century. This book goes a long way towards meeting that need. It will not be possible to cover all theessays in this collection, but let me single out some of them.Dan Harrington offers a characteristically learned piece onMatthew and Paul, imagining those two great

NT figures locked into a room, and allowed to emerge only when they had arrived at a jointly agreedstatement. His conclusion is that they could probably have managed such a statement, but only after somedistinctly lively debates. Harrington rightly stresses the importance of recognising the different genres thatthey employ. Paul writes letters, Matthew writes a narrative. Paul is dealing with pastoral problems, afterthat first Easter;Matthew is telling the story of Jesus’ life, and inserting the five blocks of teaching that are soprominent in his gospel. Within that important difference, Harrington examines the two authors’ attitudesto Christology, Law, Moral life, and their views of what constitutes salvation and what will happen at theend. It is an absorbing essay; and at its end I was left with the feeling that there is more to come here.Jasper Svartvik, on Matthew and Mark, warns against partial readings of Matthew; he suggests that

Matthew is to Mark as Paul is to James, this last-named possibly representing a very early layer ofChristianity. Svartvik presents Matthew’s version of Mark in terms of what he calls ‘rejudaization’,‘reinforcement’, ‘rebuke’ and ‘rehabilitation’, and it is a most interesting exercise. Boris Repschinski SJcompares the attitudes of Matthew and Luke to the ‘parting of the ways’, that sad moment (whenever itmay be said to have occurred) when Jews and Christians recognised that they were apparently no longerthe same sort of thing. Repschinski finds in the two documents different answers to a similar problem,namely that a group that started out as unmistakably Jewish has suddenly become attractive also toGentiles. Matthew’s option is to present a community that has remained faithful to its Jewish origins;Luke sees the community as finding its identity in fulfilling prophecy rather than keeping Torah.Martin Hasitschka SJ compares Matthew and Hebrews especially on the forgiveness of sins, where a

rather unexpected convergence appears: both Matthew and Hebrews, it seems, interpret Jesus’ ministry‘in the light of the forgiveness of sins’ (p.102), particularly with regard to the themes of covenant, blood,and forgiveness; and in the whole of the NT, it is only the gospel and the Letter to the Hebrews thatcombine these themes. In the next article, Huub van de Sandt offers an interesting comparison betweenMatthew and the Didache; this is a natural move, for their striking similarities suggest a geographical andsocial proximity: both documents see the Law as the way to perfection. However, in the Didache, Gentilesare not expected to observe Torah in every respect, unlike Jews and Jewish Christians. Van de Sandtargues that both documents are on a very different trajectory from Paul in this respect.For similar reasons it is important to relateMatthew and Ignatius of Antioch. David Sim, in his first essay,

argues that these two authors, very likely based in Syrian Antioch, and chronologically not very far apart,take a very different attitude to Torah. Ignatius, he suggests, is very Pauline, and possibly explicitly opposedto Matthew, who (in Sim’s view) is vehemently anti-Pauline. Ignatius, so experts seem to be saying today,had in fact read most of Paul. I am not sure how many scholars will accept this suggestion of a conflictbetween Ignatius and the ‘Matthaean’ group, but it is a stimulating suggestion. Sim then has a secondchapter, on the extent to which Matthew’s Jesus is the ‘Jesus of history’. He offers an interesting argument,based on an understanding of Mark’s gospel as offering two missions of Jesus, one to Jews and one toGentiles. Matthew, for Sim, offers a deliberately different picture, and tries to edit Mark in various ways, tocorrect what Mark has done; in this respect, he may have brought things closer to the ‘historical Jesus’.Finally, Boris Repschinski in his concluding summary makes the important point that what emerges

repeatedly from these essays is Matthew’s attitude to Law. According to Sim, this marks him out againsthis Christian contemporaries; it also includes a certain reinterpretation of the Law, for example in theantitheses, and inMt’s heightened sense of Jesus as a teacher. Matthew’s is (assuming that Sim and othersare right) an interpretation and revision of a Gentile gospel, and this may be connected to its eventualpopularity in the Gentile church, and its relatively weak appeal to Jewish Christian circles. ReceptionHistory must not be neglected these days. This is a most interesting book, and a very important reminderof the great diversity of early Christianity.

Campion Hall, Oxford Nicholas King

Your Father in Heaven: Discipleship in Matthew as a process of becoming children of God. By HenryPattaramadathil SJ. Analecta Biblica 172, Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, Rome 2008, n.p.g.

The notion of God as Father in Matthew has been neglected in recent treatments of the First Gospel, andthis book, which started life as a doctoral thesis, re-examines it, under five headings: Christology,Ecclesiology, Missiology, Eschatology, and Ethics. The argument, which the author defends cogently, isthat Matthew is speaking of a process of disciples becoming children of God. He is certainly ontosomething, and has a very important insight to offer. As he points out, 16 of the 21 uses of ‘Father’ in

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Matthew appear in the Sermon on the Mount, and a striking 10 of those are in 6:1–8, which this reviewerhave long supposed to be the centre of chapters 5–7, both mathematically and conceptually. The sense ofGod as Father is what holds the whole Sermon together. For Matthew, God is Father only to Jesus’disciples, who are thereby invited to becomeGod’s children. You might argue that there is no more in thisbook than what readers can read for themselves; and yet its heart is in the right place: the discovery of theinvitation to become children of God is an excellent reason for reading Matthew’s gospel, and inparticular Matthew’s greatest organised collection of sayings, the Sermon on the Mount.

Campion Hall, Oxford Nicholas King

The Way according to Luke: Hearing the Whole Story of Luke-Acts. By Paul Borgman. Pp. 404, Eerdmans,Grand Rapids MI, 2006, $23.00.

The historical-critical method seems weary these days, and scholars are looking for other ways of readingthe texts of the New Testament, not because they want to retreat from the gains that the older methodshave made for us; it is simply that these methods are feeling their age, and do not succeed in showing ushow Scripture can come alive. This book is a notable example of what literary critics have to teach exegetes.Borgman’s insistence on ‘Hearing the Whole Story’ (in the words of his sub-title) reminds us importantlythat i) Luke, like all the NT authors, wrote primarily to be heard (most readers of the NT have always beenilliterate, and therefore all the more able to pick up his clues); ii) Luke-Acts comes in two volumes. You willgo the length and breadth of any biblical conference nowadays without hearing anyone wanting to argue aseparate author for Luke and Acts; but we still tend to read and teach them separately; iii) Luke-Acts is astory, and needs to be read as such. Among many other things, a story invites the reader aboard.In narrative, especially oral narrative, Borgman frequently points out, repetitions are of immense

importance. Luke-Acts needs to be read as a dramatic script, with attention given to what he calls the ‘ear-clues’. In this connection, one claim that may raise a few eyebrows is his estimate of no less than 37 ‘we-passages’. Another is Borgman’s identification of no less than twelve ‘clustered poems’ in the first twochapters of Luke; but take these clues, and see how they help you to read the work. Borgman confidentlyunveils chiasms everywhere, which will causemany an exegete to reach for his gun; but he is very persuasive.The central message of Luke-Acts comes down, according to Borgman, to a clash of two ways, Jesus’radical way against the ‘normal’ way, love as opposed to self-interest. Readers who suppose themselves alltoo wearily familiar with the exegesis of Luke may find themselves reanimated by his talk of the ‘poem onthe plain’, which is separated from Jesus’ ‘Nazareth poem’ by five healings and two healing-summaries.There is a freshness in Borgman’s reading of the text that answers the question raised by all toomany acts ofhistorical-critical reading, ‘why should I bother with this?’ Borgman will not allow us to scissor the text intopericopae, although occasionally, it must be said, he drifts into the territory of historical-critical exegesis,and makes claims about what went on ‘in those days’ which he does not really trouble to defend.Borgman is especially effective when he points out ‘echoes’ as indicators of what Luke is about; for

example the way in which Simeon’s ‘light for the Gentiles’ is echoed in Acts. And to prevent us fromgetting lost in the jungle, each chapter begins and ends with a useful (and thoroughly nuanced) summaryof where we have been and where we are going. Borgman’s account of how the speeches in Acts (that oldchestnut of an essay-topic) hang together is remarkably persuasive, and his account of Cornelius as aparadigm of the changed allegiance to which the story invites us, is most illuminating, as is his affirmationthat God is the central character of the whole two-volume story.Most intriguing of all was Borgman’s version of how the three accounts of Paul’s ‘repentance’ work

together. Borgman shows himself very sensitive to the intertextuality of the three accounts, anddemonstrates that their mounting rhetorical effect is to highlight the Jesus who is ‘light to the Gentiles’.Finally Borgman brings the whole thing quite beautifully together by way of a concluding reflection onthe jailer at Philippi. Read this book for the breath of fresh air that it brings.

Campion Hall, Oxford Nicholas King

Why John Wrote a Gospel: Jesus-Memory-History. By Tom Thatcher. Pp. xviii, 193, Louisville, Kentucky:John Knox Press, 2006, $24.95

For a while it may escape the notice of readers or browsers that in this book’s title the wordWROTE is inupper case; but it will not be long before the author draws their attention to that fact, as well as to thesecond of the words in the subtitle. For this is a book that applies Social Memory Theory (for which

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