JESUS NOW AND THEN

by Richard A. Burridge and Graham Gould

SPCK £9.99(0-281-05499-1); Church Times Bookshop £9

Reviewed with

THE STORY WE LIVE BY: A reader’s guide to the New Testament

by R. Alastair Campbell

Bible Reading Fellowship £12.99 (1-84101-359-5); Church Times Bookshop £11.70

THE OTHER day I was asked to recommend, for someone going to theological college, an introduction to the critical issues involved in studying the New Testament. I am often asked this kind of question and find it difficult to give a straightforward answer. There are plenty of books that might meet this need, but everything depends on the students’ starting-points. Are they novices in theological thought? How have they read the Bible in the past? What else do they read: history, literature, social or natural science? Or are they, for preference, cinema enthusiasts?

The two volumes under review might be possible choices, but with some reservations. Care is wanted in discovering what particular needs they set out to meet.

The volume by Burridge and Gould is virtually a transcript of the lecture series at King’s College, London University, which was designed for those who are not studying theology, but wish to earn the Associate qualification (AKC): “the course had lectures in divinity and theology at its heart in order to help students relate their other academic studies to the Christian faith and to the world around them.”

The book by Campbell is based on mid-week lectures that he gave at West Croydon Baptist Church, and refined in Nepal at the International Church in Kathmandu. It offers “the kind of information about the Bible that ministers meet in their training, but which they rarely feel able to share with their congregations”.

Be careful not to misread the title of the first book, Jesus Now and Then. It is not an intermittent Jesus for which Burridge and Gould are arguing, but rather for a consistency between Jesus’s own self-consciousness, the New Testament accounts of Jesus, and the later Christological debates. For many modern scholars, this would seem to be an optimistic and controversial claim.

The case is made in chapters on the historical Jesus; critical approaches to the Gospels; four portraits of Jesus distinctively characterised by the signs of the four Evangelists; the relationship between Jesus and Paul, and what Paul thought of Jesus; other New Testament views of Jesus; the early Church and its moral teaching, worship and doctrinal debates; and modern understandings of Jesus.

The earlier chapters, in particular, are most engagingly written, with the kind of repetition that is a good teaching technique; there are suggestions for further reading, and text boxes that function like overhead transparencies or Powerpoint slides. But, sadly, there is no index.

Given the effective use that is made in the introduction of Hollywood representations of Jesus, it is a pity that the book was published before Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ could be included.

R. Alastair Campbell aims to provide “readable and satisfying” answers to questions about the New Testament writings: “How did they come to be written? What do they say to us today?” and to do so in such a way that the reader is able to “see the New Testament as a whole”, and not fragmented. He offers a guidebook to the New Testament, room by room.

His structural image is the storyline: the Creed is a story; the Gospels are four versions of the story of Jesus; the Church’s story is revealed in Acts and in Paul’s letters; the apostolic letters and Revelation show what it means to live by the story; the Old Testament (selectively Abraham, Moses, David, the exile and the Servant of the Lord, Daniel and the Son of Man) is the story behind the story; and all this becomes our story.

Campbell copes with the divers-ity of four Gospels in terms of portrait-painters — for example, the portraits of Churchill at Chartwell, or the different uniforms selected by theological-college principals for their formal portraits. He also uses two versions of an anecdote about Spurgeon and the lamplighter, showing not only differences in detail, but more importantly in the moral of each story. The reader should respect the lesson of each Gospel, and not strive to harmonise them.

This is a guidebook that relies on such verbal illustrations, and offers some independent ideas. It has five pages of endnotes, but, again, it has no index.

Dr John M. Court is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Theology and Religious Studies, in the University of Kent at Canterbury.