Abstract
This book is the first to appear in the new Baylor-Mohr Siebeck Studies in Early Christianity (BMSEC) series. The aim of the series is ‘to facilitate increased dialogue between German and Anglophone scholarship by making recent German research available in English translation.’ (p. vii). This volume is a translation of Schröter’s Von Jesus zum Neuen Testament published in 2007, but which is itself an edited collection of essays that were written and in some case published separately between 2000 and 2006.
The book is divided into four major sections. The first ‘Recollection and History in Early Christianity’ comprises four chapters. These deal in broad terms with new developments in historiography and practice of what Schröter terms ‘New Testament science (p. 9). Here a number of epistemological issues are probed, concerning where the meaning of past events is actually to be found. For Schröter such meaning resides with the interpreter. In the final chapter of this section Schröter draws upon the insights of Freud and Ricoeur to consider how ‘memory’ and ‘recollection’ contribute to Christian theology. In many ways the debate has moved on since Schröter first wrote this essay, but his insights still provide a helpful guide. The second section ‘Jesus-Paul-Luke’ traces the origins of the Jesus tradition through to one of its final phases in the New Testament as represented by Luke’s Gospel. Commenting on the beginning of the Jesus tradition, Schröter states that it is ‘indispensible to hold fast to the linking of sayings tradition and the narrative tradition in order to attain to a historically plausible picture of the beginnings of the Jesus tradition’ (p. 94). Part three, ‘On the Way to the New Testament’, looks at the emergence of the New Testament canon. These chapters argue that the differences between the New Testament writings are not as great as between those writings and others not contained in the New Testament. Schröter’s sees the process of canonization of Acts as the means ‘to obtain a meaning from the history of early Christianity, which lies, in spite of its not-to-be-contested diversity, in its coherence’ (p. 302). This type of statement would seem to require more justification, in order to defend it from the criticism that it is asserting that the justification for the canon can be found in the New Testament documents themselves. The final two chapters that form section four are even more overtly theological, and in his final essay he retrojects a canonical perspective back into the process of developing a New Testament theology. Admittedly Schröter notes the tension between a canonical approach and the recognition that individual writings have their own theologies.
This is an interesting collection of essays, which raises some fundamental historical, theological and canonical issues. While not all will agree with Schröter’s answers, the process of asking such questions is important in itself. The answers offered will, no doubt, generate further profitable discussion.