One or two works of reference that cover both Testaments call for mention. The Zondervan Pictorial Bible Dictionary, edited by Merrill C. Tenney (Zondervan), is a thoroughly conservative work by sixty-five scholars, most of whom belong to the western hemisphere. A number of the geographical and archaeological articles on the New Testament, however, are contributed by E. M. Blaiklock of New Zealand—whose name adds luster to any undertaking. Hastings’s one-volume Dictionary of the Bible, first published in 1909, has been reissued in a new and revised edition (T. & T. Clark), under the editorship of H. H. Rowley (for the Old Testament) and F. C. Grant (for the New). Nearly 150 contemporary scholars have been enlisted to revise and, where necessary, replace the work of their 105 predecessors of half a century ago. But all other dictionaries are put in the shade by the appearance of Volume I of the Kittel-Friedrich Theological Dictionary of the New Testament in an English translation (Eerdmans). The gigantic task of translating this monumental work has been entrusted to G. W. Bromiley, who is carrying it out with characteristic distinction. The present writer has a special qualification for evaluating Dr. Bromiley’s work: he has read through his English translation of Volume I—twice! This volume, which runs to over 800 pages, covers the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. Dr. Bromiley is already well ahead with the translation of the following volumes; at this rate he will soon catch up with the German original, which is now approaching the end of Volume VI with the closing entries under sigma.
English-speaking students of the New Testament Greek are now well provided for. Hard on the heels of R. W. Funk’s English translation of Blass and Debrunner’s Greek Grammar of the New Testament(Chicago University Press) comes Volume III of J. H. Moulton’s Grammar of New Testament Greek (T. & T. Clark), fifty-eight years after the appearance of Volume I (Moulton’s prolegomena) and forty-eight years after Moulton’s death in the Mediterranean. This third volume, which completes the work, is devoted to syntax, and has been written by Nigel Turner. He divides the volume into two parts, the first analytical (“Building up the sentence”) and the second synthetic (“The sentence complete”); he begins with the units from which sentences are constructed and goes on from the more simple to the more complex forms, ending with the involutions of the periodic sentence. An important work on one aspect of the language of the New Testament is Greek Particles in the New Testament, by Margaret E. Thrall (Brill and Eerdmans), Volume III in the series “New Testament Tools and Studies.” Dr. Thrall includes a few important exegetical studies by way of illustrating her findings on the significance of certain particles.
Volume IV in the same series is by the editor of the series, Bruce M. Metzger: Chapters in the History of New Testament Textual Criticism (Brill and Eerdmans). This brings together a number of articles contributed by Dr. Metzger to various journals over the past few years; he has revised and expanded them for this publication. We expect further contributions to New Testament textual criticism from Dr. Metzger in the near future. A most valuable handbook for the New Testament student is the first volume of Kurt Aland’s Kurzgefasste Liste der griechischen Handschriften des Neuen Testaments (Walter de Gruyter). This is an exhaustive and up-to-date presentation of the Greek manuscript evidence for the New Testament text; although it is a German work, its catalogues can be used quite readily by English-speaking students. Further contributions to New Testament textual criticism will be found in Biblical and Patristic Studies in Memory of Robert Pierce Casey, edited by J. N. Birdsall and R. W. Thomson (Herder and Herder).
New Testament Introductions
Among New Testament introductions Robert M. Grant’s Historical Introduction to the New Testament (Harper & Row) is outstanding. It falls into three parts, of which the second is devoted to special introduction; the first deals with the principles of criticism and the third with New Testament history and theology. On principles of historical criticism he reaches conclusions that are relatively conservative, for example in his assessment of the authorship of Ephesians. A. M. Hunter’s Teaching and Preaching the New Testament (SCM) is a selection of essays and lectures on New Testament themes, including one on the genuineness of Matthew 11:25–30 and another on the style of Paul that call for careful consideration. The New Testament and Current Study, by R. H. Fuller (Scribner’s), surveys current trends in New Testament study and makes some cautious forecasts of trends to come, while pointing out the unpredictable element in such matters; who could have forecast Barth’s commentary on Romans? Gerhard Gloege’s The Day of His Coming: The Man in the Gospels (SCM), a translation from the German, studies the coming of the Jesus of history against the background of his life and times.
A new and revised edition of Oscar Cullmann’s Christology of the New Testament (SCM) has appealed. The debate between Joachim Jeremias and Kurt Aland on the origins of Christian baptism is kept up in Jeremias’s The Origins of Infant Baptism (SCM). William Barclay’s Peake Memorial Lecture has been published under the title Turning to God (Epworth); it expounds the New Testament doctrine of conversion.
The present writer, however, considers that no book in the wider field of New Testament introduction published in 1963 is more useful than A. N. Sherwin-White’s Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Clarendon Press, Oxford). The trials of Jesus and Paul, and questions regarding Roman citizenship, are studied against their contemporary background, with emphasis on how consistent the New Testament record is to its dramatic date.
Bultmann And His Critics
Rudolf Bultmann’s The History of the Synoptic Tradition has had to wait long for an English translator, but now John Marsh has translated the third German edition (Blackwell). English readers now have access to one of the most influential contributions to the form criticism of the Gospels. Two antidotes to the radical skepticism with which Bultmann and his school evaluate the historical content of the Gospel narrative are The Historical Jesus, by Heinz Zahrnt (Collins), and Historicity and the Gospels, by H. E. W. Turner (Mowbrays). Zahrnt’s book (another translation from the German) is aimed at the general reader; he challenges the dogma that it is illegitimate to try to go behind the Christ of the primitive kerygma, and shows how Bultmann’s own pupils are starting to do this very thing and finding in consequence a clear and consistent portrayal of Jesus. Turner deals with the criteria which the historian uses and examines their relevance for Gospel criticism; he finds a much larger historical core in the Gospels than the more radical criticism does. An example of the more radical criticism is provided by R. H. Fuller’s Interpreting the Miracles (SCM); his theological treatment of the miracles is, however, positive and well founded when he makes them integral to our Lord’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God. J. Jeremias’s The Parables of Jesus has appeared in a new and revised English edition (SCM).
Several books on the Kingdom of God have appeared. Herman Ridderbos’s The Coming of the Kingdom has been translated into English, to our immense enrichment (Presbyterian and Reformed); from the same publisher comes Raymond O. Zorn’s Church and Kingdom; these two entities are differentiated though associated now, but merge in the eschatological fulfillment. Two works bear the title The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus: that by the Swedish bishop Gösta Lundström (Oliver & Boyd) surveys the study of the Kingdom from Ritschl to the present day; that by the English Baptist Norman Perrin (SCM) concentrates more on British contributions to the subject and takes the evidence from Qumran into account. In The Spirit and the Kingdom (SPCK), J. E. Yates argues that, for Matthew and Mark, John the Baptist’s prediction that the Coming One would baptize with the Holy Spirit was fulfilled in our Lord’s ministry of the Kingdom, whereas for Luke it was fulfilled at Pentecost. T. W. Manson’s The Teaching of Jesus has been reissued as a paperback (Cambridge); M. Black’s Manson Memorial Lecture, The Son of Man Problem in Recent Research and Debate (Rylands Library, Manchester), brings up to date a study to which Manson paid special attention.
Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew, by G. Bornkamm, G. Barth, and H. J. Held (SCM), presents important inquiries into Matthew’s sources and the use which he made of them. The Gospel According to Matthew is also the subject of the first volume of the new “Cambridge Bible Commentary,” based on the text of the New English Bible; it has been written by A. W. Argyle. Another new series of commentaries is the “Pelican Gospel Commentaries,” of which three have appeared: Saint Matthew, by J. C. Fenton, Saint Mark, by D. E. Nineham (editor of the series), and Saint Luke, by G. B. Caird (Penguin Books). The reviewer finds that Dr. Caird communicates to him more intelligibly than the other two commentators do; this may very well be because Dr. Caird is a historian. An interesting contribution to one phase of Mark’s picture of Jesus is given by U. W. Mauser in Christ in the Wilderness (SCM), where he deals with the wilderness theme in Mark’s Gospel against the background of the wilderness theme in the whole biblical tradition.
To the same series (“Studies in Biblical Theology”) T. F. Glasson has contributed a monograph on Moses in the Fourth Gospel (SCM); he considers how the strand of interpretation of Jesus as the expected Prophet, the second Moses, is woven into the Johannine picture of him. But the year’s most distinguished contribution to Johannine literature is C. H. Dodd’s Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge), a worthy sequel and companion to The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, published ten years before. The independent transmission of historical material in the Johannine and Synoptic Gospels, he believes, can provide us with a stereoscopic view of the facts about Jesus. Like its predecessor, this book will have to be lived with in order to be properly appreciated.
When we turn to Paul, we recall that some excitement has been caused (in Britain at any rate) during 1963 by the statistical analysis of his vocabulary and style with the help of the electronic computer. It was not so much the analysis itself that caused the excitement as the interpretation put upon it by a statistical expert who suggested that the computer presented a challenge to the authority of the Church. Biblical scholars remain unperturbed; they welcome the statistical analysis as something to be correlated with all the other evidence bearing on the Pauline letters.
A warm welcome has been extended to another posthumously published work by T. W. Manson, his class lectures On Paul and John (SCM). Professor M. Black deserves our deep gratitude for the care with which he has edited these lecture notes for publication. C. K. Barrett, whose commentary on Romans appeared in 1957, has written a little book for the ordinary Christian, Reading through Romans (Epworth), which brings out the evangelical message of the epistle in a way that makes a likeminded reader want to shout “Hallelujah!”—or at least to echo the words with which Dr. Barrett ends his work: “To God be the glory! Great things He hath done.”
Additional Commentaries
Two further volumes have appeared in the “Tyndale New Testament Commentary” series—Romans, by F. F. Bruce, and Ephesians, by Francis Foulkes (Eerdmans). Foulkes points out that while the teaching in Ephesians about reconciliation, the Resurrection and exaltation of Christ, and the Holy Spirit, is characteristically Pauline, in each case it is carried further than in the other Pauline epistles and related specially to the doctrine of the Church. Pauline Teaching on Marriage, by J.-J. von Allmen (Faith Press), contains much valuable exegetical treatment of the relevant Pauline passages, especially First Corinthians 7.
J. N. D. Kelly’s commentary on The Pastoral Epistles (Harper & Row) argues for their Pauline authorship, although in composing them Paul “relied extensively—much more extensively, probably, than in his earlier ones—on the cooperation of a secretary.” The latest volume to appear in the new translation of Calvin’s New Testament commentaries is The Epistle to the Hebrews and the First and Second Epistles of Peter, translated by William B. Johnston (Oliver & Boyd). The reviewer found this volume most welcome as he was revising the manuscript of the commentary on Hebrews for the “New International Commentary.” Shortly before, Luther’s Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews also appeared in a new English dress in Volume XVI of the “Library of Christian Classics”: Luther: Early Theological Works, translated by James Atkinson (SCM).
On the fringe of the New Testament canon the English translation of Hennecke and Schneemelcher’s New Testament Apocrypha (Lutterworth) is assured of a welcome. Volume I, which appeared in 1963, covers Gospels and Related Writings; Volume II will include the apocryphal books of Acts. The English translation is edited by R. McL. Wilson in cooperation with a number of other scholars. This work is more than a mere translation, as the scholars entrusted with the various documents have checked the translations by the original Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and so forth. Some of the works from the Gnostic library of Chenoboskion are included, and in this respect the English work is even more up to date than the German one.
F. F. Bruce is Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester, England. He holds the B.A. from Cambridge University, M.A. and D.D. from Aberdeen University. Among his books are “The Acts of the Apostles,” “Are the New Testament Documents Reliable?,” and “Epistle to the Ephesians.” Dr. Bruce is the editor of “The Evangelical Quarterly.”
