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The Present Task in New Testament Studies: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered in the Divinity School on Tuesday 2 June 1936
Originally published in 1936, this book contains the text of Charles Harold Dodd's inaugural lecture upon taking up the position of Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in New Testament studies in the interwar period in Britain and in the work of Dodd more generally.
42 pages, Paperback
First published November 6, 2013
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About the author
C.H. Dodd
55 books15 followersCharles Harold Dodd was a Welsh New Testament scholar and influential Protestant theologian. He is known for promoting "realized eschatology", the belief that Jesus' references to the kingdom of God meant a present reality rather than a future apocalypse.
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June 16, 2021
Cambridge professor Dodd gives a good sense of the creative energy in New Testament studies in the mid-1930s. It was a time when the Synoptic Problem had been solved “with an artistic completeness and elegance which charms the critical mind,” when the first volumes of the Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament were just appearing, and when Formgeschichte was still a rising star. According to Dodd the task is now to integrate these strata and cultural insights into a whole again. Knowing the background of individual building blocks can never explain the significance and originality of the entire structure.
Dodd concludes: “The ideal interpreter would be one who has entered into that strange first-century world, has felt its whole strangeness, has sojourned in it until he has lived himself into it, thinking and feeling as one of those to whom the Gospel first came; and who will then return into our world, and give to the truth he has discerned a body out of the stuff of our own thought. If there are other qualifications of which it is less fitting to speak in an academic lecture, I may be allowed to hint at them in a phrase familiar to theologians – testimonium Spiritus Sancti internum.” (Saying it in Latin makes Christian scholarship still acceptable.)
Dodd concludes: “The ideal interpreter would be one who has entered into that strange first-century world, has felt its whole strangeness, has sojourned in it until he has lived himself into it, thinking and feeling as one of those to whom the Gospel first came; and who will then return into our world, and give to the truth he has discerned a body out of the stuff of our own thought. If there are other qualifications of which it is less fitting to speak in an academic lecture, I may be allowed to hint at them in a phrase familiar to theologians – testimonium Spiritus Sancti internum.” (Saying it in Latin makes Christian scholarship still acceptable.)
Displaying 1 of 1 review