New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel

Title: New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel
Author: Howard I. Marshall

Publisher: Inter-varsity Press
Category: Theology
ISBN: 0830827951
UPC: 9780830827954
2005 ECPA Bibles Winner

Pages: 750
Book Type: Paperback
Size: 9.0 X 6.0 inches
Released Date: 2004

Description:
New Testament theology is essentially missionary theology, writes I. Howard Marshall. Founded on a sure-footed mastery of the data and constructed with clear thinking lucidly expressed, this long-anticipated New Testament theology offers the insights born of a distinguished career of study, reflection, teaching and writing on the New Testament.
Marshall's New Testament Theology will speak clearly to a broad audience of students and nonspecialists. But even on the most familiar ground, where informed readers might lower their expectations of learning something new, Marshall offers deft insights that sharpen understanding of the message of the New Testament.

Here is a New Testament theology that does not succumb to the fashion of settling for an irreconcilable diversity of New Testament voices but argues that "a synthetic New Testament theology is a real possibility. Beginning with the Gospels and Acts, proceeding to each of Paul's letters, focusing then on the Johannine literature and finally looking at Hebrews and the remaining general epistles, Marshall repeatedly stops to assess the view. And gradually he builds up a composite synthesis of the unified theological voice of the New Testament.

On the way toward this synthesis, Marshall highlights clearly the theological voices of the individual New Testament books. Thus, his New Testament theology serves also as a sort of introduction to the New Testament books, making it double as an attractive complement to book-by-book introductions to the New Testament.

Here is a New Testament theology that will not only guide students and delight teachers but also reward expositors with a lavish fund of insights for preaching.

Pt. 1 Introduction
Pt. 2 Jesus, the synoptic gospels and acts
Pt. 3 The Pauline letters
Pt. 4 The Johannine literature
Pt. 5 Hebrews, James, 1-2 Peter, and Jude
Pt. 6 Conclusion

Preface
The aim of this book is to provide a guide to the theology of the New Testament that will be at a level and of a length suitable for use by students but will also be of use to all who are interested in the subject. In an era of increasingly lengthy books on every aspect of New Testament study, I have tried to be reasonably succinct and to produce a work of manageable scope.

Works on New Testament theology may be organized more in terms of theological themes as they are treated throughout the New Testament or more in terms of the theological teaching of the individual New Testament books. The approach taken here is to let each of the individual books of the New Testament speak for themselves and then to attempt some kind of synthesis of their teaching. Any approach has its drawbacks, and the weakness of this approach is that the reader will find discussion of, say, the church spread over various chapters and will need to make good use of the index. However, the great strength of this approach is that it lets the structure and the content of the discussion be shaped by what the individual writers were trying to say in the actual documents. In order to avoid repetition, some topics, which might be discussed equally well in other contexts, will generally be taken up in one place (e.g., the concept of the church as the body of Christ is discussed in the chapter on Ephesians, although it could also have been taken up in connection with Colossians).

In accordance with this aim of producing a book that will be helpful to students, the bibliographies have been deliberately confined to works in English that should for the most part be not too difficult to access. However, the two or three commentaries that I have listed for each book of the New Testament tend to be among the more solid ones available, and some of them may need at least a modest knowledge of Greek to get the most out of them. I see no point in providing exhaustive lists of literature (which I haven’t read in any case) and offering no guidance as to which books should be priorities for the student. I have not listed books in other languages with one exception: I have given references to the main German theologies of the New Testament where appropriate (and very occasionally to other works that have influenced me).

Biblical citations are taken from the NIV (Inclusive Language Edition) for the Old Testament and from the TNIV for the New Testament unless otherwise indicated.

I am grateful to InterVarsity Press for their patience in waiting for the long-delayed completion of this book and for their efficient production.
I. Howard Marshall

From Chapter 1: How Do We Do New Testament Theology?
Before we can discuss how to write the theology of the New Testament, we need to say something about the legitimacy and possibility of the enterprise.

The most vocal contemporary critic of the enterprise is Heikki Räisänen, who makes four points to show why it must not and cannot be done.1

First, Räisänen claims that the historical and the theological must be kept separate. He argues that it is not the job of New Testament scholars as New Testament scholars to deal with theology; rather their sphere is history. The New Testament scholar can write a purely descriptive account of the early church, but nothing more. To write theology is to be prescriptive, and the New Testament scholar as such has no authority to prescribe anything to anybody.

Second, Räisänen also argues that the nature of the material confines us to writing a history of the religion of the early Christians. Here he is going back to the limited agenda set up a century ago by William Wrede.

Third, a study confined to the New Testament documents is said to rest on an artificial limitation; it is determined by a canonization process that represents a later theological decision and has no basis in the early history of the church.

Fourth, there is so much contradiction between the documents that a theology of the New Testament in the sense of a unified theological outlook common to the documents cannot be extracted from them.

Räisänen’s arguments have been subjected to detailed and largely convincing criticism by Peter Balla.2 Balla responds to his first point by arguing that there is no good reason why the theology of the first Christians cannot be the object of historical study, and that such historical study can be pursued without starting from a churchly standpoint or concluding with a statement of what the church ought to believe. The first of these two rejoinders is sound, but more needs to be said about the second one later.

Perhaps the simplest and most convincing response to Räisänen’s second point is to note that no fewer than ten major presentations by highly competent New Testament scholars of widely differing theological persuasions have appeared in the last few years.3 It is hard to believe that they were all united in doing something that is fundamentally illegitimate, and the existence of their works demonstrates that the enterprise is possible!...