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A Critical Introduction to the New Testament: Interpreting the Message and Meaning of Jesus Christ

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Dr. Holladay was my N.T. professor at seminary and was absolutely outstanding. This book is a must for serious students of the N.T.. The included CD has a tremendous amount of material not included in the book which is equally outstanding. As a pastor, I keep this book on my desk at all times. Fantastic !!!

While a student and one of Dr Holladay's student assistants in the mid-eighties, I wondered when he would write his 'big book'. This is it. This critical introduction will no doubt become the standard introduction to the New Testament in most seminaries and, hopefully, college courses. Dr. Holladay is an absolutely first rate scholar who maintains a keen interest in the Church's life and ministry. The book is the ideal combination in that it is both thorough and accessible. I recommend it enthusiastically and without reservation.

From the book:

This introduction provides basic literary and historical information on each of the twenty-seven writings of the New Testament, but it also orients readers to the religious, theological, and ethical issues related to the message and meaning of Jesus Christ. By giving special emphasis to how the New Testament has helped shape the church's identity and theological outlook throughout the centuries and the role it has played within the broader cultures of both East and West, this book assists readers in exercising creative, informed leadership within their own communities of faith. A distinctive feature of the book is its simultaneous publication in two formats: a standard printed edition with comprehensive yet detailed coverage; and the Expanded CD-ROM Version, which includes supporting endnotes, extensive annotated bibliographies on each New Testament book, additional maps, diagrams, and charts, and other resources for classroom use and personal study.

This work seeks to do what so many other "critical" introductions do: Straddle the gulf between 1) the dark and little-known world of the early Jesus movement, its successors in the varieties of hellenistic churches spreading by year and decade throughout the Mediterranean world, finally into the choatic environment of the second century where thousands of literary and eccesiastical forms of a church emerged and engaged in virtual "combat"... And 2) the confessional bias of the Western orthodox tradition centered in Rome that--among many others--Elaine Pagels demonstrates emerged as a thoroughly political victor (motivated by a political agenda) over its major powerful theological adversaries, especially Gnosticism, in the "opposition's" many incarnations within thousands of differing churches in countless micro-regions. As for the eventual conquest by the Roman tradition, utterly vanquishing its foes, see William Manchester's "A World Lit Only by Fire."

Thus, Holladay's work is admirable in the estimation of the numerous scholars who hold fast to their evangelical, western orthodox doctrinal, or sundry confessional stances. The infallible "tell" here is the appearance of "Jesus Christ" in his title, with no initial announcement of the enormous differences between an historical Jesus and a theologically-sponsored "risen Christ." With Holladay's failure to make this critical distinction, he firmly forecasts he will never take with authentic seriousness what the genuinely major critics in the scientific study of the hellentistic world perceive to be extant in the wildly diverse manifestations of NOT an orthodox-oriented Christianity broadly accepted as blossoming quasi-divinely from Paul through the Ante Nicene Fathers, but ChristianitIES. In a word, diversity clearly trumped any univocal or macro-clustering versions of orthodoxy as multiple Christianities spread during the first two centuries CE. (It is no accident that Holladay and his mentor, Professor Malherbe, both sprang originally from their background in the southern Churches of Christ and/or its chief engine of academic advocacy, Abilene Christian College.) As an early student of Malherbe's at ACC, I recall clearly how he sought to justify a continuing evangelically-biased reading of the New Testament by stressing that "canonicity" was the means by which "deity" was assuring the central authority of the never-mentioned (or even understood) abundant "problems" of a fundamentally singular Western tradition.

Holladay's book is a model for the avoidance of the inconvenient truths offered by Helmut Koester, Norman Perrin, (occasionally Norman Brown), the elegant Elaine Pagels, and, most recently and transparently, Bart D. Ehrman.