The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters

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Summary: Summary state of NT scholarship to about 1980
Review: The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters edited by Eldon Jay Epp, George W. MacRae (Scholars Press) (Hardcover) This volume has been designed both to survey and to evaluate New Testament scholarship since World War II. In several respects this period of about forty years comprises one of several eras in NT studies that were extraordinarily productive both in quantity and quality of work and also in significance of results. Similarly productive periods surely are to be identified around 1835-1840, when David Friedrich Strauss stirred up a world-wide debate on the historical Jesus and when the priority of Mark seemed secure; or around 1865, when the basic Two-Source theory of Synoptic origins seemed assured and C. Tischendorf was discovering or publishing some of the most important NT manuscripts; or around 1900, when the impressive scholarship of Adolf Harnack and the other learned "Old Liberals" set the modern standard for excellence in critical scholarship and at the same time misled two generations on the kingdom of God and the historical Jesus, and when Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer effected a revolution in NT scholarship on the latter issues; or around 1920, when Karl Barth's Epistle to the Romans (1918) had appeared and when the stage was set by Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann for the form-critical analyses of the NT, but especially by Barth and Bultmann for new theological/ hermeneutical approaches that were to have far-reaching influence in the post-World War II period and down to our own times; or, finally, around the mid-1930s-just before the war - when Rudolf Otto and C. H. Dodd emphasized (and Dodd overemphasized) the reality of the present kingdom in the ministry of Jesus, and when the Chester Beatty papyri were published and brought new life to textual criticism.
Our forty-year period began in 1945 and the immediately following years with the reestablishment of those international scholarly ties that had been broken and had lain dormant during the war years when North America and virtually all of Europe were involved in conflict. Obviously, British-American ties were quickly and almost automatically restored, but perhaps most striking in this reconnection was the early and close cooperation of German and American NT scholars. This was symbolized, for instance, in the broad use of English-language publications in the work of European scholars like W. G. Kümmel and others, but was demonstrated very concretely, for example, in the interconnection between the German "Neutestamentlicher Arbeitskreis" and the American "New Testament Colloquium." Prominent in the former group were scholars like Hans Conzelmann; the latter group emphasized "the study of issues raised by or resulting from the scholarly work of . . . Rudolf Bultmann" (as described in the
Encyclopedia of Associations, 10th ed.) and included among its senior members Hans Jonas, Kendrick Grobel, and Amos Wilder, as well as (then) younger members such as Robert W. Funk, Helmut Koester, George MacRae, Norman Perrin, James M. Robinson, and about a dozen others. Fully half of these members of the American group were either European by birth or had studied on the Continent. Renewed recognition and cooperation between those on both sides of the Atlantic were not limited, of course, to the German-American scene, but were worldwide, and no longer would any national group form an isolated "cell" of NT scholarship.
At the same time, due primarily to the encyclical of Pope Pius XII in 1943, Divino afflante spiritu, Roman Catholic NT scholars no longer traveled a separate path, but began to walk in the mainstream of critical scholarship (see Brown: 18-19, 117). This dramatic change can be seen, symbolically and in actuality, by observing in North America the extraordinary degree to which the memberships of the Society of Biblical Literature and of the Catholic Biblical Association now overlap-and also in recent years by the numerous Roman Catholic presidents of the former and the recent Protestant president of the latter. As a further instance, Joseph Fitzmyer, a Jesuit, has served as editor of both societies' journals, first of the Journal of Biblical Literature for six years (1971-1976) and then of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly (1980-1984). Examples could be multiplied, such as the appointment of Roman Catholic (and Jewish) NT scholars to permanent positions and endowed chairs in Protestant theological seminaries (and conversely), or the "denominationally blind" appointments now made in most of our college and university programs in the study of religion. These developments, which appear matter-of-fact to us now, could not have been foreseen or even imagined prior to World War II. Anyone who doubts this statement will find striking confirmation of its accuracy in a 1947 article in The Study of the Bible Today and Tomorrow-a collaborative volume similar to the present one-by J. H. Cobb on "Current Trends in Catholic Biblical Research," where the "Catholic" and the "liberal" scholars are seen as radically different in their approaches and results:
The Catholic scholar, on the other hand, begins with Scripture and tradition, the total deposit of the faith as, and only as, this is officially interpreted by the living magisterium of the church.... He cannot doubt the reliability of the channels by which the biblical literature has been transmitted, nor can he consider portions of it as mere myth, legend, fiction, symbol, etiological explanation, or apologetic. He cannot employ one portion of it to disprove the factual character of another portion. To illustrate, when accounts of a given event, such as the resurrection narratives, differ widely in detail, he must harmonize the records in such a way as to affirm both the truth of the detail and the truthfulness of the total story of which it is a part. (117-18)
Raymond E. Brown, S.S., speaks for the current view on the relationship between the magisterium and the theologians or biblical scholars:
I do not think that the members of the magisterium can speak authoritatively about matters of theology or Scripture unless they have elementary competence in the field, either by their own learning or by consultation. . . . I am saying that bishops must listen to theologians and acquire information, and pray over it, and think over it, and then teach pastorally what they judge the Church must hear. (48-49)
To be more specific, he speaks, for instance, of the Catholic Church's "acceptance of a developmental approach to the Gospels, recognizing that the final Gospels go considerably beyond the ministry of Jesus and that later Christology had been retrojected into the accounts of the ministry" (67), and he cites as one example Matt 16:18: "Today, the majority of scholars would recognize that Mark is older than Matthew and that the sentence about building the Church upon Peter is a Matthean addition (from post-resurrectional material) to an account which originally lacked it, as we see in Mark and Luke". These somewhat random statements from Brown are symbolic of a fresh and refreshing ecumenical unity among NT scholars that is a distinctive feature of the postwar period.
Another refreshing change has been the steady decline of anti-Semitic expressions and anti-Jewish sentiments in NT scholarship, though the task has not been finally completed. As one example, the pejorative (and inaccurate) description of the Judaism of the general NT period as Spätjudentum ("late Judaism") has in our time largely disappeared from our parlance. In addition, a new openness to face the issues of anti-Semitism within the NT - and to face them honestly-has been evident throughout the post World War II period, involving both Protestant and Catholic -and, of course, Jewish-participants in the continuing discussion and the growing literature.
Bultmann's brief but provocative essay, serves appropriately as the pivot between the prewar and postwar phases of NT scholar-ship, for not only does it bridge chronologically the gap created by the war, but it is symptomatic of widespread changes that were to take place when studies resumed on a broad scale. This is evident, as examples, in renewed investigations of the Christian kerygma and its meaning to moderns, in hermeneutics generally and in the application of existentialist categories to the NT in particular, in the study of NT language and "language-event" and the new literary-critical approaches to the NT, in the application of Greco-Roman religion and philosophy to the study of the NT, and in the so-called new quest of the historical Jesus. Indeed, when one takes into account the other aspects of Bultmann's work-form criticism and the sayings of Jesus, NT theology, and Pauline and Johannine studies-it is obvious how pivotal he and his work have been in our discipline. Even those who may eschew the "Bultmannian" or "post-Bultmannian" points of view will admit both his deep influence and the character of his work as a turning point in postwar NT studies.
This list of significant contributors, long as it is, represents only a small portion of the highly influential scholars who have shaped NT studies over the centuries. It does, however, bring us to the beginning of World War II, where the present volume again takes up the narrative of the ongoing development of NT studies.
It will be obvious that the essays that follow have at least two significant omissions, for there are neither separate chapters nor substantive discussions of either the social world of the NT or feminist perspectives on NT scholarship. Perhaps the editors were remiss in not assigning separate contributions on these subjects, but in the late 1970s, when this trilogy on The Bible and Its Modern Interpreters was planned, investigations of the NT social world were only beginning and a distinctive feminist perspective on NT studies was even less well articulated than were such perspectives on the study of religion generally, or on theology, or even on the OT-from which NT studies has so often taken its cue-for in that field also only a modicum of work had been done prior to the present decade. It will be the responsibility, therefore, of the next generation to assess NT scholarship in these two areas, for surely during the coming decades NT social world and anthropological studies will demonstrate their vital significance for interpreting the NT, and all along feminist perspectives will continue to correct the male-dominated biblical scholarship of the past eighteen centuries and more.