Noteworthy Advances in the New Testament Field

Lest publications covering the whole Bible be over-looked between two separate articles dealing with Old Testament and New Testament studies, first mention is given here this year to The Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday; Darton, Longman and Todd), a splendid production by British Roman Catholics. It is modeled on the French Dominican Bible de Jérusalem, but while the introductions and notes are for the most part straight translations from the French, the Bible version is rendered from the original texts. An important addition to “World Christian Books” is the Concise Dictionary of the Bible in two paperback volumes, edited by Stephen Neill and others (Lutterworth). Old and New in Interpretation, by James Barr (Harper & Row; SCM), is a study of the two Testaments that deals with such crucial questions as history and revelation, typology and allegory, and the work of salvation, and for good measure adds at the end “a note on fundamentalism.”

Volume III of Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Eerdmans) covers the letters theta to kappa. The second installment of the Theologisches Begriffslexikon zum Neuen Testament (edited by L. Coenen and others (Brockhaus [Wuppertal, Germany]), a work whose character was described in last year’s survey (Feb. 4, 1966, p. 13), confirms the good impression made by the first installment; its entries, which follow the alphabetical order of German words, run from Bewachen to Elias. Nigel Turner has given us a feast of good things in Grammatical Insights into the New Testament (T. and T. Clark); here the fruits of his technical mastery of Greek grammar are made available to the Bible student. If he is right about Luke 2:2, he has solved the historical problem of this verse once for all. The Language of the New Testament, by E. V. N. Goetchius (Scribners), is a Greek beginners’ workbook.

A number of New Testament introductions call for mention. Most impressive of them is W. G. Kümmel’s Introduction to the New Testament, translated from the German by A. J. Mattill (Abingdon; SCM). This work, known to an earlier generation of students as Feine-Behm, has long been a standard handbook in German; it is good that it is now available in English. Even more massive in format is the Introduction to the New Testament by A. Robert and A. Feuillet, two French Catholic scholars, translated by P. W. Skehan and others (Desclée). R. H. Fuller’s Critical Introduction to the New Testament (Duckworth) replaces the identically entitled volume by A. S. Peake in the “Studies in Theology” series. But the work in this field that most readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY will find especially congenial is B. M. Metzger’s The New Testament: Its Background, Growth and Content (Abingdon). Understanding the New Testament, by H. C. Kee, F. W. Young, and K. Froehlich (Prentice-Hall), is a well-illustrated work prepared for the Society for Religion in Higher Education; it combines literary and theological perspectives in a historical setting so as to provide a unifying approach. New Testament Illustrations, compiled and introduced by C. M. Jones (Cambridge), is a volume in the “Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible.” New Testament Essays, by R. E. Brown (Bruce), is a selection of papers written by the author over a number of years, including some particularly important ones on the Fourth Gospel. Historicity and Chronology in the New Testament, by D. E. Nineham and others (SPCK), is a volume in the paperback series of “Theological Collections”; Nineham writes on the present position regarding the Jesus of history, and another article that may be mentioned is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s “What was the Ascension?”

Two monumental volumes have been added to the series “New Testament Tools and Studies”—Index to Periodical Literature on Christ and the Gospels, by B. M. Metzger, editor of the series, and A Classified Bibliography of Literature on the Acts of the Apostles, by A. J. Mattill and M. B. Mattill (Brill; both will also be published by Eerdmans).

Two slim contributions to the mounting literature on the Scrolls and the New Testament are M. Black, The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Doctrine (University of London Athlone Press), and F. F. Bruce, The Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Christianity (Rylands Library, Manchester).

When we come to the central issue of the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth, Saviour and Lord, a symposium in the series “Contemporary Evangelical Thought,” edited by C. F. H. Henry (Eerdmans), demands our attention. Here eight evangelical scholars have dealt with various historical and theological aspects of the New Testament doctrine of Christ. Another symposium on a similar theme is The Finality of Christ, edited by Dow Kirkpatrick (Abingdon). This is a Methodist production, although one chapter presents three non-Christian views of Christ, by a Buddhist, a Sikh, and a Jew. One excellent chapter is Morna Hooker’s “The Christology of the New Testament: Jesus and the Son of Man,” which may serve as an appetizer for a full-length book on this subject due to appear in 1967. R. H. Fuller’s Foundations of New Testament Chistology (Scribners; Lutterworth) shows how further reflection on the interpretation of the Bultmann school has persuaded him to change the position he took some years ago in The Mission and Achievement of Jesus. In Christ, Lord, Son of God (Allenson; SCM), Werner Kramer endeavors to establish pre-Pauline precedent for the characteristic Christological affirmations of Paul.

A. R. C. Leaney has given us The Christ of the Gospels (New Zealand Theological Review), while Sherman Johnson’s The Theology of the Gospels (Duckworth) supersedes the earlier volume with this title contributed to “Studies in Theology” by James Moffatt. Vindications, edited by A. T. Hanson (Morehouse-Barlow; SCM), is an outspoken rejoinder to the excessively skeptical evaluation of the New Testament documents as historical documents of which we have had a surfeit of late.

THE DEACON HAS A WIFE

With a cool, cool smile

On her sneer-bent lips

She greeted them,

Gave them two lime-green dips

Of conversation.

That was this morning.

Tonight they think

They’ll skip the sermon and have a drink

Or two with their neighbors.

She has frosted their beer

With her glacial ice.

They like it chilled

But they won’t risk such a freezing twice

In any narthex

For any price.

ELVA McALLASTER

William Barclay’s The First Three Gospels (SCM) is a popular introduction written with his characteristic lucidity and charm. The Parables of Jesus, by Eta Linneman (SPCK), is a scholarly “introduction and exposition” sponsored by Ernst Fuchs. Rediscovering the Parables, by Joachim Jeremias (Scribners; SCM), is a shorter edition of the author’s major work on The Parables of Jesus. Another of Jeremias’s major works, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, has appeared in a new English translation by Norman Perrin (Scribners; SCM).

The Gospel According to St. Matthew, by Alexander Jones, translator of The Jerusalem Bible (Sheed and Ward; Geoffrey Chapman), is a Catholic commentary based on the Revised Standard Version. The Sermon on the Mount, by W. D. Davies (Cambridge), is an abridged edition in paperback of the author’s great work on The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount. Vincent Taylor’s magisterial commentary on the Greek text of The Gospel According to St. Mark (Macmillan) has appeared in a second edition. The Gospel of Luke, by Bo Reicke (John Knox; SPCK), is an essay that undertakes to rebut the “de-eschatologizing” of the Third Evangelist familiar from the works of Hans Conzelmann. While Luke’s work is early (before A.D. 65), Reicke maintains, it can at that date envisage the world-mission of Christianity, because this is in line with Jesus’ own intention. The first New Testament volume in a new series of paperback “Bible Study Books” is St. Luke, by E. M. Blaiklock (Scripture Union). The editors of a volume of essays in honor of Paul Schubert (L. E. Keck and J. L. Martyn) have decided to devote it to Studies in Luke-Acts (Abingdon); here are nineteen important essays written from divergent viewpoints. The first of two volumes on The Gospel According to John in the Anchor Bible (Doubleday), by Raymond E. Brown, covers chapters 1–12 but includes a valuable introduction to the whole Gospel of more than 120 pages. The Gospel According to St. John, by Owen E. Evans (Epworth), is a distinguished addition to the publishers’ “Preacher’s Commentaries.”

The Acts of the Apostles in the “Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible” is expounded by J. W. Packer, one of the editors of the series (Cambridge). The volume on Acts 14–28 has been published in the new translations of Calvin’s New Testament commentaries (Eerdmans; Oliver and Boyd). For the scholar, Eldon J. Epp has contributed The Theological Tendency of Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis in Acts to the monograph series of the Society for New Testament Studies (Cambridge); he finds an anti-Judaic tendency in the manuscript.

Pauline studies have not flagged during the year. Two issues in “Studies in Biblical Theology” (Allenson; SCM) deal respectively with The Collection: A Study in Paul’s Strategy (by Keith F. Nickle) and Christianity According to Paul (by Michel Bouttier). The latter work bears almost the same title as C. A. Anderson Scott’s Christianity According to St. Paul, a standard work for nearly forty years, which has now made a welcome reappearance in paperback (Cambridge). The Gospel According to Paul, by A. M. Hunter (SCM), is a new edition of part of an earlier work and bids fair to fulfill the author’s hope that readers will find in it “a short, reliable and up-to-date sketch of St. Paul’s theology plus … a suggestion that Paul still has something to say to us.” That Paul has less to say to us than Hunter thinks is the opinion of A. Q. Morton and J. McLeman, whose Paul: The Man and the Myth (Harper & Row; Hodder and Stoughton) is described as “a study in the authorship of Greek prose” but is less dispassionate than essays in statistical analysis normally are.

The eager impatience of those who waited for the second volume of John Murray’s commentary on Romans in the “New International Commentary” series (Eerdmans) has been more than rewarded by its appearance. In this volume, covering chapters 9–16, Professor Murray has excelled himself, giving proof not only of his well-known qualities as theological exegete but also of his sound judgment as an exponent of Christian ethics. Another volume in the series of new translations of Calvin’s commentaries contains the Reformer’s work on Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians (Eerdmans; Oliver and Boyd). A welcome reprint of a much appreciated classic has been issued by Baker Book House in its “Limited Editions Library”: W. M. Ramsay’s Historical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. Where Ramsay has least to give—in the study of the theological content of the epistle—a major contribution has been offered to us in the doctoral dissertation by A. J. Bandstra entitled The Law and the Elements of the World (Kok [Kampen, the Netherlands]). Bandstra takes issue with the common view that the “elements of the world” in Galatians and Colossians are the lords of the planetary spheres and concludes that the “elements” envisaged by Paul are two in number—the law and the flesh—and do not need to be demythologized for twentieth-century application as the astral powers do.

ST. MATTHEW 25:42

Waterswollen bellies of the unfed

Mock most of the hymnody pieties

Of those of us who gnaw our daily bread

(Moaning meanwhile about all the inflation

In a martini-thirsty nation,

And the inconvenience of our lot).…

And yet, beyond some reredos,

Some gilded morning, Deity

Chargingly emerging may

Have a discommoding say:

I was hungry and you fed me not.

HENRY HUTTO

The volume on The Pastoral Letters in the “Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible” has been written by A. T. Hanson (Cambridge); he finds many puzzling features in these three letters, particularly the miscellaneous character of their contents. The author, urging his readers to remain true to the teaching they had received, takes his theological language “from the prayer book and hymn book of his day” and includes in his work genuine fragments of Paul, which belong to the period following Paul’s release from his first Roman imprisonment.

Volume VI of The Wesleyan Bible Commentary, edited by C. W. Carter (Eerdmans), covers the New Testament books from Hebrews to Revelation; this is a conservative production, with strong devotional emphasis, based on the American Standard Version. Two excellent works on James appeared in 1966. One is The Epistle of James by C. L. Mitton, the latest volume in the “Evangelical Bible Commentary” (Eerdmans). It is a verse-by-verse commentary by a well-known scholar that reveals the relevance of James’s teaching for today and insists throughout that “faith is not true faith unless it is the motive power that produces Christian living.” The same essential emphasis is found in James Speaks for Today, by H. F. Stevenson (Marshall, Morgan and Scott), a collection of twenty studies in the epistle in which its heavenly wisdom is applied to earthly practice.

B. F. Westcott’s commentary on the Greek text of The Epistles of St. John has been reprinted by the Marcham Manor Press, with a preliminary essay in which the present writer surveys the progress of Johannine studies since Westcott’s day. A modern approach to the problem of the first epistle is presented by J. C. O’Neil in The Puzzle of First John (SPCK).

Our survey of commentaries ends with one of the best to appear in 1966—G. B. Caird’s The Revelation of St. John the Divine in “Harper’s New Testament Commentaries” (Harper & Row). When so much has been said about the Revelation as a reaction to pre-Christian Jewish eschatology, or as a putrid backwater in relation to the mainstream of Christian thought, it is refreshing to read a work by a scholar who sees it so clearly for the thoroughly Christian book it is. And when so much literature on the Revelation gives way to unrestrained fantasy, it is refreshing to turn to the product of such a disciplined mind as Dr. Caird’s.

The New Testament literature is related to the Christian literature of the period immediately following in the new edition of Edgar J. Goodspeed’s History of Early Christian Literature (first published in 1942), revised and enlarged by Robert M. Grant (University of Chicago Press). Its scope ranges from Paul to Eusebius.