Toward Understanding the New Testament

According to its preface, this book is intended to update O. C. Tanner’s 1932 work on the New Testament for modern critical readers. In this attempt, it fails. There has been some effort to add references to more modern sources in the bibliography and in the footnotes, but these seldom influence the substance of the text. A few selections, but too few, show signs of recent work, but overall the patina of contemporary scholarship is just too thin to disguise the fact that this book is almost a century out of date.

On the one hand, the book is postrationalist in that it adopts a naturalistic methodology and assiduously avoids the “distortion” of religious belief, but on the other hand, the book is distinctly precritical. There is little or no discussion of the problem of the historical Jesus, of the Quest or New Quest, of form criticism or other types of literary criticism, or of the importance to the New Testament of archeological and manuscript discoveries since the 1940s. And while there is a cursory discussion of the synoptic problem, the critical implications of that problem are totally ignored in the harmonized “life of Jesus” approach of the commentary. The footnotes lean heavily toward works written at or before midcentury, except where they have been added as an afterthought.

In short, for the most part this book is a museum piece of social gospel, ethical Jesus, turn-of-the-century rationalism. Sic transit eruditio doctorum.