New Testament: An Introduction: Luke and Acts (New Testament Introduction)

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Summary: hermeneutic key to the bible
Review: Professor Tarazi's valuble work presents first and foremost a hermeneutical key to the writings of the New Testament. Mark and the Epistles of Paul are explained by the same thesis which runs through the OT and NT. Tarazi's new work builds on his monumental commentary entitled "Galatians: A Commentary" (SVS Press, Crestwood, NY 1994). In that commentary, Professor Tarazi presents Paul's thesis of the function of Scripture. The baptized Galatians, like Israel, reject God, even after they have accepted Paul's preaching. The Galatians accept Paul's Scriptural authority as from God as revealed in Paul's preaching of Christ crucified, in whom the Galatians were baptized. Paul's thesis is that the prophets were rejected by the kings and temple priests (cf. P.N. Tarazi, "Introduction to the Old Testament, 3 vol, SVS Press, Crestwood, NY). Paul's epistles are each a reminder of the condemnation from God for those who heard his word and reject it (the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 and the exile of Israel), and the mercy of God on those who have gone astray and return to him (cf. Intro to OT, vol. 2). In "Paul and Mark" Prof. Tarazi demonstrates how Mark's Gospel is a history of the continuing struggle between the prophet and the king (Paul and the Jerusalem pillars), as much as this struggle is between faith in the crucified Christ as Messiah and the function of the Mosaic Law for the messianic community. Fr. Paul's powerful insight further provides an explanation of the canon based on Scripture itself, without need for appeal to patristic sources, and the function of the Nicean-Constantinopolitan Creed of Faith. This is a book which is the first in a series which returns NT biblical scholarship to the biblical text. Its explanations of the function of Scripture, Paul's thesis, and the Gospel of Mark are illustrated with numerous examples taken from everyday life which most Americans can recognize. Its common sense exposition is the key to making Fr. Paul's thesis accessible to all. His style is direct, even suspenseful, and often witty. This work is a resource for biblical studies which has no equal in print.

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Summary: Only a few understood and persevered...
Review: Tarazi's unique thesis is thought provoking and intriguing. From a linguistic point of view it is certainly interesting: hermeneutics based on word play, grammatical and syntactic structures, and intra-textual relations. It also suggests a historical reconstruction of the struggle between Paul the apostle and the heads of the Jerusalem church. It furthermore posits a thesis that the Gospel according to Mark is a systematization in narrative form of the whole struggle from a Pauline point of view. This thesis is worked out with those linguistic methods mentioned above. However, unlike what the reader from Warwick, RI stated, Tarazi stresses that most probably NO ONE accepted Paul's authority, and that is precisely why he set his preaching in writing. If everyone accepted his authority he would not have needed epistles or a biased written Gospel. To undermine this point, namely that Paul was utterly ALONE (with the exception of Timothy and a few others), implies that the reader totally misunderstood the work. It also seems that the reader from RI also misunderstood what the struggle was all about: the Jerusalem pillars accepted Christ as Messiah, so the struggle is not "between faith in the crucified Christ as Messiah and the function of the Mosaic Law for the messianic community". It is a struggle for the canonization of the authentic (in Paul's case, his) midrash on Scripture. It is therefore solely about the function of the Law for the GENTILIC messianic community based on the ASSUMPTION of Jesus's messiahship (cf. the "apostolic council" in Jerusalem). That is the "matrix" which the RI reader skilfully misses. The "matrix" of Scripture is: whose word will eventually be authoritative. It is not "assumed" as the RI reader naively states, thus undermining the whole argument! As for the king and priest vs. prophet model, the RI reader has to be careful not to make simplistic statements. The post-exilic situation in Yehud, which is somehow biasely reflected in the priests/prophets struggle in the Hebrew Bible, is far more complex than a simple "prophet vs. priest", which allowed the RI reader to make the quick analogy to Paul vs. the Jerusalem church not to say that that is not implied. Nevertheless, critical caution is necessary. It is precisely the occasional hastiness and quick leaps into assumptive conclusions that mark the small weakness of Tarazi's arguments. Some of the jumps he makes in his laudable analysis of the personal names (cf. reader from Washington DC) in Mark are simply shaky and need further evidence in order to strengthen the argument. Moreover Tarazi sometimes "overuses" the intra-textual relations in order to posit a historical reconstruction and not simply a linguistic/textual hypothesis. Although, in general, his textual/linguistic evidence is sound whenever it refers to related texts or whenever it posits literary dependency. The work is definitely worth reading and if it gets scholarly notice it might reshape Marcan scholarship.

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Summary: Paul as root of the Marcan gospel!
Review: This first volume in a proposed set of four provides a hermaneutical key to Mark's gospel by analyzing it as a literary production based not only on the life of Christ but also Paul, many of its events symbolically depicting the vehement conflict between the Pauline mission and the church in Jerusalem. Its analysis of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic wordplay is invaluable (i.e. Barabbas translated as bar abba, "son of the father", prefixed by "so-called" to symbolize the kind of "false son of God" or "false messiah" who advocates military rebellion), and its view of many of the gospel's characters as literary stand-ins (John the Baptist as Paul himself!) provides a challenging yet coherent view of a gospel that has often been viewed through history as a lesser composition than subsequent synoptic books. All in all, it provides a unique contribution to the field of Markan studies.