followed.

The third development was the rise of the “biblical theology movement.” Eager to be theologically relevant, influenced in part by Barth and in part by von Hofmann, shattered by World War I and by the Great Depression and eventually by World War II, the exponents of the movement exerted increasing influence from the 1930s to the 1950s. Perhaps the most influential of these scholars was Oscar Cullmann, whose insistence on “salvation history” (Heilsgeschichte) attempted to bring together two components, salvation and history, that had been flying apart. Writing in a style calculated to be edifying, his delineation of development across time allowed for a historical reading of the canon while still preserving central canonical unity and therefore authority.[42] But the biblical theology movement was remarkably diverse. It included those who held that revelation was borne along on the great events of redemptive history to which Scripture bears witness,[43] and those who produced the magisterial Theological Dictionary of the New Testament with its peculiar theologically loaded word studies.[44] Nevertheless, by the 1960s the movement was largely dead, cut down by critics who dismissed the linguistic naiveté of many of its exponents or who argued that the unity they found in the canon was not really there.[45]

The last fifty years or so have been characterized by astonishing diversity. On the confessional flank, the biblical theology of Geerhardus Vos,[46] though it focused more on the Old Testament than the New, taught many Christians how to read the Bible as a single book. The contribution of George Eldon Ladd,[47]seminal at the time, in some ways adopted a more conservative line in a common form: a New Testament theology that devoted separate chapters to the theology of the Synoptic Gospels, the theology of Paul, the theology of Hebrews, and so forth, with little attempt at integration. Still in the confessional heritage, Donald Guthrie attempted to address the problem of integration by writing a New Testament theology that traced scores of themes (e.g., “Son of Man,” “God,” “the Cross”) through the different New Testament corpora.[48] What was lost, of course, was the feel for how these and other themes hung together within any one particular corpus and then how the corpora related to one another.

Space does not permit discussion of the many works that marked out positions across the theological spectrum—from the centrist New Testament theologies of Werner Kümmel,[49] Joachim Jeremias,[50] Joachim Gnilka,[51] and Georg Strecker,[52] who all follow the more-or-less-standard critical orthodoxies, to the contribution of Hans Conzelmann, who does not think it necessary or helpful to include the historical Jesus as a presupposition to his work,[53] to the canonical theology of Brevard Childs,[54] to the imaginative work of George B. Caird, who mentally sits the authors of the New Testament around a table and gets them to “discuss” their respective contributions,[55] and to the large, provocative work of Klaus Berger, who, under the image of a tree with many branches, develops fairly speculative theologies of the many branches according to his radical and detailed reconstruction of how the church developed into mutually exclusive theological communities within the first century.[56]

As a label, then, “biblical theology” refers to several different things, interacting with one another in different ways in the hands of various scholars. It may refer to the theology of groups behind the biblical texts, as attested by the biblical texts themselves, insofar as we can reconstruct those groups using a variety of historical-critical and literary-critical tools. Or it may refer to the theology of the biblical texts or corpora themselves and perhaps also to how those theologies fit together (if the biblical theologian thinks they can be fit together!) along a temporal trajectory. Moreover, this study of the biblical documents may be primarily a self-distanced description of what the texts meant (an attempt at historical description) or a self-conscious wrestling with what the texts mean (a more hermeneutically reflective endeavor). This and similar analyses are common in contemporary discussion of what biblical theology and, in particular, New Testament theology, truly is.[57]

The last fifty years have also seen works devoted to the theology of Paul, the theology of John, and so forth, and an even longer list of monographs and articles that purport to work out the shape of some individual theological theme within an individual corpus.[58] During the last three decades, a renewed interest in how the New Testament writers use the Old Testament has generated a raft of monographs which are in some respects the building blocks of future works on New Testament and biblical theology. Add to these the many scores of commentaries on New Testament books published each year[59] and the countless specialist articles, and one begins to glimpse the spread of New Testament scholarship.

The purpose of this admittedly sketchy survey is to stake out the terrain in which contemporary students of the New Testament necessarily work. Perhaps it will be helpful to include one final survey of a slightly different kind.

HISTORICAL CRITICISM, LITERARY TOOLS, AND THE IMPACT OF POSTMODERNISM

We have already seen how, under the impact of certain kinds of historical criticism, biblical theology as a discipline has divided, during the last 150 years, into several mutually polarized camps. The same could be said for debates over one’s entire approach to the New Testament—whether over technical matters of “introduction” (such as date, authorship, historical setting, sources, authenticity), or over the relationship between history and revelation, or developments in literary theory or epistemology, or the impact of world Christianity on the study of Scripture. In these and other domains, those who devote their lives to the study of the New Testament occupy an ever-expanding circle of positions and options. These can be charted in the treatment of an individual book or corpus of the New Testament;[60] however, when it comes to the entire New Testament, the diversity and complexity of the stances adopted can be bewildering to the student beginning to plunge into the literature. What follows, therefore, is a sketchy outline of the literary tools, approaches, and stances that have shaped New Testament study, for better and for worse, during the last century or so.[61]

Historical Criticism

The historical reconstruction deployed by F. C. Baur to realign the dating of the New Testament documents discussed above led to the historicist reductionism of Wrede. Part of this movement coagulated around the development of various critical “tools.” We briefly noted the source criticism of Rudolf Bultmann. Source criticism itself, of course, should never be demonized. After all, some reflection on source criticism is transparently called up by the nature of some of the New Testament documents themselves. On almost any accounting, either 2 Peter made use of Jude, or Jude made use of 2 Peter; on almost any accounting, some kind of borrowing, of literary dependence, and thus of the use of sources, lies behind the Synoptic Gospels: they are sufficiently close that complete independence is almost impossible to maintain, yet sufficiently independent that the precise nature of the relationship among them is hotly disputed. Luke clearly had access to written sources before he put quill to papyrus (Luke 1:1–4). But Bultmann’s immensely detailed source criticism of the Synoptic Gospels, frequently extending down to assigning half-verses and even individual words to a particular source or layer,[62] turns out, on close inspection, to be frankly unbelievable, in part because of its detail; it is almost impossible to imagine how anyone could have put together any book the way his source theories demand that the gospels were composed. More importantly, such source criticism was little interested in the ostensible sources as atemporal documents that were somehow brought together. Rather, each source, real or imagined, was thought to reflect the theology and outlook of different communities, or different writers, or of the same community at a different time. Doubtless his most creative resort to source criticism lay in Bultmann’s handling, not of the Synoptics, but of the Gospel of John.[63]

Of course, his was not the only complex source theory, whether of the Synoptics or of the fourth gospel. Whatever the ownership or popularity of a particular theory, however, because the sources were thought to reflect various layers of tradition, these could be laid out in trajectories that would explain the development of doctrine. Hence, “source criticism” gave rise to “form criticism” and to “tradition criticism.” Form criticism focused on the formal shape or characteristics of various gospel units—miracle stories, for instance, or certain kinds of parables—in order to infer the characteristics and even the history of the Christian communities that either shaped such material or even called it into being.[64] Tradition criticism sought to construct trajectories that were judged to unpack the development of the tradition. This in turn led to charges that such theories reduced the final authors of our gospels to mere “scissors and paste” people who cut snippets out of other documents and pasted them into the pastiche that constitutes our canonical Gospels. Partly as a reaction against this objection, “redaction criticism” came into its own. It was argued that, whatever sources the evangelists had, they did not simply cut and paste, but “edited” or “redacted” them (hence “redaction criticism”) to produce gospels that would have the distinctive voice and emphases of each evangelist. Thus, the evangelists were real theologians in their own right. These and other assorted historical-critical “tools” were, on the whole, more interested, at least initially, in drawing inferences about the Christian communities that called such material into being than in the historical Jesus such materials were ostensibly describing. As a result, these tools constitute a large part of the methodological heart of the three principal “quests for the historical Jesus”. Somewhat different but not unrelated source-and form-critical work was also carried out on the rest of the New Testament.[65]

There are still a few voices as radical as that of Bultmann, but not many,[66]and some of them have become politically polarized.[67] At the same time, even mainstream historical-critical reconstruction of the historical Jesus is remarkably minimalistic in its conclusions.[68] Inevitably, other voices, less skeptical, usefully challenge the prevailing criteria of authenticity,[69] or point out the importance of well-preserved oral instruction amongst Jesus’ followers[70] or the role of eyewitnesses in the formation of the gospel tradition.[71] Another small but articulate group of scholars have accumulated much useful evidence that the canonical gospels were never designed for individual communities (a Matthean community, a Markan community, and so on) but were designed from the beginning to be read by all Christians,[72] which of course calls into question the common practice of identifying a particular source or stratum or form or even a gospel with a well-defined “layer” of tradition that can be tied to an equally well-defined community.

All of this work has produced a few gains. For instance, we are far more aware of the complexities of synoptic relationships than we were in the past. For the most part, we are more sensitive to the individual emphases and nuances of each canonical gospel, refusing to read them and preach them as if they came to us in a tight “Harmony of the Gospels” instead of what they are: individual books, each with distinctive accents.[73] But what strikes the contemporary reader most powerfully, as he or she first breaks into all this discussion, is its immense disarray, the extraordinary smallness of the common ground shared by today’s scholars.

Literary Criticism

One of the perennial dangers of much of the historical-critical work is its atomism: it keeps focusing on tinier and tinier details in the text, and reconstructing with great erudition what some scholar thinks lies behind the text, but it does not devote much attention to the actual reading of the text as text.

Interest in literary devices is scarcely new. Under categories such as “metaphor” and “type,” Christians have dealt with literary aspects of the text for centuries. The last few decades have produced a stream of essays and monographs on such things as irony in the fourth gospel. But perhaps more important are the works that deal with larger units of text. They ask what a “gospel” is, and how it is to be related to other forms of biography in the first century. They examine the narrative structure of this or that account, working through such matters as the development of the plot, what characters are being “foregrounded” and “backgrounded,” where the climax of the story is, who the implied readers are. A veritable industry has arisen around the different kinds of letters that were written around the time of Paul, and the extent to which his letters fit into recognizable patterns. A book like Revelation is carefully compared with Jewish apocalyptic works written during the previous two or three centuries. The shape of one of Paul’s sustained arguments is compared with the rhetoric that was taught in Greek circles from at least the time of Aristotle on.

For example, in 1983 R. Alan Culpepper published a book that proved to be a seminal treatment of the Gospel of John. Its title, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design,[74] nicely captures the kind of literary approach being discussed here. Culpepper was not interested in source-critical or historical questions. He acknowledged that such questions have their place, but he insisted that his focus was on the literary design of the final product. Most remarkable was his choice of literary model, the nineteenth-century English novel. His book was replete with suggestive insights, but the thoughtful reader cannot help but reflect on three things: (1) The choice of controlling model is remarkably anachronistic, not least when applied to a document like the fourth gospel, which purports to bear witness to events that happened in history. (2) The entire effort, stimulating as it is, studiously avoids asking any historical questions or drawing any historical conclusions. The text is being studied as a text in the narrowest sense, without raising questions of extratextual referentiality, that is, of things or events or people outside the text to which the text may be claiming to refer. (3) At least some of the textual features that Culpepper integrates into one literary whole were being used by the source critics and historical-critical scholars to justify the existence of “seams” that suggest an awkward melding of sources. But if certain literary features are suitably explained by the way they fit into a literary narrative, how can they also serve as evidence of sources deriving from distinguishable theological communities? Or, conversely, if certain literary features in the text justify the conclusion that the fourth gospel is made of disparate sources somewhat awkwardly joined together and reflecting rather disparate theologies, how can the same evidence be read as belonging to a seamless and ahistorical narrative? In other words, although it is rarely acknowledged, some approaches to historical criticism and some approaches to literary criticism use the textual evidence in contradictory ways.

Or consider the voluminous treatments of rhetoric, especially (but certainly not exclusively) with application to the writings of Paul. In addition to numerous surveys and several magisterial volumes, hundreds of essays have been written during the past decade on the rhetoric of this or that passage. Most of them presuppose at least a nodding acquaintance with the categories of Aristotle, modified and developed by educators and orators such as Quintilian and Cicero.[75] More recently, however, it has been pointed out rather strongly that the ancient handbooks on rhetoric were designed to help orators, those whose material was prepared for oral delivery, not for letter writers.[76] The ancient sources do not apply the categories of rhetoric to letter writing, which is what Paul was doing. In reply, those who defend the rigorous use of the categories of rhetoric point out that ancient tractate letters were meant to be read in public, and therefore the principles of orality are sustained. The debate continues, exacerbated by the fact that although Paul was recognized as a speaker (Acts 14:11–12), he himself was suspicious of rhetoric when it became manipulative or was in danger of masking the substance of the gospel, “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:1–5).

Both of these literary approaches to the text of the New Testament can yield suggestive insights into its meaning, the shape of its arguments, its literary coherence, and the like. On the other hand, abstracted from questions of history and truth, such approaches sometimes project a remarkable feeling of unreality. Scholars from across the widest theological spectrum deploy these approaches in various ways or qualify their deployment in various ways; these literary approaches are not independent and neutral tools but part of the interpretive matrix in which contemporary interpreters do their work.

The New Literary Criticism and the Turn to Postmodern Readings

In some ways it is difficult to draw a hard line between “literary criticism” and the “new literary criticism.” Inevitably, there are points of overlap and various confusions of labeling. Yet in the main, the distinction is clear enough.

It may be useful to begin with an influential book by Hans W. Frei.[77] Frei argues that as liberal historical criticism grew stronger in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars became less interested in what the Bible actually says and more interested in that which (they argued) lay behind the text—that is, what really happened. Conservative rebuttals fell into the same trap: everyone was arguing about the alleged history (real or imagined) behind the text and were no longer thinking in the categories of the text itself. Without wanting to deny that such historical questions are important, Frei argues that what the church must do is immerse itself in the text. After all, Christians before the rise of historical criticism believed that God himself was encountering them in the text. Similarly, today’s Christians will find their imagination and understanding illumined by the text; they will worry less about historical re-creations, will encounter God, and will link themselves with believers before the eighteenth century.

Clearly Frei’s approach is strongly text-centered. But what he fails to mention is that Christians before the rise of the more skeptical forms of historical criticism not only immersed themselves in the text (in this sense he is right: they were text-centered, believing that God was encountered there), but they also believed that the text told them the truth. Thus, the charge that conservatives and liberals alike at the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century focused too much attention on arguments over the ostensible reality behind the text and not on the text itself is slightly manipulative. At their best, the conservatives were not so much trying to draw attention away from the text to what lay behind it, as they were attempting to justify the view that the text was telling the truth about extratextual reality. However weighty this criticism, it has been largely ignored. As a result, this particular brand of text-centered reading, sometimes identified as “the Yale School,” finds many able exponents, the most influential of whom is George Lindbeck.[78]

This is not the only kind of text-centered study that rightly belongs to the “new” literary criticism. One kind, popular three or four decades ago but now largely in eclipse, is structuralism, which “is distinguished by its rejection of those traditional notions according to which literature ‘expresses’ an author’s meaning or ‘reflects’ reality. Instead, the ‘text’ is seen as an objective structure activating various codes and conventions which are independent of author, reader, and external reality.” Indeed, structural criticism “is less interested in interpreting what literary works mean than in explaining how they can mean what they mean; that is, in showing what implicit rules and conventions are operating in a given work.”[79]

This movement led in turn to deconstruction. Deconstructionists are no less text-centered, but they add to the brew a radical skepticism. Convinced that no text is stable or coherent, deconstructionists argue that all texts are indeterminate in meaning and inevitably contain inherent contradictions. That leaves the thoughtful reader with only two alternatives: abandon any search for meaning in texts, which is tantamount to abandoning reading itself, or find meaning in the interplay between the reader and contradictory (though frequently evocative) ideas sparked by a text. Small wonder that Vanhoozer writes, “Deconstruction is not a method of interpretation but a method for undoing interpretations, for exposing readings as functions of various ideological forces.”[80] In practice, this means that many readings of texts undertaken by deconstructionists have served the interests of overthrowing perceived injustices and inequities, based as they are on particular ideologies that must themselves be overthrown. But strictly speaking, this end is not achieved by finding such reforming pressures taught by the texts, but by finding them generated by the firm resolve to expose the alleged inconsistencies in the text, and in the interplay between such textual phenomena and the deconstructionist interpreters. In France, where it was born, deconstruction has now largely been eclipsed, but it still commands widespread allegiance in certain circles in North America. In any case, deconstruction locates more and more of the “meaning,” not in the text itself, but in the readers, or in the readers’ interaction with the text, and thus in some gray space between text and reader. If historical criticism tried to get at the historical reality behind the text, and various literary criticisms tried so to focus on the text that increasingly the text was cut off from all history, the end result of deconstruction is to locate shifting meanings in front of the text, in the direction of the readers themselves.

Thus, deconstruction has been one of the inspirations behind reader-response theory. This approach is neither author-centered (like most classical literary and historical criticism) nor text-centered, but reader-centered. In fact, there are several competing reader-response theories. One theory locates virtually all the meaning in the individual interpreter; the text is no more than some kind of stimulus. Another theory demands that more attention be paid to the social context of readers: readers interpret things out of the shared literary and cultural traditions of a particular social group, a group whose shared outlook generates a socially constructed competence. Thus, texts come to have shared meanings for people in a specified social group, but no other independent claim. Another sort of reader-response theory focuses on the tensions between the individual and the group from which he or she springs or on the interactions between the readers and the text.

These and other approaches are often cumulatively labeled “postmodern readings.” The term postmodern is notoriously slippery, of course, but it is useful nevertheless. If it is applied first and foremost to the domain of epistemology—the study of how we come to know anything, or think we know anything—then the term is useful. Unlike earlier modernism, which by and large was convinced that human beings could learn the utter and objective truth about reality and thus gain certainty and clarity of thought and that all of this enterprise was a good thing, postmodernism takes quite a different tack. Postmoderns are convinced that because we human beings are so small, our knowledge so microscopic, and our social frame of reference so limited, our putative knowledge can at best be never more than provisional. In the strongest forms of postmodernism, all human knowledge is in some sense a social construct and therefore provides no clear or objective knowledge of the objective world at all. Claims to certainty must be dismissed as arrogant bigotry. Indeed, in postmodern perspective, the univocal meaning cherished by modernists is narrow and confining. Surely it is far better to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations and approaches, none of them necessarily “right” or “wrong,” “true” or “false,” but all of them productive, thoughtful, fruitful, a reflection of a (legitimate) interaction between some reader or other and the text. Postmodern readers (we are told) are less interested in the hard lines drawn by truth and error, and more interested in the soft lines drawn by fuzziness and interpretive possibilities. They dislike exclusion, especially any view that says another view is wrong, and they admire inclusion, even of mutually incompatible ideas. They like possibilities and vistas and are suspicious of boundaries and of any insistence that there is such a thing as heresy, just as there is such a thing as orthodoxy.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, these sorts of approaches to the study of the New Testament produced books with titles like: Reading Sacred Texts Through American Eyes,[81] Deconstructing the New Testament,[82] Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspectives,[83] Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross,[84] and Liberating Exegesis.[85] Scholarly conferences encourage participants to interpret biblical texts out of their own experience, without regard for whether any particular reading is “right” or “wrong"; indeed, such categories, it is argued, betray an old-fashioned modernist approach. A certain reading may be “right” or “wrong” for one particular group, but certainly not for everyone. Among the interesting stances that this creativity has generated is a flurry of books and essays on reading texts from a “postcolonial” perspective,[86] and a now voluminous literature on feminist readings.[87]

A brief introduction cannot properly evaluate these multiplying approaches to reading the New Testament. Some of the developments described here will turn out to be passing fancies without enduring relevance. For instance, one writer comments, “Structuralism may turn out to be for literary criticism what James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was for the novel—an experimental dead end. While the structure of Biblical books and narratives is clearly of crucial importance for their interpretation, we have yet to be convinced that structuralism is a useful heuristic tool for identifying such structures.”[88] On the other hand, there is an obvious and important element in postmodern epistemology that must not be denied. None of us interprets anything from an entirely neutral stance. One would have to enjoy the attribute of omniscience to be entirely objective. Insofar as it reminds us that we are finite, and that our findings, at some level, must always be qualified by our limitations, postmodernism has been a salutary advance. It has been especially useful in checking the arrogance of modernist claims. The problem is that in the hands of many interpreters, postmodernism demands a nasty antithesis: either we claim we can know objective truth exhaustively, or we insist that our finitude means we cannot know objective truth and therefore cannot truly “know” reality. Since finite human beings can never know anything omnisciently, only the second alternative is defensible. In that case, all our “knowledge” is a social or a personal construct; the only “reality” we can know is the one we construct.

There is a sense, of course, in which this latter claim is transparently obvious: the only “reality” we can know is the one we construct. But the crucial issue is this: Can this “reality” that we ourselves “know” be tightly aligned with objective reality? In other words, even though we finite human beings can never enjoy omniscient knowledge, can we not legitimately claim to know some objective things truly, even if we do not know them perfectly, exhaustively? After all, this accords with our experience: in almost any field we can get to know some things better than we did before, and this suggests that our knowledge is improving. In principle, it can improve to the point that we may legitimately claim that we know (even if it is not omniscient knowledge) some things truly. And if more or different evidence arrives later and prompts us to change our minds, that too is part of the improvement, the approach to true knowledge.[89] We are most definitely not squeezed into the absolute antithesis: either we have perfect knowledge, or else none of our “knowledge” has any more significance than any other social construct.

This preliminary response deserves six brief further observations. First, as has often been noted, those who insist most vociferously on the relativity of all human knowledge without recognizing how our constructions can and do approach knowledge of the objective, place themselves in a terrible dilemma. For when they insist that all knowledge is a mere social construct, then they admit that their knowledge that all knowledge is a mere social construct is also a mere social construct—so why should we give the claim any more credence than the contrary claim? Second, there is more than a little irony in the fact that many interpreters of the New Testament who claim the independence of their own interpretive grid as their epistemological right, then attempt to influence others that they are right and even denigrate alternative views. To cite but one example, Neil Elliott insists on the rightness of his reading of Paul’s letters, which, he thinks, should be used as a manifesto for political action—and part of Elliott’s rhetoric is to inveigh against various theological understandings of Paul.[90] Third, Scripture itself speaks of the knowledge of Christians in a straightforward way. John says that he writes his first letter so that his readers may know that they have eternal life (1 John 5:13). Luke tells Theophilus that he is writing so that the latter “may know the certainty of the things [he has] been taught” (Luke 1:3–4). Sometimes the knowledge in view is personal (e.g., Phil. 3:10, “I want to know Christ”); sometimes it is experiential (e.g., Phil. 3:10, “I want to know … the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings”); and sometimes it is propositional (e.g., John 8:32, “you will know the truth"; John 20:31, the fourth gospel is written so that its readers may believe that certain things are true). The Christian gospel, the good news, has propositional content that is to be passed on from one believer to another. That is why it can be referred to as “the faith that the Lord has once for all entrusted to us, his people” (Jude 3). Though “truth” in Scripture can refer to more than propositional truth, propositional truth certainly lies within its embrace. So too strong an insistence that we cannot know the truth may assuage postmodern sensibilities, but it is a long step removed from Scripture itself. Fourth, for the same reason, the strongest voices in the Yale School, to which reference has already been made, are vaguely troubling. For it is not enough to fill our minds with biblical ideas, vocabulary, and images, unless we think that by so doing we are being led to think true thoughts about what is actually there—that the Bible actually refers to people, events, and even to God himself, as living outside the Bible, and that the Bible bears true witness to them (even though, transparently, it cannot bear exhaustive witness to them, or produce omniscient knowledge of these extrabiblical realities among those who read about them in the Bible’s pages). We are not saved by biblical ideas: that is a narrowly intellectualist approach. We are saved by the God and the biblical events to which the Bible refers, bearing true witness. Fifth, these reflections suggest that postmodernism has swung the pendulum much too far. In the words of Brenda Watson,

[Where a postmodern] sees the need for articulating the partiality and provisional nature of any knowledge we claim, I see the equal need for articulating what are strongly persuasive grounds for regarding as a secure basis for Christian faith—provided the enterprise is shorn of non-essential and unjustified notions of dogmatism or of rigidity.

We live not by our doubts but by our certainties, however much later experience and fresh evidence may require them to be modified. And even then it is new certainties which act as the trigger in replacing the old ones.

Released from being obliged to accept the tyranny of the naturalist presupposition and its progeny, a more confident yet appropriately flexible approach to certainty may be forthcoming. It will then be easier to accept that balance between complete ignorance and complete knowledge which each person has to reach for themselves and constantly monitor and modify according to their life experience.[91]

Failure to get this right means that either we will domesticate the Bible by our rigid and often merely traditional categories, or we will domesticate the Bible by insisting that every interpretive stance has as much merit as every other interpretive stance. In neither case will the Bible do its truly transforming work. And sixth, these reflections suggest that a responsible approach to the New Testament, and indeed to the whole Bible, will not only try to come to grips with the fact that this is a text and therefore all its textual characteristics must be understood, but that it conveys a grand story, and that although it can include parables like those of Jesus and a fable like that of Jotham, it purports to tell us some true things about God, his people, his enemies, our origins, and our destiny, and that this story line demands that, among other approaches, we remain sensitive to the salvation-historical[92] unfolding of this drama.

Approaches Based on the Selection of Background Material

Even while a substantial number of contemporary New Testament scholars operate out of the reader-response and postmodern matrices just described, several other groups are more interested in what happened in history. Many of these attempt to understand the New Testament documents by reading them against the background of particular first-century movements. Ideally, this sort of study is salutary: we are far more likely to avoid introducing hopeless anachronisms into our study of the New Testament if we are well informed about how words were used in the first century and what movements and thought patterns competed with Christian claims or fed into them. Moreover, when such study is done well, it avoids the feeling of unreality and disconnectedness that permeates some of the more subjective approaches. Nevertheless, here too there are several minefields through which one must carefully navigate.

First, the first century saw Israel at a confluence of huge cultural streams. Rooted in the Hebrew canon and Aramaic paraphrases (the Targums), and knowing itself to belong to streams of Judaism that stretched back for centuries, Israel was also part of a minor province in the mighty Roman Empire, whose official and military language was Latin and whose lingua franca was primarily Greek. Doubtless the New Testament writers most commonly cite what we call the Old Testament, but Paul can also quote minor pagan poets; and in any case, once the gospel was being preached in a predominantly Gentile world, inevitably the questions raised and the challenges to be faced ensured that the good news about Jesus the Messiah would be shaped to prove coherent and convincing in such environments. Thus, both streams can lay claim to being part of the legitimate “background” to the New Testament. Because of the enormous range of such background material, however, inevitably some scholars become experts in the Greco-Roman sources, and others in the Jewish sources. Very few have equal standing in both streams, and many books focus on one stream at the expense of the other.[93] Moreover, even within one of these streams, some scholars focus on the textual material but know relatively little about the allied archaeology; others may know a good deal about the archaeology but have a more rudimentary grasp of the textual sources. To make matters still more complicated, some parts of the first-century populace, not least in Galilee, were at home in both worlds, and each of the two streams penetrated the other. Martin Hengel made this point most tellingly three decades ago.[94]

Second, even within these three bodies of opinion—that trace, respectively, a Jewish, Greco-Roman, or somehow merged stream—there are many shades of opinion. On the Greco-Roman side, for instance, some argue that the closest background to Jesus’ sayings lies in Cynic thought. A generation or two ago, many scholars insisted that Gnosticism is older than Christianity and is, in fact, the religious movement out of which Christianity, as we know it, grew. Other scholars have focused on Stoic or Sophist elements to explain 1 and 2 Corinthians. All sides wrestle with the extent to which Paul self-consciously used the rhetorical categories that were common in the educated Greco-Roman world. Meanwhile, on the Jewish side, some scholars establish links between the New Testament documents and the Old Testament, while others focus on one part or another of the literature of Second Temple Judaism: the Dead Sea Scrolls, perhaps, or apocalyptic literature, or the writings of Philo, or some part of the vast corpus of rabbinic Judaism. In some instances complex issues of dating and provenance generate disparate schools of scholars with highly diverse opinions as to the extent to which a particular corpus may legitimately be used as background (e.g., the rabbinic literature).

The third minefield to be negotiated is the manner in which such studies of background sources may or may not be legitimately used to shed light on what the New Testament is saying. In other words, it is possible that by forcing a New Testament document onto the Procrustean bed of some particular ostensible background, a kind of interpretive rape takes place. This is what Samuel Sandmel rather shrewdly labeled “parallelomania” several decades ago:[95] apparent parallels to New Testament texts may so domesticate those texts that the meaning of the “parallel” is read back into the New Testament, making it impossible to hear what the New Testament is actually saying. For instance, the major commentary on Galatians by Hans Dieter Betz[96] interprets the letter almost entirely from the matrix of Greco-Roman “parallels” of disputed relevance: by and large their thought-forms and assumptions succeed only in distorting Paul’s thought.[97] The recent New Testament theology by Georg Strecker,[98] rather amazingly, reads Pauline Christology against the background of a pre-Christian gnostic-redeemer myth, a category that has been repeatedly shown to be post-Christian.[99] The so-called “new perspective on Paul,” though it has earlier roots, was precipitated in large part when E. P. Sanders argued that the various Judaisms in Palestine of the first century all adopted a pattern of religion that he labeled “covenantal nomism.”[100] No one disputes that Sanders identified certain important elements in first-century Judaism and that he corrected some important misjudgments of earlier scholars. But because he placed all of the relevant Palestinian Jewish background into one conceptual bucket, his theory exercised hegemonic control over the exegesis of Paul, especially in Anglo-American circles. That hegemonic control is now losing its grip, precisely because several have shown that there are important elements in first-century Palestinian Jewish thought that do not fit into Sanders’s grid—and this is again freeing up the exegesis of Paul from a rather narrow and stifling paradigm that did not always listen very attentively to Paul himself.[101] Sometimes the nature of the ostensible background is itself disputed, and in any case, it should not be allowed to control the exegesis of the New Testament.[102] The first obligation of the interpreter of the New Testament is to try to understand the thoughts of these documents on their own terms.

But none of these warnings means we can dispense with the study of backgrounds. One should be as wary of “parallelophobia” as of parallelomania, since in the providence of God the New Testament documents were written in concrete historical circumstances in which they are embedded. One need only reflect, for instance, on the considerable light shed on Revelation 2 -3 by the archaeological and textual probing of backgrounds undertaken by gifted scholars,[103] or the remarkable volumes in the series The Book of Acts in Its First-Century Setting,[104] or the comprehensive survey of background thought on resurrection, life after death, and immortality in N. T. Wright’s recent and thorough examination of the resurrection of Jesus Christ,[105] to discern how impoverished we would be if there were no such research.

Social-Scientific Approaches

Social-scientific criticism is deeply indebted both to sociology and to cultural anthropology. Apart from isolated studies, its rise as a burgeoning field with a multiplying literature goes back only thirty or forty years. For the first decade and a half, it tended to apply specific sociological theories to the dynamics of the movements found in the New Testament. For instance, John Gager applied contemporary theories of millenarian movements, functions of social conflict, and cognitive dissonance to Paul’s conversion and the experiences of the Pauline churches in the New Testament.[106] In his approach to the New Testament, Gerd Theissen leaned heavily not only on the sociological approaches of Weber but on Freudian psychology.[107] In other words, these sorts of approaches depended on adopting the kinds of global categories advanced by (largely) European sociology (the grand theories of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, and Mary Douglas, among others). Perhaps the most careful of the books in this line is Wayne Meeks’s The First Urban Christians, [108] where he avoids careless transfer of contemporary social categories such as “middle class” to the first-century setting but attempts instead to isolate the social dynamics applicable at the time, including categories of status, honor, benefaction, and the like.

In some ways, Meeks’s book anticipates the slight transition in focus and terminology that took place around 1986.[109] After that date, “social-scientific criticism” came increasingly to be used of a network of approaches that owed more to cultural anthropology than to European sociology. Now there is much more emphasis on personal and group relationships within a particular historical and social setting. Such an approach wants to know, for instance, how a father or mother would view his or her role in a first-century family in Ephesus, why first-century itinerant preachers could expect hospitality, what the obligations were between employers and employees, how the patronage system worked, what ingredients were tied to the honor/shame culture of the day, how a local assembly, a local church, would view itself, and be viewed, within the larger social matrix, and much more of the same.[110] Clearly such questions are, broadly speaking, historical, but only recently have they received the attention they deserve. At least they are avoiding the solipsism of text-based studies that entirely ignore the extratextual history.

As helpful as these approaches are, to some extent they have achieved, in the hands of some interpreters, their own regrettable hegemonic authority. By and large, scholars who focus on the social dynamics of the individuals and groups represented in the New Testament are at their best when they help us understand some of the givens and presuppositions of first-century life and outlook in this or that Roman province. Such study sheds useful light that helps us interpret the New Testament in its own historical (and therefore social) setting. They are at their worst when they give the impression that the horizontal axis of social dynamics is a sufficient explanation of New Testament texts, when the supernatural and revelatory dimensions are either systematically ignored or specifically disowned, when specific social theory is treated as a transcultural control that may not itself be questioned, when the values of today’s Mediterranean or Palestinian world are read back into the first century without rigorous questioning—and above all, when the text of the New Testament, far from being illuminated by such study, is ignored or controverted or domesticated on the grounds of the external model.[111]

Language and Linguistic Approaches

Although the last century witnessed a decline in the number of people with a working knowledge of the primary languages important to New Testament study (Greek, of course, but also Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin, followed by the other languages into which the New Testament was first translated), there have nevertheless been some remarkable advances. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the discovery of many colloquial Greek papyri helped to explain the differences in Greek syntax and vocabulary that anyone could discern between the New Testament documents and the works of Homer (eighth century B.C.) or the works of the “classical” period (fifth and fourth centuries B.C.). Of the numerous books that flowed out of these findings, the one by C. F. D. Moule probably still circulates most widely.[112] Similar finds have more recently enriched the study of Aramaic.

But what attracts attention here is a handful of linguistic and linguistic-philosophical advances. The three mentioned below are far from exhaustive; they merely represent a plethora of developments.

First, continual advance is being achieved in the study of words—words as they are found in lexica (“lexical semantics”), and words as they are actually used in concrete contexts (a branch of “pragmatics”). A recent volume by John Lee has provided us with a highly competent history of New Testament lexicography.[113] In particular, Lee demonstrates how linguistic awareness is increasingly, and rightly, taking us away from thinking of the meaning of words in the categories of English “glosses” (i.e., quick translation equivalents). The latest English edition of the Bauer lexicon[114] is certainly an improvement on its predecessor in this regard, though doubtless there is more to be learned. An ongoing project in Australia is making available to a wider readership the scattered publication of papyrological finds that may have some bearing on our understanding of New Testament words.[115] And an innovative lexicon prepared by Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida organizes the Greek words to be studied, not in mere alphabetical order, but in “semantic fields"; that is, it groups words together that have similar or overlapping domains of meaning.[116]

Second, although linguistic theory falls into several disparate camps, one of the more productive of these camps has carefully distinguished Aktionsart (well known to every seminary student who has taken even the first year of Greek) from “aspect” in the verbal system (not the kind of action, but the author’s choice of how to envisage the action).[117] The results challenge not a little of what traditionalists think that each tense of the Greek system actually grammaticalizes. With only occasional exceptions, this work, though some of it has been around for decades, has not yet broken into the general run of New Testament scholarship, though breaks are appearing in the dikes of partition commonly erected between disciplines.

Third, “speech act theory” has brought major advances to how words in text work. Words in contexts do not simply mean something, they may do something. Speech act theory springs from the seminal work of J. L. Austin,[118] but it has been developed in a large body of erudite literature,[119] and has now become part of the arsenal of every New Testament scholar.[120] This certainly does not mean that every subtheory or interpretive grid erected by speech act theorists is unquestioningly adopted—far from it. What it means is that every informed reader of the New Testament is a little more sensitive to the exigencies of thinking through how words function, what they actually perform, as well as what they mean. When Jesus cries to the storm, “Cease! Be still!” we may be misled if we think that the words themselves are primarily meant to convey some deep theological truth. We need to think through Jesus’ intention in uttering the words and to mark their effect. Words do things as well as teach things. And that fact itself requires the reader to discern a new level of meaning as well as, vicariously in imagination, to grasp what the people described in the narrative experienced.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

As long as it is, this introduction, which ventures to cover the distance from the first writing of the New Testament documents to contemporary study of them, cannot be more than a sketch. Several overwhelming impressions are conveyed by developments during the last century or so. First, an extraordinary diversity of approaches, methods, presuppositions, and conclusions now attends the study of the New Testament.[121] Second, the presentation here has been somewhat schematized. In order to attain some degree of clarity, we have described some methods and movements piecemeal. In reality, many scholars mingle their approaches to produce hybrids that are both interesting and fruitful. For instance, there are social-science approaches and there are linguistic approaches, but there are also now sociolinguistic approaches.[122] Third, with only limited exceptions, this chapter has focused on Western study of the New Testament. But of course the New Testament, not to say the earliest centuries of the Christian church, was not characteristically Western.[123] Today there is a rapidly multiplying church in many parts of the world, and although the depth of scholarship in these fast-growing arenas is still a bit thin, new journals are being published every year, usually in languages that most Westerners cannot read. Insofar as it is possible to probe this literature, one is struck both by the commonality of historic, confessional Christianity, even if it has local flavor, and by the fresh questions that are sometimes asked by people with limited exposure to the Western heritage. And fourth, most of the approaches and historical developments surveyed in this chapter have had some value, but almost all of them have sometimes been deployed irresponsibly, primarily by claiming some kind of near-exclusive methodological control, or by being married to deep-seated rationalism or even philosophical naturalism, both of which find it difficult to read the New Testament sympathetically on its own terms.

One of the entailments of this burgeoning diversity of approaches is that the “introductions” to the New Testament written in the last decade or two have themselves taken on highly diverse emphases. It used to be that introductions to the New Testament primarily dealt with matters of date, authorship, background, authenticity, and perhaps a brief history of the discipline. These were written from various stances, of course, but the matters covered were rather similar. But today, although such matters remain the focus of some introductions,[124] others introduce the New Testament by focusing on the growth and context of the church,[125] on its history and literature,[126] or on its history and theology[127] (not necessarily quite the same thing!); by attempting a fairly comprehensive and integrated interpretation of the whole (though inevitably that means that certain elements are less discussed than in other works);[128] by relatively brief surveys of the material written from a dogmatic and usually reductionistic stance that scarcely acknowledges there are other judgments;[129] or by providing a brief survey and a representative smattering of primary sources relevant to the origins of Christianity (though of course the selection itself says a great deal and can prove limiting).[130]

To project the future of the study of the New Testament demands a courage the authors of this volume lack. Some are convinced that it lies with postmodern approaches.[131] Rather amusingly, Bockmuehl lists “possible futures” to New Testament scholarship as he extrapolates what would happen if any of the current emphases now on offer had its way and became hegemonic. The effect, of course, is to expose the rather painful reductionism of so much of the current enterprise. He concludes by observing,

At the end of the day it may turn out that the implied reader is in a better position to understand the text than the aloof or the distrusting interpreter.

Adolf Schlatter (1969) was perhaps right after all to criticize atheistic methods of theological study for their inadequate perception of what is in the text… : there are limits to how much you can usefully say about the stained glass windows of King’s College Chapel without going inside.[132]

But perhaps the most perceptive advice is offered by Craig Blomberg: those with a confessional stance toward the New Testament must engage both with the text of holy Scripture and with the way it is discussed in their own generation, bearing in mind some of the long heritage that has gone before.[133]

[1] See especially Alan Millard, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000).

[2] The best survey is Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission and Limitations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

[3] Amulets are charms, often worn around the neck to ward off assorted evils. Some amulets were simply “magic” stones or the like, but others were sayings or cherished quotations written on papyrus, vellum, potsherd, or wood. Where superstition overlaid Christian faith, inevitably some of these quotations were biblical. Obviously, neither ostraca nor amulets can provide evidence for extensive passages.

[4] For further reading, see John A. L. Lee, A History of New Testament Lexicography, SBG 8 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).

[5] One of the fourteen was Codex Bezae, now recognized as the chief witness to the Western Text.

[6] A small minority of textual critics argue that the pursuit of the original is a vain exercise: e.g., D. C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The manuscript tradition is so fluid, they say, that the attempt to uncover the original reading is pointless. Worse, it diverts attention from the study of what the diverse textual traditions tell us of what the church thought at various times and places. However, not only does Parker overemphasize the freedom of the textual tradition, but he also fails to reflect on the significance of the fact that for every book there was an original. That we cannot reproduce it with perfect certainty with respect to every word does not vitiate the fact that the pursuit is valuable and that its goal is, in no small measure, attainable.

[7] The best introductions to the subject are still those of Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes (Leiden: Brill; Grand Rapids: Eerd- mans, 1987). Students have long relied on the reasoning displayed in entry after entry of Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (London/New York: United Bible Societies, 1994).

[8] Perhaps the best defense of this view is Wilbur N. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text II, 3rd ed. (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2003). The best succinct treatment of this position from the stance of mainstream eclecticism is probably that of Kurt Aland, “The Text of the Church?” TrinJ 8 (1987): 131-44. For popular treatments, see D. A. Carson, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979); James R. White, The King James Only Controversy (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1995); Doug Kutilek, J. Frank Norris and His Heirs: The Bible Translation Controversy (Pasadena: Pilgrim, 1999).

[9] In some ways this movement is rather a sustained critique of the weak spots in eclecticism. It is best represented by the work of J. K. Elliott and his best students (and earlier by the text-critical essays of G. D. Kilpatrick). See, for instance, J. K. Elliott, ed., The Principles and Practice of New Testament Textual Criticism: Collected Essays of G. D. Kilpatrick, BETL 96 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990); idem, Essays and Studies in New Testament Textual Criticism, EFN 3 (Córdoba: Ediciones el Almendro, 1992); Kent D. Clarke, Textual Optimism: A Critique of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, JSNTSup 138 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). The best response to thoroughgoing eclecticism as a movement (though not necessarily to each particular criticism the movement offers) is the description of the goals and methods of mainstream textual criticism offered in the sort of standard texts listed in n. 7 above.

[10] The stance of Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels—that textual criticism is not concerned with getting as close as possible to the original text but is simply an exercise in hermeneutics—is frankly baffling. See the penetrating review by Moisés Silva in WTJ 62 (2000): 295-302.

[11] E.g., W. G. Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems (Nashville: Abingdon, 1972), 13: “It is impossible to speak of a scientific view of the New Testament until the New Testament became the object of investigation as an independent body of literature with historical interest, as a collection of writings that could be considered apart from the Old Testament and without dogmatic or creedal bias. Since such a view began to prevail only during the course of the eighteenth century, earlier discussion of the New Testament can only be referred to as the prehistory of New Testament scholarship.” It is doubtful if anyone informed by postmodern awareness of the unavoidable fact that all interpreters bring their biases to the text could make quite the same remark today.

[12] Dialogue with Trypho almost certainly represents a later report of actual discussions Justin Martyr had with Jews. Its level and tone are remarkably elevated and fair- minded, unlike some later treatises. Almost every major Christian writer of the first five centuries either wrote a treatise against Judaism or incorporated substantial arguments of that sort within other works, but most scholars conclude that this became a literary conceit usefully deployed to defend the uniqueness of Christ and of Christianity. See especially Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 1:15-16.

[13] E. A. Judge, “Ancient Contradictions in the Australian Soul,” ISCAST Bulletin 33 (Winter 2001): 8.

[14] Cited by Augustine, City of God 10.32.

[15] R. L. Wilken, “Religious Pluralism and Early Christian Thought,” in Remembering the Christian Past (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 42-43.

[16] See D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), chapter 23, on the Johannine Epistles.

[17] James A. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Harper, 1990).

[18] Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971 [orig. 1934]).

[19] So I. Howard Marshall, whose title amusingly draws attention to the point: “Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earlier Christianity,” Themelios 2/1 (1976): 5–14. Other useful works on this subject include Daniel J. Harrington, “The Reception of Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity During the Last Decade,” HTR 77 (1980): 289–99; Harold O. J. Brown, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy from the Apostles to the Present (Garden City: Doubleday, 1984); Graham N. Stanton and Guy G. Strousma, eds., Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Craig L. Blomberg, “The New Testament Definition of Heresy (or When Do Jesus and the Apostles Really Get Mad?),” JETS 45 (2002): 59-72, which, despite the racy title, is penetrating.

[20] Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 115-16.

[21] Although relatively little of his enormous oeuvre survives, some of his extant work is accessible to those who read only modern English translations. Origen’s massive commentary on Romans, written in Greek, is lost, but it was translated into Latin and somewhat condensed by Rufinus (345-410), and has only recently been translated from the Latin into English by Thomas P. Scheck: Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans,2 vols. (Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2001-2).

[22] We say “variety of theories” because how church and state relate to each other varies widely. Separation of church and state does not mean the same thing in, say, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. But all Christian experience and heritage on this subject, as complex and as variegated as it is, remains profoundly different from, for example, the Muslim heritage. Once Muhammad gained power at Medina, the religious and civil authorities were one. The first three centuries of Islam witnessed rapid growth by military conquest. There is nothing in Islam quite like the seminal utterance found on the lips of Jesus, “Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” By the same token, Islam has never conceived of the nation-state quite the way the West has, nor has it ever had a “clergy” closely analogous to Christian clergy.

[23] Doubtless this system developed in part because traveling preachers/lecturers were common in the Roman world. The best of them could make a good living. They gained disciples who would pay for the privilege of attaching themselves to the teacher. Occasionally one of these traveling preachers would stop traveling and settle somewhere, opening a small academy. There were no institutions akin to modern universities.

[24] The nature of these controversies can be quickly discovered in any good dictionary of church history, e.g., F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[25] See Thomas C. Oden, The Justification Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).

[26] For an interesting if overstated description of the role of monasteries, see Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Doubleday, 1995).

[27] For easy access to the issues, see Daniel B. Clendenin, Eastern Orthodox Theology: A Contemporary Reader (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995); idem, Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994); and especially Theodore G. Stylianopoulos, The New Testament: An Orthodox Perspective, Vol. 1: Scripture, Tradition, Hermeneutics (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1997). Cf. also Bradley Nassif, “Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism: The Status of an Emerging Global Dialogue,” SBET18 (2000): 21-55.

[28] Intriguingly, during his reign, Pope John Paul II canonized sixty-four saints, which is more than all the canonizations by popes during the last four hundred years. This does not include several currently in process.

[29] See further M. Fiedler and L. Rabben, eds., Rome Has Spoken: A Guide to Forgotten Papal Statements, and How They Have Changed through the Centuries (New York: Crossroad, 1998).

[30] For further reading, see G. R. Evans, ed., The Medieval Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Medieval Period (Blackwell: Oxford, 2001).

[31] See the important work of Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998-2000).

[32] In recent years it has been pointed out, not least by Thomas C. Oden (“A Patristic Perspective on European Christianity in World Perspective,” ERT27 [2003]: 31836), that the Christianity of the first few centuries was not primarily a European phenomenon. The gospel spread out from Jerusalem into what is now called Turkey (which was for a millennium the heart of Byzantium), the North African coast, Egypt, Ethiopia, Arabia, Syria, northern Mesopotamia, and probably as far east as the Indus Valley, with some evidence of extension to China, not to mention extension to Rome, and then to what are now France and Spain. Thus, for either the friends or foes of Christianity to see the Christian religion, in its origins and initial expansion, as primarily a European phenomenon, is simply mistaken. On the other hand, one should also point out that, owing in substantial part to the expansionist pressures from Islam, Europe became the dominant voice preserving, articulating, defending, and expounding Christianity, especially after the fall of Constantinople. These roles, of course, contemporary Europe seems determined to shed.

[33] For an introduction to the rise and definition of the canon, see Carson and Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), the final chapter.

[34] This is no less true of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, of course, than of, say, the Puritans, even though, transparently, the two parties emerged with radically different conclusions. Both felt the massive impact of the Reformation.

[35] See D. A. Carson, “New Testament Theology,” in Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments (Downers Grove: IVP, 1997), 796-814, some of which has been adapted for use here, and the opening pages of Charles H. H. Scobie, The Ways of Our God: An Approach to Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). For an earlier survey, see Gerhard F. Hasel, New Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978); idem, “The Nature of Biblical Theology: Recent Trends and Issues,” AUSS32 (1994): 203-15.

[36] See J. Sandys-Wunsch and L. Eldredge, “J. P. Gabler and the Distinction Between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology,” SJT33 (1980): 133-58.

[37] See Horton Harris, The Tübingen School(Grand Rapids: Baker, repr. 1990 [1975]); or, in shorter compass, Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861-1986, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 20-34.

[38] Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1897. The work was translated into English by Robert Morgan as “The Task and Methods of ‘New Testament Theology,'” in Robert Morgan, The Nature of New Testament Theology (London: SCM, 1973), 68-116.

[39] Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments (Nördlingen: Beck, 1886).

[40] Of his many books, the most important to this discussion was his Die Theologie des Neuen Testaments, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Verlag der Vereinsbuchhandlung, 1909-10)— though Schlatter revised his work significantly in a later edition. The 1923 edition has now been translated into English by Andreas Köstenberger in two volumes with the respective titles The History of the Christ: The Foundations of New Testament Theology and The Theology of the Apostles: The Development of New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997, 1999).

[41] See especially his Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols. (ET London: SCM, 1952-55 [1948-53]). For additional insight into his approach, see his important essay, “The Problem of a Theological Exegesis of the New Testament,” available in ET in The Beginnings of Dialectical Theology, ed. J. M. Robinson (Richmond: John Knox, 1968), 47-72 (the original appeared in 1941).

[42] See especially his Salvation in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

[43] See especially G. Ernest Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital, SBT 8 (London: SCM, 1962).

[44] Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1933-74; ET: Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 19641974).

[45] See especially Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970). No less influential was James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); and most recently his magisterial The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (London: SCM, 1999).

[46] Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948).

[47] A Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974 [rev. ed. 1993]).

[48] New Testament Theology (Downers Grove: IVP, 1981).

[49] The Theology of the New Testament According to Its Major Witnesses (London: SCM, 1974 [1969]).

[50] New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus (New York: Scribner’s, 1971). This was the only volume to be published of what was supposed to be a multivolume series tracing the theology of the different sources and corpora.

[51] Neutestamentliche Theologie: Ein Überblick (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1989); idem, Theologie des Neuen Testaments (Freiburg: Herder, 1994).

[52] Theology of the New Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000).

[53] An Outline of the Theology of the New Testament (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).

[54] Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992).

[55] New Testament Theology, ed. Lincoln D. Hurst (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

[56] Theologiegeschichte des Urchristentums (Tübingen: Francke, 1994).

[57] See especially Peter Balla, Challenges to New Testament Theology: An Attempt to Justify the Enterprise, WUNT 95 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1997); Dan O. Via, What Is New Testament Theology? GBS (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002); D. A. Carson, “Current Issues in Biblical Theology: A New Testament Perspective,” BBR 5 (1995): 17-41; and many of the essays in T. D. Alexander and Brian S. Rosner, eds., New Dictionary of Biblical Theology (Downers Grove: IVP, 2000).

[58] E.g., Brian S. Rosner, Paul, Scripture and Ethics: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1-7, AGJU 12 (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Dorothy Lee, Flesh and Glory: Symbol, Gender, and Theology in the Gospel of John (New York: Crossroad, 2003).

[59] Cf. D. A. Carson, New Testament Commentary Survey, 5th ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001).

[60] See, for example, the important work of W. Ward Gasque, A History of the Criticism of the Acts of the Apostles, BGBE 17 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1975), though it is now somewhat dated.

[61] Although most of the ways of breaking down and ordering the following literary tools and approaches to the New Testament text are not remarkable, some scholars adopt slightly different classifications.

[62] See especially his History of the Synoptic Tradition (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).

[63] See his The Gospel of John (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971).

[64] For example, by comparing the forms of the parables recorded in different gospels, Joachim Jeremias (The Parables of Jesus [New York: Scribner’s, 1963], 113-14) developed what he called ten “laws of [parable] transmission.” At one time widely influential, this work is now almost entirely eclipsed. For a useful treatment of the history of parable research, see Craig Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove: IVP, 1990).

[65] By and large, source and form critics have not been as adventuresome in the NT letters as in the gospels. Even so, there are many variations. Perhaps the most extreme source critic in recent memory is J. C. O’Neill, who argues, for instance, that Paul wrote no more than about two-thirds of Galatians: see his The Recovery of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (London: SPCK, 1972).

[66] See, for instance, Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter, The Question of Criteria: The Quest for the Plausible Jesus (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), and the biting review by R. T. France in Theol 106 (2003): 272-73.

[67] One thinks, for instance, of the work of The Jesus Seminar, with its color-coded gospels measuring out the historical probability of this or that snippet. Of the several books that reflect the work of the Seminar, perhaps easiest access is found in Robert W. Funk, A Credible Jesus: Fragments of a Vision (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 2002). See the negative assessments by the classical historian Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels;Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland, eds., Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995).

[68] For instance, the multivolume work of John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew (New York: Doubleday: 1991-). The net results of the first three massive volumes (a fourth volume, on John, is still promised) conclude that Jesus was a prophetic figure emerging from the diversity of first-century Judaism; that he was linked in some way with John the Baptist, expected God’s rule, and had some ill-defined group of followers (of whom only Judas and Peter are at all known); that he performed healings and associated with outcasts; and that he interacted with other Jewish religious groups. In the Bultmannian heritage, Meier wants to protect the Christ of faith—the Christ in whom Christians believe, if they are Christians at all—from the results of his own historical probings, that is, from what he calls the Jesus of history. Implicitly, of course, this denies the incarnation—the revelation of God himself in real history.

[69] E.g., Stanley E. Porter, The Criteria for Authenticity in Historical-Jesus Research: Previous Discussion and New Proposals, JSNTSup 191 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). There are also countless essays and books on particular historical-critical tools: e.g., on redaction criticism, see D. A. Carson, “Redaction Criticism: On the Legitimacy and Illegitimacy of a Literary Tool,” in Scripture and Truth, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983), 115-42; Randall K. J. Tan, “Recent Developments in Redaction Criticism: From Investigation of Textual Prehistory Back to Historical-Grammatical Exegesis?” JETS44 (2001): 599-614.

[70] See especially Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerd- mans, 1998).

[71] E.g., Samuel Byrskog, Jesus the Only Teacher: Didactic Authority and Transmission in Ancient Israel, Ancient Judaism, and the Matthean Community (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1994); idem, Story as History—History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History, WUNT 123 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2000). See the useful evaluation in the review article by Peter M. Head, “The Role of Eyewitnesses in the Formation of the Gospel Tradition,” TynB 52 (2001): 275-94.

[72] See especially Richard Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

[73] Even here, however, we would be remiss not to notice that Ned B. Stonehouse was advocating precisely such sensitive reading of the canonical gospels before “redaction criticism” had become a household word. See esp. his The Witness of the Synoptic Gospels to Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker, repr. 1979 [1944]).

[74] Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

[75] For a comprehensive introduction to the study of rhetoric, see Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study (Leiden: Brill, 1998). For a focus on classical rhetoric and an introduction to most of the categories used by NT scholars in this regard, see Stanley E. Porter, Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period 330 BC-AD 400 (Leiden: Brill, 1998). For a much briefer introduction, see A. J. Hauser and D. F. Watson, Rhetorical Criticism of the Bible, BIS 6 (Leiden: Brill, 1994); and, with special reference to Pauline studies, R. D. Anderson, Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Paul, CBET 18, 2nd ed. (Leuven: Peeters, 1999).

[76] See the essays collected by Stanley E. Porter and Dennis E. Stamps, eds., The Rhetorical Interpretation of Scripture, JSNTSup 180 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999).

[77] The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

[78] Perhaps Lindbeck’s most seminal work is The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Post-liberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984)—though he has written a string of important essays and books since then.

[79] C. Baldick, ed., Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

[80] Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “The Reader in New Testament Interpretation,” in Hearing the New Testament, ed. Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 313-14.

[81] Charles Mabee, Reading Sacred Texts Through American Eyes: Biblical Interpretation as Cultural Critique (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1991).

[82] David Seeley, Deconstructing the New Testament, BIS 5 (Leiden: Brill, 1994).

[83] Stephen D. Moore, Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspectives: Jesus Begins to Write (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

[84] Stephen D. Moore, Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994).

[85] Christopher Rowland and Mark Corner, Liberating Exegesis: The Challenge of Liberation Theology to Biblical Studies (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1989).

[86] E.g., Fernando F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2000); Heikki Räisänen, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, R. S. Sugirtharajah, Krister Stendahl, and James Barr, Reading the Bible in the Global Village: Helsinki (Atlanta: SBL, 2000); R. S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Reconfigurations: An Alternative Way of Reading the Bible and Doing Theology (St. Louis: Chalice, 2003).

[87] As a mere sample from a very wide range, see the multivolume and growing series, The Feminist Companion to the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993-).

[88] Gordon J. Thomas, “Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw? An Evangelical Response to the New Literary Criticism,” EQ71 (1999): 48. Cf. similarly, Peter Cotterell and Max Turner, Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation (London: SPCK, 1989), 30.

[89] Elsewhere, borrowing language from Karl Popper, this has been called the “asymptotic approach.” See D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 121-22.

[90] Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994), 73 and passim.>

[91] Brenda Watson, “To Know, Or Not To Know? Re-assessing Historical Skepticism,” Theol 103 (2000): 195-96.

[92] The term is notoriously slippery but cannot be unpacked here. One of the most informed treatments is that of Robert W. Yarbrough, “The ‘heilsgeschichtliche’ Perspective in Modern New Testament Theology” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Aberdeen, 1985). A revised form of the dissertation is The Salvation-Historical Fallacy? Re-assessing the History of New Testament Theology (Leiderdorp: Deo, 2004).

[93] E.g., compare F. Gerald Downing, Making Sense in (and of) the First Christian Century, JSNTSup 197 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), and Peter J. Tom- son, ‘Ifthis be from Heaven …':Jesus and the New Testament Authors in their Relationship to Judaism (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).

[94] Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period, 2 vols. (London: SCM, 1974). More recently, a collection of essays edited by Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), despite its many seminal suggestions, goes too far in the attempt to obliterate distinctions between the two heritages, as if there were no distinction to be made whatsoever. Some of the argumentation in the book is in transparent and visceral reaction against any claim that the Old Testament and Judaism constitute the fundamental soil from which Christianity springs.

[95] “Parallelomania,” JBL 81 (1962): 2-13.

[96] Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979).

[97] See esp. Philip H. Kern, Rhetoric and Galatians: Assessing an Approach to Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, SNTSMS 101 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[98] Theology of the New Testament. See also the review article by Simon Gathercole, Themelios 28/3 (2003): 40-48.

[99] Of the many books on this subject, one of the clearest is that of Edwin A. Yamauchi, Pre-Christian Gnosticism: A Survey of the Proposed Evidences, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983). Half a century ago, there was somewhat more of an excuse for C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), when he mistakenly read John against the background of the Hermetica (a subset of the second-century gnostic movement). But there is very little excuse today.

[100] Paul and Palestinian Judaism

[101] (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977).

[102] From the voluminous literature, see Seyoon Kim, Paul and the New Perspective: Second Thoughts on the Origin of Paul’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark Seifrid, eds., Justification and Variegated Nomism, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck/Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001-4).

[103] E.g., see the dispute between Bruce Winter (Seek the Welfare of the City [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995]; idem, Philo and Paul Among the Sophists, SNTSMS 96 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]), who argues that much of 1 and 2 Corinthians should be interpreted against the background of a rather early Sophist movement in Corinth, and his most articulate critic, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, in his review article in RevBib 110 (2003): 428-33.

[104] See, for instance, Colin J. Hemer, The Letters to The Seven Churches in Their Local Settings, JSNTSup 11 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1986 [repr. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001]).

[105] Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993-.

[106] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).

[107] John G. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christian - ity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975).

[108] Gerd Theissen, The Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978); idem, Social Reality and the Early Christians (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1993); idem, Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1987).

[109] New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

[110] Effected, it appears, by the essay of J. H. Elliott, “Social-Scientific Criticism of the New Testament: More on Methods and Models,” Semeia 35 (1986): 1-33.

[111] Among the more useful surveys are David G. Horrell, Social-Scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999) and Anthony J. Blasi, Jean Duhaime, and Paul-André Turcotte, eds., Handbook of Early Christianity: Social Science Approaches (Walnut Creek/Lanham: Altamira Press, 2003). Representative works include Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Atlanta: John Knox, 1991); idem, The Social World of Jesus and the Gospels (London: Routledge, 1996); Jerome H. Neyrey, ed., The Social World of Luke-Acts: Models for Interpretation (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1991); idem, Honor and Shame in the Gospel of Matthew (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998); Richard L. Rohrbaugh, “ ‘Social Location of Thought’ as a Heuristic Construct in New Testament Study,” JSNT30 (1987): 103-9; idem, ed., The Social Sciences and New Testament Interpretation (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1996); Vernon K. Robbins, Exploring the Texture of Texts: A Guide to Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1996)—which integrates some of the strengths of social-science criticism with some of the strengths of rhetorical analysis. Several of the commentaries by Ben With- erington III run down the same avenue.

[112] See especially the essay by Kenneth Berding, “The Hermeneutical Framework of Social-Scientific Criticism: How Much Can Evangelicals Get Involved?” EQ75 (2003): 3-22.

[113] An Idiom-Book of New Testament Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).

[114] John A. L. Lee, A History of New Testament Lexicography, SBG 8 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).

[115] Walter Bauer, Frederick W. Danker, W. F. Arndt, and F. W. Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), now commonly abbreviated BDAG.

[116] This is the series of volumes titled New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, edited by various people. The series began in 1983, and so far has reached volume 9. It is published by Macquarie University in Australia (more recently by Eerdmans in the United States).

[117] Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, eds., Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2 vols. (New York: UBS, 1988).

[118] See especially Stanley E. Porter, Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament with Reference to Tense and Mood, SBG 1 (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); idem, Idioms of the Greek New Testament (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992); Buist M. Fanning, Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); K. L. McKay, A New Syntax of the Verb in New Testament Greek: An Aspectual Approach, SBG 5 (New York: Peter Lang, 1994). These theoretical treatments are increasingly being tested on contiguous texts: e.g., Rodney J. Decker, Temporal Deixis of the Greek Verb in the Gospel of Mark with Reference to Verbal Aspect, SBG 10 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).

[119] Especially in his work How To Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1962]). Austin distinguishes the locutionary act of an utterance (i.e., what it means, made up of sense and reference) from its illocutionary act (i.e., “the performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something”) and its perlocutionary act (i.e., the consequential effects on the feelings, thoughts, or actions, whether intentional or otherwise, of the speaker or the audience).

[120] See esp. Richard S. Briggs, Words in Action: Speech Act Theory and Biblical Interpretation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2001), and Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).

[121] See, for instance, the use to which it is put in the important commentary by Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). vol. 3, Craig Bartholomew, Jonathan Chaplin, Robert Song, Al Wolters, eds., A Royal Priesthood? The Use of the Bible Ethically and Politically: A Dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002); and vol. 4, Craig Bartholomew, C. Stephen Evans, Mary Healy, and Murray Rae, eds., “Behind” the Text: History and Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003).

[122] One of the seminal books in this area is Johannes P. Louw, Sociolinguistics and Communication, UBSMS 1 (London: UBS, 1986).

[123] See especially n. 32, above.

[124] See esp. the magisterial work of Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997).

[125] E.g., Arthur G. Patzia, The Emergence of the Church: Context, Growth, Leadership & Worship (Downers Grove: IVP, 2001).

[126] E.g., Lee Martin McDonald and Stanley E. Porter, Early Christianity and Its Sacred Literature (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2000).

[127] Achtemeier/Green/Thompson.

[128] E.g., Johnson.

[129] E.g., Gerd Theissen, Fortress Introduction to the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003); Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). One of the interesting features of Ehrman’s Introduction is that it includes treatment of some noncanonical early Christian writings. This is historically useful, of course, but it also reflects the author’s conviction that there is no difference in authority or revelation between the canonical books of the New Testament (which are “canonical” only for reasons of historical accident) and other first- and second-century Christian literature. In this regard Ehrman’s work is a more user-friendly version of the older work by Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982).

[130] E.g., Delbert Burkett, An Introduction to the New Testament and the Origins of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

[131] E.g., Robert F. Shedinger, “Kuhnian Paradigms and Biblical Scholarship: Is Biblical Studies a Science?” JBL 119 (2000): 453-71—and of course he offers a resounding “No” to his question.

[132] Markus Bockmuehl, “ ‘To Be or Not To Be': The Possible Futures of New Testament Scholarship,” SJT 51 (1998): 271-306, quote on 302.

[133] Craig L. Blomberg, “Where Should Twenty-first Century Evangelical Biblical Scholarship Be Heading?” BBR11 (2001): 161-72

A Quick Introduction to the New Testament

Previously published in An Introduction to the New Testament—Second Edition

Copyright © 1992, 2005 by D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 978-0-310-49616-8

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:

Carson, D. A.

An introduction to the New Testament / D.A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo.-2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-10: 0-310-23859-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-310-23859-1

1. Bible. N.T.—Introductions. I. Moo, Douglas J. II. Title.

BS2330.3.C37 2005

225.6′1–dc22                                           2005005186

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version®. TNIV®. Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by Zondervan, nor does Zondervan vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Cover design: Ron Huizinga

Table of Contents

Cover

A Quick Introduction to the New Testament

Copyright