Thinking About The Study Of The New Testament PDF

THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT THE RISE OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY35 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 brie...

THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT THE RISE OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY35 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 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,” AUSS 32 (1994): 203–15. 35See 47 + = 48 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 considerations36 —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 (see chapter 2 of this book). (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 (for example, see the chapters on 2 Thessalonians and Romans in this book). Similar source criticism is applied to other New Testament documents. 36See J. Sandys-Wunsch and L. Eldredge, “J. P. Gabler and the Distinction Between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology,” SJT 33 (1980): 133–58. THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 and repeatedly in later chapters of this book. 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 37See 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. 49 + = 50 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 God had 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 38Göttingen: 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. 39Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments (Nördlingen: Beck, 1886). 40Of 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). THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 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). 42See especially his Salvation in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). 43See especially G. Ernest Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital, SBT 8 (London: SCM, 1962). 44Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1933–74; ET: Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964– 1974). 45See 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). 41See 51 The last fifty years or so have been characterized by astonishing diversity in biblical theology. + = 52 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 46Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948). 47A Theology of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974 [rev. ed. 1993]). 48New Testament Theology (Downers Grove: IVP, 1981). Theology of the New Testament According to Its Major Witnesses (London: SCM, 1974 [1969]). 50New 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. 51Neutestamentliche Theologie: Ein Überblick (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1989); idem, Theologie des Neuen Testaments (Freiburg: Herder, 1994). 52Theology of the New Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000). 53An Outline of the Theology of the New Testament (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). 54Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). 55New Testament Theology, ed. Lincoln D. Hurst (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 49The THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 Some of these, of course, are described in the chapters that follow. 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 year59 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. 56Theologiegeschichte des Urchristentums (Tübingen: Francke, 1994). 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). 58E.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). 59Cf. D. A. Carson, New Testament Commentary Survey, 5th ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001). 57See 53 + = 54 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 (as will be discussed in the next chapter). 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 assign60See, for example, the important work of W. Ward Gasque, A History of the Crit- icism of the Acts of the Apostles, BGBE 17 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1975), though it is now somewhat dated. 61Although 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. THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT ing 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 historicalcritical “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, 62See especially his History of the Synoptic Tradition (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). 63See his The Gospel of John (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971). 64For 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). 55 + = 56 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT these tools constitute a large part of the methodological heart of the three principal “quests for the historical Jesus” detailed in the next chapter. 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 65By 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). 66See, 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. 67One 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). 68For 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. 69E.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?” JETS 44 (2001): 599–614. THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT importance of well-preserved oral instruction amongst Jesus’ followers70 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 welldefined 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 especially Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). 71E.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. 72See especially Richard Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). 73Even 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]). 70See 57 + = 58 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 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. Most of these matters are introduced a little more fully, along with appropriate bibliography, in the pages ahead. One or two examples may help. 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 historicalcritical 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. 74Philadelphia: Fortress Press. THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 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. 75For 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). 76See the essays collected by Stanley E. Porter and Dennis E. Stamps, eds., The Rhetorical Interpretation of Scripture, JSNTSup 180 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999). 59 + = 60 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 77The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 78Perhaps 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. THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 readerresponse 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. 79C. Baldick, ed., Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 80Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “The Reader in New Testament Interpretation,” in Hearing the New Testament, ed. Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 313–14. 61 Deconstructionists are no less textcentered than structuralists, but they add to the brew a radical skepticism. + = 62 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 ScholMabee, Reading Sacred Texts Through American Eyes: Biblical Interpretation as Cultural Critique (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1991). 82David Seeley, Deconstructing the New Testament, BIS 5 (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 83Stephen D. Moore, Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspectives: Jesus Begins to Write (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 84Stephen D. Moore, Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994). 85Christopher Rowland and Mark Corner, Liberating Exegesis: The Challenge of Liberation Theology to Biblical Studies (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1989). 81Charles THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT arly 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 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). 87As 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–). 88Gordon J. Thomas, “Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw? An Evangelical Response to the New Literary Criticism,” EQ 71 (1999): 48. Cf. similarly, Peter Cotterell and Max Turner, Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation (London: SPCK, 1989), 30. 86E.g., 63 + = 64 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 89Elsewhere, 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. 90Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994), 73 and passim. THINKING ABOUT THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 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 i