New Testament Theology: Honoring Diversity and Unity

by Frank J. Matera

Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2007. 485 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-664-23044-9.

ACCORDING TO THE AUTHOR, currently Andrews-Kelly-Ryan Professor of Biblical Studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., the basic question that underlies this book, as it does any theology of the NT, is whether it is possible to speak of the theology of the NT as well as theologies of NT books, or whether one must acknowledge that the NT is only a collection of diverse writings, some of which are related to each other, while some others are not.

In approaching the various NT writings, Frank Matera assumes the canonical shape of the text, rather than an historical reconstruction of hypothetical earlier forms of the writings, or sources upon which they drew. Matera characterizes this approach to the NT writings as “literary” in contrast to an (implied) “historical” approach.

Matera argues that despite the obvious diversities, there is an underlying unity, based on the experience of salvation by early Christians, which grounds the master story of the NT in which all books share: (1) the human need for salvation; (2) God’s response in the person of Christ; (3) the church as the community of the sanctified; (4) the moral life of the sanctified; and (5) the hope of the sanctified. This narrative in turn points to key doctrines: anthropology, Christology, ecclesiology, ethics, and eschatology. Because the experience of salvation grounds the NT understanding of reality, soteriology is the ground of all other doctrines. As a result of these assumptions, this book consists in an account of the theological approaches of the three basic NT traditions: Synoptic (including Acts), Pauline, and Johannine, to which a fourth, “Other Voices,” is added.

Despite the shared “master story,” the various traditions do differ from one another, due to their differing starting points: for the Synoptic tradition, it is the Kingdom of God; for the Johannine tradition it is the incarnation of Jesus as Son of God; for the Pauline tradition, it is the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Within each tradition, as within the NT as a whole, there are also different emphases due to the particular situation facing each author. In the course of the book, Matera outlines those emphases (hence the differences within the traditions) but also shows how the writings are related to each other (hence the unity).

Matera’s identification and use of the “Master Story/Narrative” in accounting for the unity of the NT writings while respecting, and accounting for, their diversity, is one of the more creative and generative contributions of the book. It allows him to give free reign to the reality of the diverse theological approaches of the various NT writings, while at the same time pointing to the reality of their underlying unity.

The design of the book is apparent from the detailed table of contents. After a short survey of problems, methods, and some earlier approaches to a NT theology, Matera looks at each of the four major traditions in detail. He devotes a chapter to each of the forms of the Synoptic tradition (Mark, Matthew, Luke-Acts); of the Pauline tradition (1, 2 Thessalonians; 1, 2 Corinthians, Galatians and Romans, prison epistles [Philippians, Philemon, Colossians, Ephesians], the Pastoral epistles); of the Johannine traditions (Gospel of John, 1 John); and of the other voices (Hebrews, James, 1, 2 Peter and Jude, Revelation). As a result of the detailed consideration of the theology of each of these writings, the book can serve the pastor or student of the NT as a reference work to each of the books of the NT (with the exception of 2, 3 John, which are basically ignored). The detailed exposition of the theology of each NT book can stand by itself, and provides rich resources for understanding the theological approach of each writing.

Matera concludes the volume with a section on the diverse unity of the NT, in which he takes each of the elements of the master story (humanity in need of salvation, the bringer of salvation, the community of the sanctified, the moral life of the sanctified, and the Hope of the Sanctified), and shows how it is treated in each of the four major theological traditions (Synoptic, Pauline, Johannine, Other Voices). In all of these, Matera finds three elements that account for the diverse unity of NT theology: two of those three elements display the unity (the experience of salvation, out of which grows the underlying master story), while the third element shows its diversity (the differing starting points of each of the major traditions).

Matera concludes that a diverse unity is the only kind of unity one can find in the NT, and that it is the only kind of unity that stands in awe of the mystery of God. Hence it is the only kind of unity worthy of such a God, to whose actions the NT bears witness.

Such a summary can only hint at the richness and depth of the expositions of the various NT books, within the framework of the major tradition within which each one stands. A detailed account of such expositions would demand a review almost as long as the book itself. For the most part they are simply expositions, with a minimum of argumentative material aimed at scholars with whom Matera disagrees. It is clear from his treatment that he represents a specific approach to such a theology of the NT (his insistence on the “literary” approach and the equal insistence that one must find diversity, but also unity, in such a theology), but Matera does not allow polemics to stand in the way of the clarity of his exposition. His many comments on the manner in which various NT books differ from, and are in agreement with, other NT books, also enrich one’s understanding of the theological range of the NT, and its subtleties of conception and expression.

This volume is the work of a mature scholar, who has obviously immersed himself in the study of the individual books of the NT, as well as reflected equally diligently on their theological interrelationships. Those who read the book carefully will come away with a sense of the real accomplishment this book represents, as well as an appreciation of its serious contribution to the study of NT theology. A careful reading is strongly recommended.

Paul J. Achtemeier, Professor Emeritus
UNION-PSCE
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA     

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Prophecy and Hermeneutics: Toward a New Introduction to the Prophets

by Christopher R. Seitz

Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, 2007. 264 pp. $22.99. ISBN 978-0-8010-3258-5.

AUTHOR OF THE ACCLAIMED The Bible As It Was (Belknap, 1999), and the expanded version, Traditions of the Bible (Harvard University Press, 1999), James Kugel is an expert on the subtle ways of early biblical interpreters. In this book, an offshoot of these earlier works, he collects and revises a series of studies on the early interpretation of the stories of Jacob and his children. The exegetical texts that Kugel explores include Jubilees, the Testaments of the Patriarchs, the Ladder of Jacob, the Aramaic Levi
Document (ALD), and other texts of the Second Temple period and beyond. He is not con­cerned to discuss these texts as individual documents; rather, he sees them as part of the multi­farious stream of early exegetical traditions. These early interpreters exercised their ingenuity and erudition to solve interpretive problems in the biblical text, and as a result, built new nar­rative elaborations grounded in the biblical stories. Many of their exegetical solutions came to circulate independently as “exegetical motifs,” which are often recombined in subsequent texts. Many of these texts belong to a vaguely defined genre often called “the rewritten Bible” (a term coined by Geza Vermes). Kugel does not use this term, but his work most elegantly and convincingly explores how this genre works and how early interpreters conceived of the Bible and of their hermeneutical task.

These interpreters operate by what Kugel calls “the four assumptions” (presumably a play on the traditional “four questions” of the Passover Seder.) The first assumption is that the Bible is always relevant. The second, which logically relates to the first, since the relevance is not always apparent, is that the Bible speaks cryptically. The third is that the Bible is perfect and harmonious. And the fourth is that the Bible is of divine origin. Since the relevance, harmony, and divine intent of the text are often obscure, the task of the interpreter is pri­marily to explore its secrets, its cryptic speech, in order to recuperate its divine and edifying per­fection. The result is a method that often combines great imagination with great erudition. These were exceedingly close readers, whose interpretive constructions are, to one degree or another, rooted in the details and “gaps” of the text. Kugel expertly reveals their trains of thought, tracing the logical paths from the curious or problematic details of the biblical stories to the exegetical motifs that restore the text’s divine plenitude. In the case of the stories of Jacob and his children, these exegetical motifs often also recuperate the characters’ ethical reputation.

Let me adduce a small example to show the scope and interest of Kugel’s discussions. In the story of Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob sees “angels of God ascending and descending on it” (Gen 28:12). This description has several potential obscurities for the interpreter. First, “ascending and descending” is not the obvious direction of movement for angels, who presumably start out in heaven—“descending and ascending” would be more natural. So some early interpreters inferred that the angels in question had been previously exiled on earth or, alternatively, had been accompanying Jacob on earth all along, and so had to “ascend” first (Gen. Rab. has both of these exegetical motifs). Other interpreters took “ascending and descending” to be cryptic symbolism in a dream-revelation that refers to the rise and fall of world empires, an inter­pretation that joins Jacob’s dream to the dreams and visions about the rise and fall of world empires in the book of Daniel (this exegetical motif is found in Gen. Rab.). Because it occurs in a dream, it made sense to these interpreters to apply Danielic techniques, which simulta­neously “decode” the text and serve to restore the harmony of various parts of the canon. (This may be seen as an early form of “canonical criticism”). By these means, the story grows in new and fascinating ways.

The second potential problem or ambiguity in this verse is the prepositional phrase “on it” (viz. the ladder), which can also be read to mean “on him” (viz. Jacob). Some interpreters inferred that the angels were ascending and descending on Jacob’s sleeping body (again, in Gen. Rab.). Notably, Kugel argues that this exegetical motif is assumed in the NT description of “the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (John 1:50–51). Commentators often recognize this as an allusion to Gen 28:12, but Kugel adds that the allusion presumes this particular interpretation of the text, that is, to the already richly interpreted “Bible As It Was.” Hence, we can see that Kugel’s discussion and topic have serious implications for NT studies as well as for other aspects of the Hebrew Bible’s history of reception.

This is an erudite and polished book, but there are some minor flaws as well. The first involves a question of audience. Kugel writes in a genial and accessible manner that seems to invite a scholarly and non-scholarly audience. Most of the interaction with scholarly literature is in footnotes at the back of the book. But occasionally he drifts into technical discussions that non-specialists will find wearisome or impenetrable. For example, he spends a dozen pages on the “historical relations” between the ALD (partially preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo Geniza) and the book of Jubilees. He argues that the former is dependent on the latter, and that ALD can be dated confidently to “the latter half of the second century B.C.E.” (p. 161). But he previously states that the composition of ALD “must go back to before 125–100 B.C.E.”

(p. 151). So does Kugel really mean to say that ALD must date between 150–125 B.C.E.? This is a very narrow window of time for a text that has no obviously dateable features, except that it must have been written before the date of its earliest manuscript fragments. In any case, this is a technical and confusing argument that no doubt will lose many of its readers.

A second problem is a curious lack of attention to the subtleties and sophistication of the biblical text itself. Kugel is himself a very close reader of texts, and notes the many biblical cruxes that exercised early interpreters. But he does not tell us what he thinks (or what he thinks we ought to think) about these problems in the biblical stories. The views of the early interpreters are his sole focus. But is the Jacob narrative really just a series of perplexing stories about a dysfunctional family? In his conclusion Kugel states that “The stories of Jacob and his children recounted in Genesis are what they are: etiological narratives and old-time historiography, things rooted in the soil of ancient Israel and its people in biblical times”
(p. 221). Is that all they are—stories of blood and soil for simple folk? He suggests that it was the early interpreters who made these stories into profound and resonant religious literature, that they built “a single, ascendant structure,” a Jacob’s Ladder, that extends from the soil of the old stories up to heaven itself. Kugel seems, as the endorsement from Harold Bloom says on the back cover, to have “a poignant (yet wary) nostalgia” for the ways of the early interpreters. Kugel has done a magnificent job in restoring the conceptual world of these traditions. But the stories of the Bible have their own richness and complexity that cannot adequately be described as old-time historiography that the early interpreters improved. One does not need to deemphasize the sophistication of biblical narrative in order to emphasize the riches of early interpretation.

Despite this theoretical objection, I would emphasize that this book—and Kugel’s major oeuvre of recuperating early exegesis—is an important, fascinating, and often brilliant endeavor.

James Luther Mays, Professor Emeritus
UNION-PSCE
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

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