Abstract
This edited volume is a collection of fourteen essays in three parts – ‘the value of New Testament historical studies, ‘the gospels and the historical Jesus’, and ‘the book of Acts and Christian origins’ – plus three essays in a fourth part of ‘responses and reflections’. The main body of essays is by prominent evangelical biblical scholars (among whom are luminaries like Darrell L. Bock, Craig A. Evans and Craig A. Keener) concerned with furthering the so-called criteria of authenticity to the effect that the Gospel and Acts yield historically verifiable facts about Jesus and the early church. In other words, by their lights, the criteria of authenticity are, for the most part, fit for purpose.
On the one hand, they are largely preaching to the choir insofar as the lion’s share of evangelicals (and not only evangelicals) welcome any means by which to verify the gospels’ claims about Jesus and his earliest disciples and, therefore, have skin in the game for a Third Quest. For example, Daniel B. Wallace’s ‘Textual criticism and the criterion of embarrassment’ concludes that ‘the criterion of embarrassment is a valid tool in the search for historical authenticity in the Jesus traditions’ (p. 124). On the other hand, readers outwith the choir may find themselves perplexed, at least at first, as to the contextual mooring of this volume for it lacks an introduction. It takes the reader a little while to realise that this volume is a collective response to an earlier volume of essays, whose authors think the criteria of authenticity not so fit for purpose – Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne (eds)’s Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (London: T&T Clark, 2012) – and find that third questers have little to show for their efforts.
The essay that lends contextual mooring to this volume, and would well serve an uninitiated reader as an introduction to it, is Scot McKnight’s ‘The historical Jesus and witness: the problem is not method but results’. McKnight, also a contributor to Keith and Le Donne’s volume, reminds the reader that methods ‘work’ and ‘yield results’ but ‘break down, because different historians weigh them differently’ (p. 357). The strength of this volume, then, is to demonstrate some methods that may advance our understanding of the historical figure of Jesus, but the reader needs to be aware of the Tendenzen, whatever they be, of the practitioners.
Robert Bowman Jr. and J. Ed Komoszewski, in the volume’s first essay, ‘The historical Jesus and the biblical church: why the quest matters’, rightly stress the importance of history to Christians, given their claims about Jesus, for example performing miracles and, of course, rising from the dead. Each of the essays makes a strong case for one or another of the criteria of authenticity; and each essay is well worth reading in terms of well-crafted and scholarly writing. In the end, though, whether or not the criteria are fit for purpose remains an open question – at least to this reviewer.