Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | Januar/2022 |
Spalte: | 71–72 |
Kategorie: | Neues Testament |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Gray, Patrick [Ed.] |
Titel/Untertitel: | The Cambridge Companion to the New Testament. |
Verlag: | Cambridge u. a.: Cambridge University Press 2021. XIX, 431 S. = Cambridge Companions to Religion. Kart. £ 26,99. ISBN 9781108437707. |
Rezensent: | James K. Elliott |
This »companion« volume has its essays divided, presumably by the editor, into three sections: the first deals with the historical context into which the books in the canonical New Testament fall; part two deals with those twenty-seven books and part three is entitled »Methods and Modes of Interpretation«.
All of the essays are in English: the majority of the writers work in the USA. Many use North American English and its spellings. The other writers are, in general, British, although five of these are said (on XI) to reside in »Scotland«. The two who are English are described here as being in the »UK«, rather than in »England«. One writer works in Australia. The majority are young scholars. Invidiously to name only a handful of the authors, we have Elizabeth Shively, Helen Bond, Margaret Mitchell, Paul Foster, Nijay Gupta, Patrick Hartin, James Crossley and Leslie Baynes.
All the articles have been especially commissioned by the editor (Patrick Gray, who is Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee). Each includes at its conclusion a short list of titles (which often has at least one from each writer of the articles) suitable »for further reading«.
This Einleitung inadvertently shows how New Testament studies have changed in recent days. We, therefore, require this updated text to be on our shelves. For instance, several years ago, courses at most institutions taught the Synoptic Problem to its undergraduate audiences. Now »Q« and the two-source theory are relegated to only a few pages in a maximum of three articles. The North or even the South Galatian theory are completely ignored. Have these problems been solved, or are today’s students and readers uninterested in such matters? When I started my teaching career, it was expected that all students of theology needed to learn Greek and (ideally) Hebrew too. That is no longer the case, although I gather that the University of Leipzig (and some others) still re-quires the two biblical languages, plus Latin too, to be taught. In its old DDR days that university also required »Marxism« to be a compulsory subject, but it insisted that this subject had to be »taught by a believer«! Nowadays, Greek is said to be »too difficult« for tyros to learn. Similarly that foundational course, textual criticism, is given so little space in this book; and why is James Barker (with his misspelling of Tischendorf’s name on p. 365, as well as his mistaken »miniscules« for »minuscules« [350]) chosen for such a task? Barker also devotes only one paragraph to the vastly important coherence-based genealogical methodology, recently espoused by Gerd Mink of Münster (Westfalen). That too is also very minimalist – and strange.
The twenty-seven books that make up the canonical New Testament are here reduced to only less than half of the chapters. Those remaining chapters deal with the social, political and to the religious and philosophical milieux; the historial Jesus, as well as Part III, which deals with matters such as sociology (once again!), the-ology and the canon even if that collection of writings devotes several pages to the non-canonical writings, i. e. the apocryphal New Testament, because many (most?) current readers and stud-ents of these texts are highly motivated by such matters. So: the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas has many a reference, as in chapter three for instance, as too have the names of allegedly popular figures from the Jesus Seminar e. g. Funk or Crossan.
May it even be because most scholarly biblical studies has recently moved away from its earlier, European base to North America? Vanhoozer’s essay bucks the trend and refers to Cullmann, Bultmann (whose name still merits several references although even Marburg has taken a back seat in such matters and Bultmann’s home there is »merely« on the tourists’ route of the town) and also to Schlatter, and to Wrede.
CUP and the editor and his contributors are to be congratulated on their having produced this valued and valuable up-dated ver-sion of the current isogogics in this series of »companions«. Only one map is included (10) and the concluding Index alone tries to avoid several names mentioned in most essays and also to provide some but, certainly, not all writers and modern scholars with their initials or full Christian names/their fore-names. »Sin« and even »sexuality« merit many an entry in the index here, as too do Syrian wars, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts are referred to! Why, for example do the names listed on p. 275 only include some of them in this index? The index as a whole is an oddity and is one that even fails to have the »catholic« letters in it. These letters were referred to regularly by that name. Nevertheless, one recognises the value of the twenty-one essays preceding this index. (These essays were written by twenty-two scholars.) The finished product is no mere »textbook« but one that fits into modern, i. e. 21st-century, tastes.