Reading the New Testament

by James G. Crossley

Reading the New Testament offers an exciting and contemporary approach to New Testament Studies, which have changed dramatically in the past thirty years. James Crossley combines an introduction to traditional methods of source, form and social-scientific criticism with postcolonial, gender and political frameworks. He discusses reception-history, covering areas such as popular culture, party politics, historical theology and the politics of contemporary scholarship. He discusses Paul and Christian origins in continental philosophy, as well as offering a more traditional analysis of Paul's theology and the quest for the historical Jesus. A selection of readings from contemporary scholarship is provided in the final chapter of the book.

Reading the New Testament has been carefully designed to help students think critically and in wide-ranging ways about the texts of the New Testament and will prove a valuable resource for everyone engaged in serious study of the Bible.

201 pages, ebook

First published June 11, 2010

Reviews

[A.]

Too dry to finish

[Ben Thurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a competent, contemporary and commendably brief introduction to various ways of reading the New Testament. "Contemporary approaches" is the subheading and Crossley – while covering the basics of New Testament study and criticism well: source and form criticism, as well as literary, historical and social scientific approaches – is at his best when writing on more recent and emerging areas of interest, particularly postcolonial studies, the turn to Paul and the New Testament in recent Continental philosophy (particularly Badiou, Agamben and Zizek) and in reception history.

His discussion of reception history, which addresses how texts come to be received, interpreted and put to use, throughout time, is particularly rich. He identifies a sub-category of reception history which looks at how the church and various theological figures and schools of thoughts have made use of various texts. He notes a second sub-category which looks at how reception history – by identifying the ways thinkers, artists and interpreters have understood and made use of texts — can serve as an aid to closer, more correct, or more fruitful engagement with the New Testament.

A third category, much more open to influences and receptions beyond the Christian and theological mainstream, is what he terms an "anything goes" approach. Despite the risks (or benefits?) of a potentially endless blancmange of intertextual, cross-genre, postmodern play in this approach, Crossley engages a really interesting conversation about the use of Biblical allusions and quotations in contemporary (particularly US) politics. It seems that in politics there are "good" and "bad" — or electorally more successful versus electorally less successful — uses of Scripture, with vaguer, more inclusive, less "Christ-y" quotations generally preferred, although a measure of signalling and dog-whistling is not out of the question. These uses also can serve to deflect attention from political or policy choices or failures, as when Bush's response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans invoked the mysterious ways of God in the face of a natural disaster.

Crossley's text concludes with extended quotations from three recent scholars, Justin Meggitt on Living Standards in the Ancient World, Stephen Moore on Postcolonialism and the Book of Revelation, Martin Bockmuehl on Reception/Effective History and Shawn Kelley on Rudolf Bultmann and Reading Scholarship in Context. I found Meggit's discussion of the material conditions of life in Roman Palestine and Kelley's discussion of the connections between Bultmann's scholarship and his mostly resistant but somewhat equivocal engagement with German nationalism in the 1930s, particularly interesting.