Last year, Prof Diarmaid MacCulloch, who serves as Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, gave the Gifford Lectures. Prof MacCulloch is an excellent historian who has written important books on the Reformation and the history of Christianity. Check them out!
Here is my review of William Baird’s excellent History of New Testament Research (Vol. 3). Thank again to Fortress for this review copy.
Unfortunately, theologians today increasingly lack historical knowledge and an interest in history, and above all are too ignorant of the legacy of the past, whether of the Old Testament and Judaism, or of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Since the so-called “scholars” are gradually failing us here, it is doubly important for us as Christians to try to acquire a deeper historical understanding of what took place more than 1900 years ago; without such historical understanding our theological thinking, too, will all too easily become barren.
Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity[1].
From what I can gather about the late Dr. Hegel, he did not pull any punches when it came to the New Testament and its historical background. I could not agree more with these words, and I could not be more convicted either.
1. Cited in Barid’s History of New Testament Research: Vol. 3
The very kind folks over at Fortress Press sent along volume three of William Baird’s must read History of New Testament Research. If you have not read the first two volumes, go and get them all! These volumes are a must for the student of the New Testament. I look forward to reviewing this excellent volume.
In this masterful volume—the culmination of his three-volume History of New Testament Research (vol. 1, From Deism to Tübingen, 1992; vol. 2, From Jonathan Edwards to Rudolf Bultmann, 2012)—William Baird continues his insightful, balanced, and accessible survey of the major developments in New Testament scholarship. Volume 3 charts the dramatic discoveries and breakthroughs in method and approach that characterized the mid- and late twentieth century. Baird gives attention to the biographical and cultural setting of persons and approaches, affording both beginning student and seasoned scholar an authoritative account of the evolution of historical-critical study of the New Testament.
In case you are interested:
History of New Testament Research, Vol. 1: From Deism to Tubingen
History of New Testament Research: Vol. 2: From Jonathan Edwards to Rudolf Bultmann
History of New Testament Research: Vol. 3: From C. H. Dodd to Hans Dieter Betz
Wherever the subject of discussion is God’s revelatory action—and to it belongs creation in a special degree—there, in the Primitive Christian view, the subject of discussion is Christ, the same person whose incarnation can be dated in an ordinary chronological manner.
Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time, 25.
The good folks over at Baker Academic are putting out good stuff these days. These are just a few that they have coming later this year.
Highly respected New Testament scholar Craig Keener is known for his meticulous and comprehensive research. This commentary on Acts, his magnum opus, may be the largest and most thoroughly documented Acts commentary available. Useful not only for the study of Acts but also early Christianity, this work sets Acts in its first-century context.
In this volume, the second of four, Keener continues his detailed exegesis of Acts, utilizing an unparalleled range of ancient sources and offering a wealth of fresh insights. This magisterial commentary will be an invaluable resource for New Testament professors and students, pastors, Acts scholars, and libraries.
In this addition to the award-winning BECNT series, highly regarded New Testament scholar Douglas Moo offers a substantive yet accessible commentary on Galatians. With extensive research and thoughtful chapter-by-chapter exegesis, Moo leads readers through all aspects of the book of Galatians-sociological, historical, and theological-to help them better understand its meaning and relevance.
As with all BECNT volumes, this commentary features the author’s detailed interaction with the Greek text and an acclaimed, user-friendly design. It admirably achieves the dual aims of the series-academic sophistication with pastoral sensitivity and accessibility-making it a useful tool for pastors, church leaders, students, and teachers.
This volume addresses the most important issues related to the study of New Testament writings. Two respected senior scholars have brought together a team of distinguished specialists to introduce the Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman backgrounds necessary for understanding the New Testament and the early church. The book includes seventy-five photographs, fifteen maps, numerous tables and charts, illustrations, and bibliographies. All students of the New Testament will value this reliable, up-to-date, comprehensive textbook and reference volume on the New Testament world.
Many books are available on the historical Jesus, but few address issues that are critically central to Christian faith-namely, Jesus as resurrected Lord, Christ, and Son of God. This comprehensive introduction to the study of the historical Jesus takes both scholarship and Christian faith seriously.
Leading New Testament scholar Lee Martin McDonald brings together two critically important dimensions of the story of Jesus: what we can know about him in his historical context and what we can responsibly claim about his significance for faith today. McDonald examines the most important aspects of the story of Jesus from his birth to his resurrection and introduces key issues and approaches in the study of the historical Jesus. He also considers faith issues, taking account of theological perspectives that secular historiography cannot address. The book incorporates excerpts from primary sources and includes a map and tables.
Any person declared a criminal by the highest authority of his or her society and accordingly put to death in a most shameful and brutal way at a public execution has obviously been pushed to the margins of that society. The ultimate impoverishment, the ultimate margin, is death, especially death by torture as a punishment meted out by the state for gross criminality. In Roman eyes, Jesus died the ghastly death of slaves and rebels; in Jewish eyes, he fell under the stricture of Deut 21:23: “The one hanged [on a tree] is accursed by God.” To both groups Jesus’ trial and execution made him marginal in a terrifying and disgusting way. Jesus was a Jew living in a Jewish Palestine directly or indirectly controlled by Romans. In one sense, he belonged to both worlds; in the end, he was ejected from both.
A few weeks Mohr Siebeck graciously sent a review copy of the recently published collection of essays honoring Martin Hengel entitled Earliest Christian History: History, Literature and Theology. Edited by Mike Bird and Jason Maston, these essays originated with the Tyndale Fellowship in Cambridge. Some of the contributors include former students and close associates of Hengel like Don Hagner, Seyoon Kim, and Roland Denies. Each of the essays represent areas of study that Hengel spent his life teaching and writing on.
I just finished reading the first to chapters of the book, both of which are biographical sketches on Hengel: “Martin Hengel as Theological Teacher” by Jörg Frey and “Martin Hengel: Christology in Service of the Church” by Roland Denies. These two chapters do much in introducing Martin Hengel’s influence in NT studies and the motivation and desire he had to serve the Church. They portray Hengel not just only as an astute historian, but also a man deeply engaged in the theological study of the NT. Hengel was a man who loved to teach and a man who never stopped learning. He is presented as a warm man, always approachable and interested in the work of his students, both while they were working on a PhD and after they already secured teaching posts. It is always nice when I hear such recollections of men that I look up to from afar, and Hengel is such a man. He loved the Bible and never tired of learning from it. Jörg Frey offers this memorable memory of Hengel in his opening paragraph:
The scene was unforgettable. During the orientation days for new students of Protestant Theology—beginning winter semester 1983/84—representatives of the famous Tübigen Faculty in the Evangelischen Stift had to introduce the various theological disciplines. Every one of them tried to feature the importance of their subject for theology as a whole, but they all missed to create that real tingle that could have fascinated the novice. Only one went beyond limits. He did not keep talking about his scholarly field for very long, but instead he put great emphasis on its object, the New Testament. Whilst pulling a little heavily worn blue booklet—his old “Nestle-Aland”—out of his pocket, swinging it through the air, he urged his audience with great vigour: “Read this book! In Greek! It’s a good book.
We pray God to give us his guidance, and that we may have the help of the power of the Lord, for nowhere can we find even the bare footsteps of men who have preceded us in the same path, unless it be those slight indications by which in divers ways they have left to us partial accounts of the times through which they have passed, raising their voices as a man holds up a torch from afar, calling to us from on high as from a distant watch-tower, and telling us how we must walk, and how to guide the course of our work without error or danger.
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History: 1.1.3
On Monday we offered part one of a conversation with Dr. Craig Keener. Today we conclude our interview and I want to again thank Dr. Keener for taking the time to answer a few questions about Acts and his new commentary just published by Baker Academic. If you have not yet gone a purchased a copy, I would strongly suggest that you do!
1.You describe your commentary on Acts as being “socio-historical and, in some cases, rhetorical in its focus.” For the reader who does not understand exactly what the term “socio-historical” means, can you explain for us how that looks and how it maybe differs from other approaches that have been taken by past commentators like Bruce, Barrett, etc.?
I try to set Acts and what happens in Acts as fully as possible in its first-century context. That means not just noting where events fit our knowledge of ancient history, but how the ideas, customs, relationships and so on map out in relation to the ideas, customs, relationships, etc. of the first century world. Ancient rhetorical principles, for example, can help make obvious Paul’s genius in his defense speeches in Acts; I believe that an ancient hearer would understand that Paul should have been immediately released after his speech in Acts 24, and was not released only because of the political complications of his case.
2. How do the speeches in Acts help shape the message of Acts? Are they complete speeches or does Luke edit them, or possibly create them for Acts?
They cannot be complete speeches, because Luke sometimes has speeches that are said to have gone on for hours, yet take a minute or two to read; in Acts 2, Luke explicitly says that Peter on this occasion added many other words that Luke has not recorded. The best practice in ancient historiography was to use whatever you knew (or your predecessors thought they knew or inferred) about a speech as a core, and then develop it into the kind of speech you would expect to have been given on the occasion. Interestingly, Luke’s speeches are short, not fleshed out like typical speeches in ancient historiography. No one had video recorders, but Luke does not appear to embellish his sources the way the genre allowed. He does use the historian’s right to select what is useful for the purposes of his larger work. Because preaching is central to his account, speech summaries appear fairly regularly in his narrative, and recount ideas of value for understanding how early Christian preachers communicated their message.
3. You mention that most of the alleged historical inaccuracies in ancient historical works center around speeches rather than narrative, would you say this is true of Acts also?
This is a generalization in the sense that historians could make mistakes in narratives and could also include very accurate information in speeches, but by and large, one tends to find more invention of history in speeches. In Acts, the focus of the speeches is the narration of Jesus already offered in greater detail in Luke’s Gospel. But one may note that the one historical point on which Acts has most been challenged appears in a speech in Acts ch. 5, and that speeches were the place where ancient readers would be least surprised by historical incongruities.
4. Besides the OT, what other sources does Luke rely on for his work?
Luke says that he has material going back to eyewitnesses (Luke 1:1-2); he (or on some views, his eyewitness source) actually was present during part of the action in Acts, particularly Paul’s Roman custody, which is narrated in detail. His primary theological sources, of course, are the OT, as you note, and also the account of Jesus that he already offered in volume 1. For Acts, I suspect that most of his sources were oral—Paul, Judean believers that Luke met during his time with Paul in Judea, and the like.
5. Where there any passages in Acts that you found to be particularly difficult to comment on (I am here thinking of historical, grammatical, geographical, textual, etc. difficulties)?
Various passages required special and extended attention because of their intersection with points of modern interest (e.g., worship in tongues in Acts ch. 2) or historical debate (e.g., debates about the speech in Acts 5). As for the grammar—students today will always wish that Luke wrote like John!
6. To what extent should the church take the book of Acts as normative? As in, how should the narrative of Acts shape our ecclesiology?
As a Christian I am interested in Acts not only for historical reasons but also for its message. Acts is rich in that way, especially with its focus on mission and how we should carry out the mission. In terms of ecclesiology, I believe that church leadership takes a variety of forms in Acts, some related to leadership forms already existing in the wider culture. They were more interested in what would be effective than in locking in one form for all time and all cultures. Nevertheless, there are principles even there. Certainly Luke places a high value on the unity of the church. The central, core message of Acts is the Spirit’s empowerment for our mission. The Western church today is very self-focused, and we would profit from hearing afresh Luke’s message: God’s Spirit has come to empower us for God’s mission.
Earlier this month, Baker Academic published the first volume of Craig Keener magisterial commentary on the book of Acts. When all is said and done, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary will total four volumes of roughly 5,000 pages. It is safe to say that once volume four hits the shelf, Keener’s work on Acts will be the standard by which Acts studies will be compared to for generations to come.
This past June I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Keener in Chicago. We talked often about his work on Acts, his book on Miracles, and his many other commentaries and writings. When I contacted him about an interview he graciously accepted my offer. Below is part one of our interview. I hope you enjoy this conversation.
1. For those who may not know you, can you briefly tell us a little bit about your educational background, where you currently teach, and what subjects you teach?
I started teaching in 2011 at Asbury Theological Seminary and so far have been teaching New Testament introduction and PhD courses (one on Revelation and soon one on historical Jesus research). Until then I taught for fifteen years at Palmer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where I did most of the writing of the books now coming out. There, at the M.Div. level, I taught a required course in biblical interpretation and, toward the end, another one in Gospels and Acts; also occasionally Old or New Testament Introduction; and a range of electives (especially Matthew, Revelation, Acts, Life of Paul, Romans, 1-2 Corinthians). My educational background is diverse (sometimes determined by my geographical location at the time, but all helpful), from Bible college to seminary to a state university and a PhD at Duke, from different periods in my life. I learned valuable insights at each stage and got to know many wonderful friends along the way. Over the years I studied with Methodists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Baptists, Jewish scholars, agnostics, and others—it is helpful to learn from a range of perspectives and then see where the evidence leads.
2. You have written a number of commentaries on different NT books: the Gospel of Matthew and John, Romans, 1-2 Corinthians and Revelation, and now Acts. How do you decide which book you will write on next? Is there a method to your choosing?
Sometimes it has been based on what I was asked to write or where a series had an opening, but my large commentaries have partly followed my research. Some thirty years ago I started keeping information on index cards, eventually many tens of thousands of them. Although some were arranged topically, most were arranged canonically. The problem was that an index card with an ancient source relevant for, say, something in John, Acts, and Revelation would be filed under the canonically first reference, in John, though also marked for the others. I had to finish John before I could file it forward. Happily I now have a better system for accessing my more recent data, so when I go to Paul, Lord willing, I should be able to move more quickly.
3. Baker Academic just published volume one (there are a total of four to be published) of your Acts commentary. Can you tell us a little bit of how this magisterial work came to be, how long it took you to write, etc.?
I had always planned to make Acts one of my major undertakings, and to complete it some time after John. In fact my research file on Acts was much larger than on other books, but when I started writing this commentary, in 2000, I had no idea that it would mushroom to roughly three times the size of my two-volume John commentary. That is why the volumes have so many large pages with fairly tight type, especially in the footnotes. In each volume of Acts, one gets almost the amount of material one would get in one volume of my John commentary. After 2000, I kept thinking, “Just two more years and I will be finished with the rough draft,” or “with editing it into shape,” etc. Instead it kept stretching on and on, roughly a decade. As someone who is something like ADD, I have been frustrated with the extremely delayed completion and publication. Nevertheless, I loved Acts itself, and all the ancient sources I was able to use to bring its message to life for modern readers.
4. For some, the question of genre may not come into play while they are reading through Acts. But in your introduction you spend quite a bit of time establishing the genre of Acts. Can you explain why understanding the genre of Acts is important for understanding the message of Acts?
What you expect a book to be will influence how you read it. If I read a novel for entertainment, I am not expecting to learn accurate historical information. Genres have also evolved over time. Thus for example ancient biographies and histories were supposed to focus on genuine information, but were also supposed to be presented in a readable way that also offered insights (through positive and negative examples) for how to live. Using internal markers to see what genre of his day the author wanted the work to conform to guides us in determining how to understand what the author wanted us to do with the work.
5. One of first things the reader of your commentary notices is the interaction with key Greco-Roman and Jewish sources. What part do the writings of Pliny, Cicero, Josephus, and other contemporaries of Luke play in situating Acts in its first-century context?
I had loved Greco-Roman literature before I read the New Testament or (many decades ago) converted to Christianity. This part of the work came naturally for me, and I loved doing it. If we want to understand the information in Acts that the writer could take for granted, without explicit articulation, that his first-century audience would understand, we need to know about the first-century world. Sometimes scholars develop a competence in a single ancient source or sphere (say, Cynic sages or rabbinic literature) and then try to read the entire New Testament in light of these proposed backgrounds—somewhat analogous to a reader today wanting to understand 9/11 through aeronautic engineering, at best, or through the study of Melanesian cargo cults, at worst. It’s important to have a command of the full range of ancient sources, insofar as possible, to reach the highest probabilities of what first-century people did and thought. That is what I have worked to achieve, as best as possible.
6. As opposed to the works of Richard Burridge (biography) and Pervo (Novel), you argue that Acts is best read as history. Why do you believe that this is the best genre for Acts?
Richard and Charles Talbert make useful contributions to the discussion because there was a biographic way to do history, and Acts does focus on chief characters. One can even learn from some of Pervo’s literary insights from novels, since historical works, though meant to be factual, were ideally expected to be told in an entertaining or engaging way. But Acts cannot be a novel, even a historical novel. Where we can test Acts with sources external to Acts, which is in scores of cases, it nearly always corresponds to that data. Granted, Luke, like every other ancient (and modern) historian had his distinctive interests and emphases, but plainly he is writing about real people in real and relatively recent history. Novels normally involved characters of the distant past (usually romances involving fictitious characters, but even historical characters belonged to the distant past, not recent figures as in Luke-Acts). Luke also has a historical preface mentioning the subject of “what took place among us,” a historical kind of topic, and has other features characteristic of ancient historical monographs. It is with good reason that more Acts scholars view it as historiography than any of the other alternatives. (The proportion is even higher when we recognize biography as a special subtype of or related to ancient historiography).
7. The job of the historian is to present the facts as they occurred. How do modern historians differ from ancient historians in the way they not only present the facts, but also how they present them?
Modern historians tend to tell you up front: here are the possibilities for what could have happened in this scene, and sometimes are sketchy about details except for the ones that they can concretely document. Ancient historians agreed that history had to be about facts, but they narrated it differently. They were concerned about literary cohesiveness. So they would give you their best reconstruction of the scene, maybe also summarizing varying views where there were such, but often giving reconstructions. Rather than just telling you about history, they often narrated it. It is enjoyable to read. Also, while modern historians have their interests and their biases, those factors are often much more in your face in ancient historians. In the case of Acts, most Christian readers would share most of the author’s theological perspectives, and so would not find his emphases or interests disturbing.
Look for part two of my interview with Craig Keener later this week.
The last couple of weeks have seen a number of review copies come my way. I am always grateful that publishers send me books to read and review, and I do not take their kindness nor generosity for granted. The following are books that I have recently received:
The Spirit and Christ in the New Testament and Christian Theology: Essays in Honor of Max Turner. I. Howard Marshall, Volker Rabens, and Cornelis Bennema. Eerdmans, 2012.
History of New Testament Research (Vol. 2): From Jonathan Edwards to Rudolf Bultmann. William Baird. Fortress Press, 2002.
Isaiah in the New Testament: The New Testament and the Scriptures of Israel. Steve Moyise, Maarten J. J. Menken. T & T Clark, 2005.
The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. Robert A Gagnon. Abingdon Press, 2002.
The Gospel According to Isaiah 53: Encountering the Suffering Servant in Jewish and Christian Theology. Darrell L. Bock, Mitch Glase. Kregel Academic. 2012.
