the author is good on the implications of the discoveries at Qumran for the Jewish background of ourtext. Finally, a very sensible conclusion reminds us of the variety of approaches that are possible to GJ,including that of the ‘ordinary reader’, and, happily, asserts that it will continue to be read.

Campion Hall, Oxford Nicholas King

The Gospel of John and Christian Theology. Edited by. Richard Bauckham and Carl Mosser. Eerdmans,Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2008, $28.00.

For some time now there has been a detectable desire, more perhaps on the side of theologians than on thepart of Scripture scholars, to have the disciplines of biblical studies and systematic theology talking oncemore to each other. They have not been doing so, and yet, as Richard Bauckham points out in hisintroduction to this admirable attempt at a conversation, both disciplines have in recent years eagerlyinteracted with literary studies, with philosophy, and with social theory; but they hardly ever botheredtalking to each other. The present volume arises out of a conference held some years ago at St Andrew’s,unde semper aliquid novi, and makes for quite compelling reading.It is hard to review fairly a collection such as this, so let me simply give the reader a flavour of the

offerings contained herein, with a warm encouragement to leap from the review to the book. There aresome challenging essays on Johannine dualism by Stephen Barton and Miroslav Volf, where the interest(for me, at any rate) lies in seeing the Gospel of John (hereinafter GJ) through quite different eyes thanthose of Scripture scholars. The effect, it has to be said, is to yield a much richer reading of the text.Nowadays we have all to face up to the challenge of Reception History, and two excellent and

contrasting essays offer an account of Irenaeus’ reading of GJ, and God’s ‘aseity’ (D. Jeffrey Bingham),while Rowan Williams takes a characteristically perceptive look at the way some eminent Anglicanthinkers (Westcott, Hoskyns, Temple, and JAT Robinson) have approached the Fourth Gospel, eachone, in their very different way, inspired by Browning’s remarkable poem on John (‘A Death in theDesert’). There is a very useful piece in the same vein by Todd Larson, starting from the very differentpositions of John Ashton (to whommany of the contributors pay proper reverence) and D.Moody Smithshowing how their work (unexpectedly perhaps) has been foreshadowed in the history of exegesis.Stephen Evans offers an interesting take, from someone outside the discipline of biblical studies, on the

historical reliability of GJ, including the following challenging sentence, ‘Surprising as it may seem, it maybe perfectly reasonable to have beliefs about John’s historical reliability that are not based on anyevidence at all, and therefore not based on scholarly evaluation of that evidence . . .’ (p.93). It is, one hasto confess, enormously refreshing to have a philosopher looking at the arguments about historicity.There is a fascinating piece by Bauckham on the Fourth Gospel as the testimony of the Beloved

Disciple, developing some of his well-known insights in this area, and adding the intriguing notion thatthere is at the beginning and end of the gospel an inclusio in which this disciple frames the entire narrative.On a different topic, Stephen Motyer forces us to face the fact that Jewish readers are offended by the

references in GJ to ‘the Jews’, and he argues that in the text the term refers to a particular kind of Torah-observant Jew, living in Judaea; and he suggests some striking retranslations. Motyer’s suggestion is thatthose who come under such (embarrassingly) vehement attack are in fact Christian apostates: ‘diabolizationis restricted to those who had once been followers of Jesus, and restricted to them alone’ (p. 193).There is a perceptive account by Andrew Lincoln of the unexpectedness of the Lazarus story; and on

the same narrative, Alan Torrance’s reflections on ‘epistemic base’ in assessing the probability of the storywill be found chastening by those of an over-sceptical frame of mind.Amagisterial contribution comes fromMartin Hengel on the Christology of the Prologue; and it would

only be slightly overstating the case to say about the editors’ positioning of this essay and that of JurgenMoltmann that ‘you have kept the best wine until last’. This book is a joy to read, and will make agenerous contribution to the discourse in a number of areas.

Campion Hall, Oxford Nicholas King

John, Jesus and History, Volume 1: Critical Appraisals of Critical Views (SBL Symposium Series 44, Atlanta2007). Edited by Paul N. Anderson, Felix Just SJ and Tom Thatcher. Pp. viii, 330, $37.95.

This book is yet another indication of a turning of the tide in exegesis of the New Testament. For a longtime scholars have regarded the lofty Christology of John’s Gospel (GJ) with some suspicion, at least

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when it came to squeezing it for indications about the ‘Historical Jesus’. Now the present volume is acollection of papers of the ‘John, Jesus and History group’ of SBL, looking at what it terms the‘dehistoricization of John’ and the ‘de-Johannification of Jesus’. The aim of the contributors, who by nomeans all agree with each other, is to bring GJ back into the scholarly conversation about the historicalJesus; and, as Tom Thatcher remarks in his introductory essay, it is certainly an odd thing that the FourthGospel, which has more archaeological content and topographical detail than all the other gospels puttogether, has come to be viewed as ‘unhistorical’.Not that this book is either a simple vindication of the historicity of the gospel, or an attempt to turn the

clock back to the comfort of pre-critical days. This is a thoroughly critical venture, as it should be, askingas it does the question of whether current critical attitudes to GJ are themselves critically based. PaulAnderson offers an admirably careful essay on the strengths and weaknesses of some of theconsiderations that have led to the widespread view of GJ as ‘unhistorical’, on the grounds that itpresents too ‘ideological’ a picture of Jesus. Kyser’s essay is a model survey of the English-languagetreatment of the issue, with a composed response from Marianne Meye Thompson. Jack Verheydencontributes an impressive account of the 19th Century German School (if one may still so call them), withsome very illuminating insights. M. A. Powell, who is rapidly rising to a position of eminence in historicalJesus studies, continues the survey on into the 20th century, especially in English; and his paper suggeststhat wemay be on the brink of some startling new possibilities in the study of the Fourth Gospel. Carson’smasterly (and very entertaining) essay on he literature speaks, aptly enough, of the ‘balkanization’ ofJohannine studies, and of ‘clumps of opinions and approaches that regularly talk past one another’ (p.151); and he concludes with an interesting suggestion about how to push the debate forward, one which Ifear will not be taken up.D. Moody Smith gives us a splendid survey of the recent signs of a return of Historical Jesus studies to

paying attention to GJ, and mentions some important points at which the fourth Gospel seems to havemore accurate historical knowledge than the Synoptics. There is a characteristically thoughtful essay byAndrew Lincoln, offering less consolation than some of the other contributors to those who wish toascribe historicity to GJ. Colleen Conway offers a very lively piece, on the ‘new historicism’, whichdeserves careful reading, and John Painter draws an illuminating analogy between different kinds ofcontemporary evidence for the person of Socrates and testimony about Jesus. Then there is a brilliantessay by Paula Frederikson, which nevertheless left me in some discomfort (though not the samediscomfort as M. A. Powell expressed in his response).At the end of the book, one can only admire the level of scholarship displayed, and the care with which

arguments and erudition are marshalled, and, particularly, the signs of renewed willingness to takepatristic evidence seriously; but that combination alone, quite clearly, does not provide the answer. Theconclusions one reaches on, for example, the historical accuracy of GJ, depends, apparently, on quiteother, perhaps sub-rational, factors. We look forward, of course to the two volumes that we are promisedin succession to this one, but I was left at the end with this nagging doubt: is the ‘historical Jesus’ simplythe wrong question to put to the Scriptures in general, and to GJ in particular? While it may well be thecase that in the 19th Century scholars turned to the ‘Quest for the Historical Jesus’ because they wereweary of lifeless doctrinal readings of the gospels, perhaps the weariness is now on the other foot, and aproperly critical stance today requires us, without surrendering any of the gains of the last two centuries,to read biblical texts on their own terms, from within the community of believers.

Campion Hall Nicholas King

Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations. By Michael Wyschograd. Edited andintroduced by R. Kendall Soulen. (Radical Traditions. Theology in a Postcritical Key) Pp. xiii,253. London, SCM Press, 2004, $25.00.

The series ‘Radical Traditions’ in which this work appears is described in page i as cutting new lines ofenquiry across a confused array of debates concerning the place of theology in modernity and, moregenerally, the status and role of scriptural faith in contemporary life. Far from despairing overmodernity’s failings, postcritical theologies rediscover resources for renewal and self-correction within thedisciplines of academic study themselves.Michael Wyschogrod was born in 1928 in Berlin. His earliest memories go back to the years in Berlin

just before Hitler’s coming to power. In 1939 the family moved to New York by way of Warsaw. Threeweeks in Warsaw made a deep impression on the ten-year-old Michael who was a witness of the lastmoments of pre-war Jewish life in Poland. In New York he got a good Talmudic education in a Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European-style Orthodox day school. As an undergraduate he got interested in and

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