You know you must be getting on a bit when you're prepared to read a 700 page tome replete with dates and names, and theories and movements about how people in the last 80 years have read and interpreted the New Testament. Why would you do that?
It's not as if historical critical study of the New Testament is at the cutting edge of contemporary life, unless it's in the academy, the learned society and those who have nothing better to do with their time.
Now that's an interesting evaulative criterion about a book which spends quite a lot of time examining evaluative criteria for authenticating the words of Jesus! I read this book because I had nothing better to do with my time. What would have been a better use of my time?
Well, read the New Testament itself, not what a lot of dead people wrote and said about it. After all if it really is the historic witness to the greatest story ever told, what it says is more important than the revisions and excisions of generations of scholars.
Or. Read something that deals with one or other of the huge issues facing our world today, like the mass migration of refugees as people move away from war looking for safety; or the pollution and slow asphyxiation of our planet. Justice and creation care are surely more relevant than whether a demythologiser of ancient texts might have been right or wrong, or whether Matthew or Mark were first to post the patent application for the idea of a written Gospel?
Or write something yourself that is about your own passion, your own interests, that comes out of your own lived experience rather than merely rehearsing what others have got excited about, or upset about decades ago.
Or bake a cake, cut the grass, go shopping, climb another mountain, read a novel, visit the sick, write and preach a sermon, go a run in the car, do some tapestry, paint the windows, go see a film, walk by the sea, get a haircut, pray for a while, listen to music, read some decent theology, take your camera to the country, support a charity.... actually I do all these things, but I also made time to read this book.
I suppose the point is we will always have something better to do than what we are doing, unless we can give good reasons for what we are doing, and why we are doing it now. So here's a go at three reasons why the time and mental energy reading this book would not have been better spent doing one or some or all of the above.
Intellectual humility. I read the Bible a lot, and anyone who does knows that it bristles with problems, upsets our assumptions, comes from strange places in even stranger times, is embedded in many cultures and that the texts were produced over the centuries of 5 empires. The New Testament is a literary masterpiece made up of documents that were so embedded in their context, so specific to occasion, so soaked in cultural and religious norms, beliefs and values, that the idea I can simply read off what's there as if it were an email from God, is not to reverence Scripture but to trivialise it, not to submit to Scripture but to compel the Bible to be what I think it should be by giving an arrogant primacy to what I think. One way to avoid that is to learn how others have read and tried to understand; the questions, insights and approaches of previous serious readers. Hence names like Dodd and Betz, Conzelmann and Kummel, Barrett and Sanders, Bultmann and Cullmann, Martyn and Wright, are not mere debating ciphers in a tedious display of ongoing literary and theological pedantry. They were and are amongst the Church's most important voices calling the Church to faithful engagement with its own foundation charter.
Balanced Perspective. Bultmann's famous dictum about no exegesis without presuppositions should need no further argument. I read from the standpoint of a western, white, late middle aged male, whose life has been spent in Scotland, a small island nation on the edge of Europe. My education is in philosophy, history and theology, supplemented with 50 years of serious reading around other subjects including natural history, biography, social sciences, poetry and literature. I speak only one language with any fluency; all I know of the southern hemisphere is from TV, online and other distance learning; I am a Scottish Baptist, a small evangelical presence in a country with a powerful Presbyterian and Calvinist history. I read the New Testament through these and other lenses I haven't mentioned, and even some I'm not even aware of. I need other viewpoints and to be shown the landscape of the text from other standpoints. The text requires of me that I listen with care to what others in the community of faith have seen or failed to see; I'm willing to borrow the binoculars of this or that companion on the way in order to see more clearly, and realise that what I took to be a faraway rock is in fact a cleverly built house.
Fruitful Conversation. I don't have to agree with all, or even much, that someone else writes in order to learn from them. Often the important gift brought to the table is not the definitive answer but the defining question. To be made to think, and often enough made to think again, is one of the ways the Spirit of God gets it through our thick skulls that we are not the arbiters of truth, nor the copywright and permissions controllers of the New Testament. To borrow the image from the unknown writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "Seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses..." why wouldn't we listen to their testimony, the story of their journey, the discoveries they made that I missed when I was last there? That verse goes on "running with perseverance the race set before us.....looking to Jesus, the starter and finisher of our faith."
The mainstream of New Testament Study is overwhelmingly populated by men and women who seek to be faithful within academy and church. Yes many of these scholars dig deep into the foundations of faith and at times rattle us all around with questions and conclusions we don't like. But just one example. Those who dismissed and trashed the work of Rudolph Bultmann overlooked, or worse still deliberately ignored, Bultmann's ministry of preaching sermons deep dyed in Gospel urgency, his faithfulness against Hitler in his witness to the Gospel of Christ, and his own deep piety that was a powerful underwater current in his intellectual and spiritual life.
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