New Testament Theology: Exploring Diversity and Unity. By FRANK J. MATERA

Abstract

Textbooks of New Testament theology have long been a German speciality, but in addition to Howard Marshall’s (2005) we now have two major American contributions, one more from a conservative evangelical perspective (Thielman, 2005), and this one by a distinguished American Roman Catholic scholar whose accounts of New Testament Christology and ethics are already widely used. The publisher says it integrates Protestant and Catholic approaches, and it is hard to detect any confessional bias in its thorough, balanced, and reliable account of the biblical writings. Four parts, the Synoptic, Pauline, Johannine Tradition, and Other Voices, are followed by a substantial conclusion on ‘the diverse unity of New Testament theology’. This does justice to a major concern of the discipline. The unity of the New Testament is ‘a presupposition of faith’, but for the historian ‘a hypothesis to be tested’ (p. 429). What each of the four parts has to say about humanity in need of salvation, the bringer of salvation, the community of the sanctified, the moral life of the sanctified, and the hope of the sanctified is lucidly recapitulated and the diverse unity of New Testament theology explained on the grounds that ‘no one way can fully capture the mystery that is God in Christ’ (p. 480). The theological dimensions of the task are acknowledged and the difference from a history of religions presentation implied, but the dangers of distortion are avoided as Matera seeks ‘to describe the theological logic of each New Testament writing with a view to explaining how the diverse theologies in the New Testament are ultimately related to one another’ (p. xvi). That this, not the historical character or theological content of the writings, is what is explained, signals a less ambitious project than some classics in the field.