Brighter Outlook in the New Testament Field

Last year’s book survey had cause to complain that 1967 was a lean year for the New Testament interpreter. This time there is cause to rejoice, for 1968 was a year of plenty, both in quantity and quality.

Worthy of first mention is once again the latest volume in the English translation of Kittel’s wordbook. Thanks to the indefatigable labors of Geoffrey Bromiley, volume five takes its place on the shelf in the growing treasury of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Eerdmans). By now it is superfluous to praise this massive work, or to commend it to the alert student and pastor; just the announcement of publication should be enough to send him scurrying to the bookstore. This volume covers the Greek words whose initial letter is xi, omicron (in full), and pi (in part). Thus we are given full data, in typical Kittel style, on such important words as hodos (way); oikos (house, with cognate forms such as the verb to build); homologeo (to confess); hoplon (weapon: this article is much wider than the single word; it passes on to consider all the New Testament terms that deal with militia Christi and will prove especially useful in the study of Ephesians 6); horao (to see: here again the article extends its scope and takes in all the New Testament words of vision with their various nuances); orge (wrath), given a worthy treatment that does not bypass the theological issues of God’s wrath; parabole (parable); parakletos (where the rendering “advocate” is preferred to clarify our appreciation of the Holy Spirit’s office); pater (father, with excellent studies of family life in Judaism and New Testament teaching, and of the rich seam of truth of the divine fatherhood). But the longest article is also the best. In cooperation with Zimmerli, who contributes on the Old Testament side, J. Jeremias reproduces the lines of his cogent study on pais theou (servant of God) and with a wealth of erudition tells probably all there is to know about the meaning of Isaiah 53 and its background in Jewish and New Testament theology. The picture of Jesus as the suffering Servant is sketched in bold relief in this fine essay. One further observation on this volume: for the first time in the encyclopedia use is made of the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is one sign that post-World War II volumes are now being translated.

The past year has been a good one for the study of the Gospel of John, with at least three significant books expounding the deep themes of the “spiritual gospel,” as Clement of Alexandria aptly named it. High on the list of these commentaries, in this or any year, must be R. Schnackenburg’s The Gospel According to St. John (Herder; Burns and Oates [for some books mentioned in this survey we list both an American and a British publisher]). This commentary in a projected multi-volumed coverage of the entire Gospel consists of a long introduction and an exegesis of chapters 1–4. Its treatment is all that an ideal commentary should be; it is marked both by an extensive knowledge of the relevant literature (and there is enough to fill a library) and by a depth of penetration and exegetical skill. The label “magisterial” would not be out of place. But the real significance of Schnackenburg’s work is that it offers for the first time a viable alternative to Bultmann’s commentary, which also is being translated into English. Throughout his pages and particularly in a number of excursuses, Schnackenburg is in running debate with Bultmann, preferring to maintain, with powerful reasons to support his case, that John is to be understood on an Old Testament—Jewish background rather than a Hellenistic-Gnostic.

The other titles on the shelf marked Johannine are J. N. Sanders, The Gospel According to St. John (Harper & Row; Black), and E. Käsemann, The Testament of Jesus (SCM). The former is a work published posthumously and edited and completed by the author’s former pupil, B. A. Mastin. It stands in the characteristic British tradition of sober exegesis and a high regard for gospel history; therefore the commentator’s verdict on authorship will hardly be expected, for he offers in all seriousness the novel view that the evangelist John is none other than John Mark, writer of the second Gospel and composer of the Revelation. There are obvious difficulties with this identification, not least the problem of how the varying styles of writing are to be accounted for. The second book from a post-Bultmannian scholar is novel in a far more thoroughgoing fashion. Indeed, his conclusion (if it had any semblance of plausibility) would give most readers a violent trauma. Käsemann holds that the Johannine Christ is scarcely a human figure at all. He is presented as a God who walks on the earth but whose feet are two inches off the ground all the time. The evangelist has succumbed to heretical thinking that denies the Lord’s true humanity, and offers his Gospel as a protest against orthodox, catholic Christianity. The logical outcome of Käsemann’s argument, which has a fragile base indeed, is that the fourth Gospel was received into the canon by mistake, “by human error and divine providence.” Any attempt to understand John’s Gospel that leads to this monstrous conclusion is suspect from the start.

Our preference for a more straightforward way of looking at John must not pre-empt discussion of other New Testament books that pose testy problems. Here we think of Ephesians, judged by many Christians to be the high-water mark of the Pauline letters. The liturgical cast of this epistle has long been appreciated; both its language and style are in keeping with the idea that it is not a pastoral letter sent out to meet a local situation but a prose-poem dedicated to the theme of Christ in his Church. Now a Canadian scholar draws the inference that it is not a letter at all but a joining together of a eucharistic prayer and a sermon based on a discourse taken from the liturgical readings of the Feast of Pentecost. The combination of these elements of early worship suggests to J. C. Kirby in his Ephesians: Baptism and Pentecost (SPCK) that the document we call Ephesians finds its natural setting in a baptismal service. This is suggestive, but not all the evidence falls into the pattern.

Another recent effort to reopen a part of the New Testament closed for some time is made by A. T. Hanson. In Studies in the Pastoral Epistles (SPCK) he tries to use these letters to throw light on a dark-tunnel period of Christian history between the death of Paul and Bishop Ignatius. Some of his exegetical findings are worthwhile, but the overall thesis of a second-century dating of the epistles runs into serious trouble.

Finding the most likely “life-setting” of the New Testament documents is an occupational hobby of some scholars, who eagerly seize upon such letters as Second Peter and Jude for this purpose. Not so with E. M. B. Green, whose Tyndale commentary on these epistles (Eerdmans) brings the series almost within sight of completion. Green offers a stout defense of the letters’ authenticity and unity, and gives a careful review of the debate before opting for a conservative conclusion. His explanatory notes on the text well maintain the proven value of this unpretentious series of commentaries.

A commentary with a wider field to cover is that by C. K. Barrett on The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Harper & Row; Black). Last year’s survey was hesitant about this author’s attitude toward gospel history; no such reserve need be injected into a commendation of this major work on the liveliest of all Paul’s letters. The commentator has a judicious comment on each problem text and, with a touch of distinction visible again and again, brings to life the Corinthian situation and the inspired apostle’s handling of it. A first-rate piece of work, this book makes us impatient for Barrett’s promised commentary on the companion espistle.

Two large offerings on the life and teaching of Paul have appeared this year, but unhappily neither of them would merit a place among the great books on the Pauline shelf. E. W. Hunt calls his treatment Portrait of Paul (Mowbray). It follows conventional lines marked out by traditional Anglo-Saxon scholarship and breaks new ground only by proposing that its subject may be described in musical terms. Paul’s message is likened to the movements of a symphony. Brahms’s First Symphony is in mind, with its musical representation of the victory of good over evil. But even more addicted to the textbook approach to Paul and his doctrine is L. Cerfaux’s The Christian in the Theology of St. Paul (Chapman). This final product of a recently deceased Roman Catholic scholar crowns the exegetical work of a lifetime, coming as the last member of a trio of books on Christ and the Church in the apostle’s thought and experience. Its chief usefulness will be as a repository of biblical verses rather than as a new insight into Paul’s life and labors. For some fresh insights we need to turn to Paul and Qumran (Chapman), edited by J. Murphy-O’Connor. This composite volume performs the valuable service of making available in English some scholarly articles that in recent times have appeared in learned journals in French and German. They have a common interest in seeking to throw light on Paul’s teaching from the data of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Pauline themes they illumine are central and decisive, such as justification by faith, mystery, the link between Ephesians and the Qumran texts, and truth. The claims made are advanced cautiously, and the book is marked by sobriety and sound judgment.

Discussion of the historical Jesus has not been much furthered in this year’s list. The Catholic writer X. Léon-Dufour has found a translator for his book now available as The Gospels and the Jesus of History (Collins). Though based on an erudite French treatment, this version makes few claims as a technical work of theology. But it will fill a space as a popular assessment of modernday trends from a conservative stance within the Catholic Church. Telltale signs of the author’s adherence are seen in his attitude to the pre-Synoptic tradition with a reliance on oral testimony, and his support of the quest of the Jesus of Galilee. Three supplementary books may be mentioned as they touch upon the very matters that are highlighted in Léon-Dufour’s book. The authorship of Matthew’s Gospel and its claim to apostolic authority are much to the front in the classic Catholic solution of the Synoptic problem. Liberal Protestants and form critics take an opposite and skeptical view. Now, in a highly competent and detailed study, R. H. Gundry seeks to have a second look at the matter. The Use of the OldTestament in St. Matthew’s Gospel (Brill) will do much to enhance the reputation of conservative scholarship in an area where it has a congenial contribution to make, namely, textual analysis and appraisal. Gundry examines the 148 Old Testament references in Matthew and discusses their textual affinities. An upshot of his treatment is the submission that the Apostle Matthew may well have been responsible for collecting the Lord’s words and be the author of the gospel book that bears his name. Another younger American scholar, Douglas R. A. Hare, in The Theme of Jewish Persecution of Christians in the Gospel According to St. Matthew (Cambridge) builds on the contrary assumption that this Gospel reflects the theological interest of an unknown Christian at a time when the Church and the synagogue had parted company. His distinctive thesis that Matthew’s Gospel came out of a situation in which the mission to Israel had failed and the Jews were treated as rejected by God founders on such a verse as 23:39 and is almost incredible.

A book that touches a nerve center of apostolic Christianity is not to be overlooked because it is small. Otto Betz in his What Do We Know About Jesus? (SCM) turns to the witness of the Qumran scrolls as well as to that of the Synoptics to face the issue, Was Jesus simply a man who knew himself to have a divine commission, who could represent God himself but without any particular office such as Messiah-Son of God? Betz’s response to this deep question does not share the agnosticism of much modern gospel study.

A logician takes a close look at some of the cherished presuppositions of gospel study in H. Palmer’s The Logic of Gospel Criticism (Macmillan). In a difficult but rewarding essay he subjects the four disciplines of textual, documentary, source, and form criticism to some perceptive analyses and comes up with surprising results. The overall impression of his book is a fresh understanding of the gospel writers, who cannot be properly evaluated if we persist (as many form critics do) in viewing them as “telegraph operators, camp-fire raconteurs, or Boy Scouts standing in a line.” In an indirect way Palmer contributes to the demise of a literary and form criticism that sees the evangelists as mere collectors of an anonymous tradition or the faceless men of an ecclesiastical school. He supports the latest vogue in gospel study, which is dignified by the descriptive tag Redaktionsgeschichte (“editorial history”); if this term seems mystifying, one can find a whole treatise devoted to its meaning in J. Rohde’s Rediscovering the Teaching of the Evangelists (Westminster; SCM). This volume, based on a dissertation in East Germany, is little more than a summary of current research in a field largely in the hands of German scholars, so its value is mainly one of transatlantic communication. But Anglo-Saxon scholars have not been slow to catch on, and already we are able to greet a study of John the Baptist from the standpoint of “editorial criticism” that takes seriously the claim of the evangelists as historians and theologians in their own right. W. Wink surveys what may be known of the Messianic herald in John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition (Cambridge). The bridge between John and Jesus is well established in this interesting study, and fresh direction is given on the road back to the historical figures of the gospel narrative.

Two introductions to the New Testament may be bracketed only for convenience, for they have little in common. W. Marxsen’s Introduction (Blackwell) looks at the documents through Bultmannian spectacles and finds traces of an omnipresent Gnosticism at every turn of the page. A valuable corrective is at hand, however, in R. McL. Wilson’s Gnosis and the New Testament (Blackwell). Much more durable is the contribution of Oscar Cullmann in his popular survey, The New Testament (SCM). Although offered only as a sketch, it does a remarkable work of mediating the results of a “middle of the road” scholarship to a wide audience and refuses to surrender to either a blind obscurantism or the latest critical novelty. A postscript locates the genius of the New Testament in the conviction that through the historical events of Jesus of Nazareth, the past, present, and future are gathered up in a story of salvation that “has Christ as its meaning and apex.”

Among other published titles are:

GENERAL. Christian History and Interpretation, a Festschrift for J. Knox, edited by W. R. Farmer, C. F. D. Moule, and R. R. Niebuhr (Cambridge); Soli Deo Gloria, a Festschrift for W. C. Robinson, edited by J. M. Richards (John Knox), and The Pattern of New Testament Truth, by G. E. Ladd (Eerdmans).

THE GOSPELS. The Beginning of the Gospel (Mark), by C. F. Evans (SPCK); The History of the Synoptic Tradition (revised and corrected ed.), by R. Bultmann (Blackwell); An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (third ed.), by M. Black (Oxford); Jesus in the Church’s Gospels, by J. Reumann (Fortress); Jesus and the Power of Satan, by J. Kallas (Westminster); History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, by J. L. Martyn (Harper & Row); The Open Heaven: Revelation of God in the Johannine Sayings, by W. H. Cadman (Blackwell); According to John, by A. M. Hunter (SCM); and Gospel According to St. John, by J. Marsh (Pelican).

PAUL. Theology and Ethics in Paul, by V. P. Furnish (Abingdon); Paul’s Concept of Inheritance, by J. D. Hester (Oliver and Boyd); Another Jesus: A Gospel of Jewish-Christian Superiority in Second Corinthians, by D. W. Oostendorp (Kok); and First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, by R. P. Martin (Scripture Union).

THE EARLY CHURCH. More New Testament Studies (mostly reprints), by C. H. Dodd (Manchester University Press); and The Resurrection of Christ, by S. H. Hooke (Darton, Longman and Todd).

THEOLOGY. The Significance of the Message of the Resurrection for Faith in Jesus Christ, edited by C. F. D. Moule (SCM); The Pre-existence of Christ, by F. B. Craddock (Abingdon); An Introduction to the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann, by W. Schmithals (SCM); and The New Temple: A Study of the Church, by R. J. McKelvey (Oxford).

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