Customer Reviews

Face of New Testament Studies, The: A Survey of Recent Research

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It's incredible how many scholarly books and articles are written every year on the New Testament. Even if you had the time to keep up with all the research, you probably wouldn't have access to all the relevant material unless you lived next to a seminary with a large library.

A book that summarizes the recent findings of NT research and makes it accessible to the layman would be tremendously valuable. To a large extent, Scot McKnight and Grant Osborne have accomplished this in THE FACE OF NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES: A SURVEY OF RECENT RESEARCH. This book collects essays by leading NT scholars hitting on all the major areas of NT studies. The contributors are a mix of conservatives (Blomberg and Twelftree) and moderates-liberals (Dunn and Chilton).

By "recent" the authors don't mean just the last five years. For example, McKnight's article on the Jesus of history discusses Bultmann and Dodd, although more time is spent on N. T. Wright and J. P. Meier. The articles are all informative, but a couple (those on textual criticism and Greek grammar) are a bit too technical for the casual reader.

This was a required text in my doctoral program in New Testament Studies. I found the book to be very thorough and quite readable. The only disadvantage was that the book does not have bibliographical information at the end of each chapter. The chapters are up to date and written by fine scholars. There is also a complimentary volume on the Old Testament that I have not yet written. I recommend the text strongly.