What do you think?
Rate this book
Theology of the New Testament
Following his well-received Apostle Paul , prominent European scholar Udo Schnelle now offers a major new theology of the New Testament. The work has been translated into English from the original German, with bibliographic adaptations, by leading American scholar M. Eugene Boring.
This comprehensive critical introduction combines historical and theological analysis. Schnelle begins with the teaching of Jesus and continues with a discussion of the theology of Paul. He then moves on to the Synoptic Gospels; the deutero-Pauline, catholic, and Johannine letters; and Revelation, paying due attention to authorship, chronology, genre, and canonical considerations. This is an essential book for anyone with a scholarly interest in the New Testament.
This comprehensive critical introduction combines historical and theological analysis. Schnelle begins with the teaching of Jesus and continues with a discussion of the theology of Paul. He then moves on to the Synoptic Gospels; the deutero-Pauline, catholic, and Johannine letters; and Revelation, paying due attention to authorship, chronology, genre, and canonical considerations. This is an essential book for anyone with a scholarly interest in the New Testament.
- GenresTheologyNew Testament
912 pages, Paperback
First published December 4, 2007
11 people are currently reading
41 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 2, 2010
Theology of the New Testament by Udo Schnelle
This volume, almost 800 pages of content supplemented by a detailed 60 pages of bibliography and 70 pages of assorted appendices, was a pilgrimage for me. Udo Schnelle is a fabulous New Testament scholar that I discovered when I was working on a book on the Letters of John. His writing was a tremendous catalyst for my thought in his earlier work and this new (it came out last November) work, Theology of the New Testament is no exception. I suppose I should specify, the translation of this work into English by M. Eugene Boring came out last November. I was too lazy to read it in German. In fact, my German is so rusty that I was having trouble translating some card text from a trading card game yesterday. Even in English, this was a book where I would read 10-15 pages at a sitting and have to run through its permutations in my head.
In the typical fashion of German scholarship, Schnelle is not prepared to talk about the text of the New Testament, much less the theological content of the New Testament, until he discusses the historical problem. He makes the traditional distinction between geschichte (the core data of what presumably happened) and historie (the methodology designed to create narrative or interpreted history from the mass of dissonant data we have). With regard to the New Testament, his criteria includes an ideal of finding “Comprehensive Plausibility” by considering both “Contextual Plausibility” (how the events fit into the Judaic background in which they were supposed to have occurred) and “Plausibility of Historical Effects” (how the early interpreters would have extrapolated and built upon those events) and weighing both of these considerations in the light of the following material considerations: multiple attestations, dissimilarity (to be expected in historical accounts), coherence (probably suspect if the harmony is too tightly constructed), tendencies of developing tradition (sometimes, we see an emphasis flattened or enhanced when a tradition is being developed), and embarrassment (if the content is willing to be embarrassed by an account, that may add to its plausibility). So, you can see right off the bat that this isn’t your typical attempt to take theological issues, add a few biblical references, and claim that the work is done. Schnelle doesn’t take things for granted. He makes you sift through the evidence and try to formulate interesting hypotheses for the cognitive dissonance that is to be expected from the multiple sources and the layers of tradition woven into the New Testament as a living book.
To some people, particularly those of literalist persuasions, this is an unsettling approach. To those who believe God as present in the Holy Spirit was active within the individual and corporate minds of the biblical authors, this is not a threatening methodology at all. Indeed, it is refreshing. Having dealt some with the historical methodology, most theologies of the New Testament jump into a book-by-book summary of what each says about the essence of God (Theology), the essence of Jesus as the Christ (Christology), the idea of humanity (Anthropology), the essence of “salvation” (Soteriology), the essence of the Holy Spirit (Pneumatology), the idea of the church (Ecclesiology), the concept of individual and community behavior (Ethics), and the relationship of the present to the “end” (Eschatology). Schnelle addresses these issues, but addresses them systematically through the development of various traditions: the understanding of Jesus as we can assemble it, the reasonably certain Pauline writings (those that can be dated earlier), early “sayings source” (quotations attributed to Jesus), the developing church’s idea of the gospel (the three synoptic gospels: Mark, Matthew and Luke), Acts as a continuation of the Gospel of Luke, the so-called general or catholic letters, the probable deutero-Pauline writings, and the gospels, letters, and apocalypse of the Johannine school. In this way, the book continues to build and one gets an orderly picture of the canonical development of the biblical text (even though Schnelle as writer and we as readers are imposing our own order upon the text when we know such events are much more complicated).
Here are some of the gleanings that meant a lot to me (although you wouldn’t read it if I copied all of my notations into this “review”). I enjoyed the fact that he underscored the meaning of parables to be found in “contrast (pp. 99-104).” If you want to understand the parables, contrast the events described with what you know of human nature. In a later discussion of the sayings against the backdrop of the culture, Schnelle made this statement that is so similar to my argument when I speak of God as being X-dimensional: “When human beings equate God’s possibilities with their own, they are no longer talking about God.” (p. 238)
I also enjoyed his discussion of the early understanding of faith in the letters of Paul. Faith cannot be neutral, so confession (agreement and expression) is necessary (p. 307). I agreed with his perception of Paul’s understanding of the church as coming from both the Hellenistic (political assembly) and Judaic background (cultic assembly) as well as the idea that the church is local, geographical, and global (p. 329). I know some theologians regard the global church as merely equivalent to kingdom, but I’m not totally convinced. There seems to be a dual use of local and global in descriptions of the church as the Body of Christ. However, Schnelle exploded my understanding of apostleship by the traditional definition that it was someone who had seen Jesus and, with the exception of Paul, was limited to the Twelve. I Corinthians 15:7 refers to the Lord going beyond the Twelve to appear to “all the apostles” and there is a reference to an Andronicus and a Junia who were apparently apostles before Paul (Romans 16:7), as well as the terminology of apostleship used with regard to Antioch (Acts 13:1-3, 14:4, 14) and the dispute in II Corinthians about the definition of apostleship leads one to believe it was a much wider concept than our modern usage (p. 337).
Another concept I enjoyed was his emphasis, “Precisely because there is a judgment according to works, human beings are directed to the grace of God alone!” (p. 352) I’ve always had trouble reconciling this idea of judgment by works with the rest of Paul’s emphasis on grace, but this discussion gave me a new way to look at it. There is also a great description in the book of the development of Paul’s eschatology from “apocalyptic to personal” on pp. 346-9 and I enjoyed his emphasis on acculturation, enculturation, and transethnic concepts as distinct to Pauline theology (p. 360).
I particularly liked his definition of the gospels. “The gospels are narrative syntheses of experiences with Jesus of Nazareth that generate meaning.” (p. 379) Whereas Paul had emphasized faith as confessional, Mark emphasized faith as an attitude of understanding that God’s rule has come near to humanity and is fulfilled in Jesus as God’s Son. So, repentance, faith, and discipleship are inseparable as means of living in that Kingdom of God come to earth (p. 423). I also liked his understanding of Matthew’s perspective on Jesus as both example and prototype of the heavenly citizen (p. 441) and his perspective on the Lucan conception of history: “What has preceded always continues to be present and is developed further. His structuring of history begins with creation, extends through the time of the law and the prophets, the time of Jesus, and the time of the church to the time of parousia/ultimate fulfillment within which the time of Jesus and the time of the church are clearly the center.” (p. 466). Understanding the way Luke-Acts fits together is much clearer after that simple discussion (though he embellishes it with a discussion of the Greek usage for “since then” and “until” with regard to emphasizing this fluid understanding of history/God). In short, Luke perceives Jesus’ life and the initial acts of the church as being in the “middle of time” (p. 482). He also confirmed Frank Stagg’s insight that the entire theme of the Book of Acts can be understood in the last phrase where the gospel was being shared “unhindered.” (p. 475) And here’s one I didn’t notice before (going back to the gospel of Luke), early in the Gospel of Luke (2:10), we read of great joy and, at the end of the gospel, we read of great joy (p. 485). I was also enamored by his statement that the Holy Spirit “drives” the Luke-Acts narrative just as the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness (p. 493).
As we move to the Deutero-Pauline epistles, we no longer see faith as confession and assurance, but now as content received (p. 549). With the delay in Jesus’ return, we begin to see the development of “realized eschatology” (the idea that most of Jesus’ promises save the actual return and judgment have been fulfilled—p. 555). In Ephesians, we see “insecurity” within the church that is addressed with an appropriate emphasis on focusing upon the person of the risen Christ (p. 558).
It isn’t until we reach the Letter to the Hebrews that we see where the idea of faith is no longer merely confession, assurance, and content received, but has now (used 32 times in the book) as both a virtue and a virtue owing to relationship to the Lord (p. 643). With regard to “realized eschatology,” Hebrews moves from the tension described as “already” and “not yet” to that which can be described as “shakeable” and “unshakeable.” (p. 651) In the same way, the letter presents God’s glory as being both representative of God’s divine being and God’s accessibility to humanity (p. 675). That one keeps my head spinning, but it emphasizes that cognitive dissonance between transcendent and imminent God that is found throughout the Bible. Without that dissonance, we would either remake God in our image or place God so far out on the periphery of our lives that we ignored God.
As he moved into the Johannine writing, he observed a structural relationship between John 6 and John 20 that deserves more study (p. 698) and hit again on the significance of “not yet” (p. 699). He emphasized the ontological importance of “out of” for John (p. 705) and had a great line about the Holy Spirit being the “church’s memory” (p. 707). Both of those were conceptual blockbusters that had me thinking for a while. They work on a lot of different levels.
Although this isn’t related to the way Schnelle handled the discussion, he had an interesting footnote from Suetonius about how Caligula humiliated senators by forcing them to wash his feet and comparing that approach to Jesus’ willingness to wash His disciples’ feet (p. 728). I’ve read Suetonius, but I forgot that one.
Obviously, I don’t have room to sprinkle in all the jewels and thought-provoking observations and discussions in this review. I haven’t even given half of the material in my hand-written index (which I make in all the non-fiction books I read, and sometimes in a fiction book with lots of great quotations). This book will be invaluable to me for years. It fills a gap for me as I’ve never been satisfied with Bultmann, Jeremias, or Ladd as a New Testament Theology that spoke to me. Now, I have one. I would recommend this for anyone who wants at least a six month pilgrimage into deep scholarship in the New Testament. I recognize that only one or two of my readers may be in that category but I can't resist bubbling over about it.
This volume, almost 800 pages of content supplemented by a detailed 60 pages of bibliography and 70 pages of assorted appendices, was a pilgrimage for me. Udo Schnelle is a fabulous New Testament scholar that I discovered when I was working on a book on the Letters of John. His writing was a tremendous catalyst for my thought in his earlier work and this new (it came out last November) work, Theology of the New Testament is no exception. I suppose I should specify, the translation of this work into English by M. Eugene Boring came out last November. I was too lazy to read it in German. In fact, my German is so rusty that I was having trouble translating some card text from a trading card game yesterday. Even in English, this was a book where I would read 10-15 pages at a sitting and have to run through its permutations in my head.
In the typical fashion of German scholarship, Schnelle is not prepared to talk about the text of the New Testament, much less the theological content of the New Testament, until he discusses the historical problem. He makes the traditional distinction between geschichte (the core data of what presumably happened) and historie (the methodology designed to create narrative or interpreted history from the mass of dissonant data we have). With regard to the New Testament, his criteria includes an ideal of finding “Comprehensive Plausibility” by considering both “Contextual Plausibility” (how the events fit into the Judaic background in which they were supposed to have occurred) and “Plausibility of Historical Effects” (how the early interpreters would have extrapolated and built upon those events) and weighing both of these considerations in the light of the following material considerations: multiple attestations, dissimilarity (to be expected in historical accounts), coherence (probably suspect if the harmony is too tightly constructed), tendencies of developing tradition (sometimes, we see an emphasis flattened or enhanced when a tradition is being developed), and embarrassment (if the content is willing to be embarrassed by an account, that may add to its plausibility). So, you can see right off the bat that this isn’t your typical attempt to take theological issues, add a few biblical references, and claim that the work is done. Schnelle doesn’t take things for granted. He makes you sift through the evidence and try to formulate interesting hypotheses for the cognitive dissonance that is to be expected from the multiple sources and the layers of tradition woven into the New Testament as a living book.
To some people, particularly those of literalist persuasions, this is an unsettling approach. To those who believe God as present in the Holy Spirit was active within the individual and corporate minds of the biblical authors, this is not a threatening methodology at all. Indeed, it is refreshing. Having dealt some with the historical methodology, most theologies of the New Testament jump into a book-by-book summary of what each says about the essence of God (Theology), the essence of Jesus as the Christ (Christology), the idea of humanity (Anthropology), the essence of “salvation” (Soteriology), the essence of the Holy Spirit (Pneumatology), the idea of the church (Ecclesiology), the concept of individual and community behavior (Ethics), and the relationship of the present to the “end” (Eschatology). Schnelle addresses these issues, but addresses them systematically through the development of various traditions: the understanding of Jesus as we can assemble it, the reasonably certain Pauline writings (those that can be dated earlier), early “sayings source” (quotations attributed to Jesus), the developing church’s idea of the gospel (the three synoptic gospels: Mark, Matthew and Luke), Acts as a continuation of the Gospel of Luke, the so-called general or catholic letters, the probable deutero-Pauline writings, and the gospels, letters, and apocalypse of the Johannine school. In this way, the book continues to build and one gets an orderly picture of the canonical development of the biblical text (even though Schnelle as writer and we as readers are imposing our own order upon the text when we know such events are much more complicated).
Here are some of the gleanings that meant a lot to me (although you wouldn’t read it if I copied all of my notations into this “review”). I enjoyed the fact that he underscored the meaning of parables to be found in “contrast (pp. 99-104).” If you want to understand the parables, contrast the events described with what you know of human nature. In a later discussion of the sayings against the backdrop of the culture, Schnelle made this statement that is so similar to my argument when I speak of God as being X-dimensional: “When human beings equate God’s possibilities with their own, they are no longer talking about God.” (p. 238)
I also enjoyed his discussion of the early understanding of faith in the letters of Paul. Faith cannot be neutral, so confession (agreement and expression) is necessary (p. 307). I agreed with his perception of Paul’s understanding of the church as coming from both the Hellenistic (political assembly) and Judaic background (cultic assembly) as well as the idea that the church is local, geographical, and global (p. 329). I know some theologians regard the global church as merely equivalent to kingdom, but I’m not totally convinced. There seems to be a dual use of local and global in descriptions of the church as the Body of Christ. However, Schnelle exploded my understanding of apostleship by the traditional definition that it was someone who had seen Jesus and, with the exception of Paul, was limited to the Twelve. I Corinthians 15:7 refers to the Lord going beyond the Twelve to appear to “all the apostles” and there is a reference to an Andronicus and a Junia who were apparently apostles before Paul (Romans 16:7), as well as the terminology of apostleship used with regard to Antioch (Acts 13:1-3, 14:4, 14) and the dispute in II Corinthians about the definition of apostleship leads one to believe it was a much wider concept than our modern usage (p. 337).
Another concept I enjoyed was his emphasis, “Precisely because there is a judgment according to works, human beings are directed to the grace of God alone!” (p. 352) I’ve always had trouble reconciling this idea of judgment by works with the rest of Paul’s emphasis on grace, but this discussion gave me a new way to look at it. There is also a great description in the book of the development of Paul’s eschatology from “apocalyptic to personal” on pp. 346-9 and I enjoyed his emphasis on acculturation, enculturation, and transethnic concepts as distinct to Pauline theology (p. 360).
I particularly liked his definition of the gospels. “The gospels are narrative syntheses of experiences with Jesus of Nazareth that generate meaning.” (p. 379) Whereas Paul had emphasized faith as confessional, Mark emphasized faith as an attitude of understanding that God’s rule has come near to humanity and is fulfilled in Jesus as God’s Son. So, repentance, faith, and discipleship are inseparable as means of living in that Kingdom of God come to earth (p. 423). I also liked his understanding of Matthew’s perspective on Jesus as both example and prototype of the heavenly citizen (p. 441) and his perspective on the Lucan conception of history: “What has preceded always continues to be present and is developed further. His structuring of history begins with creation, extends through the time of the law and the prophets, the time of Jesus, and the time of the church to the time of parousia/ultimate fulfillment within which the time of Jesus and the time of the church are clearly the center.” (p. 466). Understanding the way Luke-Acts fits together is much clearer after that simple discussion (though he embellishes it with a discussion of the Greek usage for “since then” and “until” with regard to emphasizing this fluid understanding of history/God). In short, Luke perceives Jesus’ life and the initial acts of the church as being in the “middle of time” (p. 482). He also confirmed Frank Stagg’s insight that the entire theme of the Book of Acts can be understood in the last phrase where the gospel was being shared “unhindered.” (p. 475) And here’s one I didn’t notice before (going back to the gospel of Luke), early in the Gospel of Luke (2:10), we read of great joy and, at the end of the gospel, we read of great joy (p. 485). I was also enamored by his statement that the Holy Spirit “drives” the Luke-Acts narrative just as the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness (p. 493).
As we move to the Deutero-Pauline epistles, we no longer see faith as confession and assurance, but now as content received (p. 549). With the delay in Jesus’ return, we begin to see the development of “realized eschatology” (the idea that most of Jesus’ promises save the actual return and judgment have been fulfilled—p. 555). In Ephesians, we see “insecurity” within the church that is addressed with an appropriate emphasis on focusing upon the person of the risen Christ (p. 558).
It isn’t until we reach the Letter to the Hebrews that we see where the idea of faith is no longer merely confession, assurance, and content received, but has now (used 32 times in the book) as both a virtue and a virtue owing to relationship to the Lord (p. 643). With regard to “realized eschatology,” Hebrews moves from the tension described as “already” and “not yet” to that which can be described as “shakeable” and “unshakeable.” (p. 651) In the same way, the letter presents God’s glory as being both representative of God’s divine being and God’s accessibility to humanity (p. 675). That one keeps my head spinning, but it emphasizes that cognitive dissonance between transcendent and imminent God that is found throughout the Bible. Without that dissonance, we would either remake God in our image or place God so far out on the periphery of our lives that we ignored God.
As he moved into the Johannine writing, he observed a structural relationship between John 6 and John 20 that deserves more study (p. 698) and hit again on the significance of “not yet” (p. 699). He emphasized the ontological importance of “out of” for John (p. 705) and had a great line about the Holy Spirit being the “church’s memory” (p. 707). Both of those were conceptual blockbusters that had me thinking for a while. They work on a lot of different levels.
Although this isn’t related to the way Schnelle handled the discussion, he had an interesting footnote from Suetonius about how Caligula humiliated senators by forcing them to wash his feet and comparing that approach to Jesus’ willingness to wash His disciples’ feet (p. 728). I’ve read Suetonius, but I forgot that one.
Obviously, I don’t have room to sprinkle in all the jewels and thought-provoking observations and discussions in this review. I haven’t even given half of the material in my hand-written index (which I make in all the non-fiction books I read, and sometimes in a fiction book with lots of great quotations). This book will be invaluable to me for years. It fills a gap for me as I’ve never been satisfied with Bultmann, Jeremias, or Ladd as a New Testament Theology that spoke to me. Now, I have one. I would recommend this for anyone who wants at least a six month pilgrimage into deep scholarship in the New Testament. I recognize that only one or two of my readers may be in that category but I can't resist bubbling over about it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review