Abstract
This volume, like the first edition, is grounded in the critical study of the gospels in their historical context, but it does not stop there. It always has an eye to how the gospels impact theology, ethics, and the life of faith. Hence, the essays in Part I address topics such as ‘What is a Gospel?’, ‘The Fourfold Gospel’, and ‘The Scriptural Matrix of the Gospels’. Part II then includes concise introductions to the four canonical gospels. The concern of Part III is then to consider the gospels’ impact on Church and Society, including essays on ‘The Gospels and Doctrine’, ‘Praying the Gospels’, ‘The Gospels Embodied: The Lives of the Saints and Martyrs’, and ‘Living the Gospels: Morality and Politics’. This pattern of critical foundations that work through to present-day implications made the first edition a gift for courses aimed at ordinands and seminarians and the same is very much true of the second edition.
Where the second edition differs most markedly from the first is in the inclusion of five entirely new essays. The first is Todd Brewer’s ‘Gospel Sources and Interrelations’. The study of the Synoptic Problem has recently entered a new phase of spirited debate, which Brewer accurately reflects. The second new essay is Simon Gathercole’s ‘Non-canonical Gospels as Witnesses to Christ’. This is pitched perfectly to enable a broad appreciation of the texts concerned along with some sense of their scope and significance. The third is Stephen Barton’s ‘God and the Knowledge of God in the Gospels’. Here Barton starts to ask theological questions of these historical documents and, as he does so, he builds a bridge to Part III – which considers the impacts of the gospels. New essays in this section include Christine Joynes’ ‘Reception History of the Gospels’, which broadens the definition of the ‘biblical interpreter’ to include artists, writers and musicians. Following a introduction to the idea of reception history, and the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, Joynes presents a case study using the story of the women who go to the empty tomb. This highlights the diversity of impact made by the gospel stories, which in turn creates space for marginal voices to contribute to the discussion of how to interpret gospel texts. The volume concludes with a new chapter by Ben Quash, ‘Gospels for the Life of the World’, which presents Graham Sutherland’s Christ in Glory as an example of how the Spirit mediates the life of Christ risen and ascended to the church and the world.
Alongside these five additional essays the volume includes three chapters written by new authors: Roland Deines on Matthew; Elizabeth Shively on Mark; and Christopher Skinner on John. Contributors who reprise and refresh their contributions include Stephen E. Fowl who substantially updates his essay, ‘The Gospels and “the Historical Jesus”’, to take account of the particularly marked developments in this field.
A good introductory textbook leaves the reader with the sense that they have grasped the basics of the given subject, including some understanding of what is happening in current debates. This Cambridge Companion more than adequately achieves this goal. Beyond these basics there is a dimension to this volume that elevates it from a manual that merely seeks to inform to one that causes the reader to marvel at the gospels’ remarkable and wide-ranging capacity to transform.