Reading the New Testament

169 Pages·1989·18.858 MB·English

by  Patrick Grant (auth.)

READING THE NEW TESTAMENT
Also by Patrick Grant
THE TRANSFORMATION OF SIN: STUDIES IN DONNE, HERBERT,
VAUGHAN AND TRAHERNE
"IMAGES AND IDEAS IN LITERATURE OF THE ENGLISH
RENAISSANCE
"SIX MODERN AUTHORS AND PROBLEMS OF BELIEF
"LITERATURE OF MYSTICISM IN WESTERN TRADITION.
A DAZZLING DARKNESS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF WESTERN
MYSTICISM
"LITERATURE AND THE DISCOVERY OF METHOD IN THE
ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
"Also published by Macmillan
Reading the
New Testament
PATRICK GRANT
Professor of English
University of Victoria, British Columbia
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
© Patrick Grant 1989
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1989978-0-333-43618-9
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First published 1989
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills. Basingstoke. Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
Typeset by Mid-County Press. London. S.W.15. England
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Grant. Patrick. 1941-
Reading the New Testament.
1. Bible. N.T.~Commentaries
I. Title
225.7 BS2341.2
ISBN 978-1-349-09312-0 ISBN 978-1-349-09310-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09310-6
For My Parents
Anne and Desmond Grant
Contents
Preface ix
1 Introduction: the New Testament and the
Literary Reader 1
2 Mark: the Anointing at Bethany 10
3 Matthew: the Centurion's Earthquake 23
4 Luke-Acts: the Ironic Travellers 36
5 John: Seeing and Believing 59
6 Paul to the Corinthians: 'As deceivers yet true' 78
7 Hebrews: Blood on the Boundary 95
8 Revelation: the Two-Edged Sword 108
9 Coda 127
Notes 133
Index 158
vii
Preface
The worst bad men. C. S. Lewis says. are religious bad men. and I am a
great suspector of religious faith in case it turns out to be the bad sort.
The present study suggests that a literary reading of the New
Testament reveals that the documents are deeply insightful about the
perilous nature of faith. and about how uneasily it can stand in relation
to our sense of reason. justice and freedom. I do not imply that the New
Testament somehow 'really' attacks the faith it so imperatively
recommends; only that it presents the problems of religious belief
imaginatively and in a strong form. so that the full challenge of faith is
brought home to us.
I would like to thank James P. Mackey. who encouraged me in this
undertaking from the start. and whose advice has been of inestimable
help throughout. as has the example especially of his book. Jesus. the
Man and the Myth. I thank Larry Hurtado and Ian McDonald for
sharing their expertise as New Testament specialists. and for great
kidness in reading my typescript. As ever. Charles Doyle. Laurence
Lerner and A. D. Nuttall have provided astute criticism and helpful
advice without which the inadequacies of this book would be
considerably more pronounced.
Quotations throughout are from the Revised Standard Version.
ix
1
Introduction: the New
Testament and the
Literary Reader
It is difficult to say exactly what sort of book the New Testament is. It
consists of twenty seven documents, broadly classifiable as gospels,
letters, acts and apocalypse. Of these main kinds, the gospel is
peculiarly Christian; the other three were familiar property in the
ancient world, adapted by the New Testament authors to their special
purposes. Yet it is not clear how much the gospel is indebted to other
sorts of writing to which it seems closely related, such as memoirs or the
'lives of famous men'. Moreover, the word 'gospel' (euaggelion) in the
New Testament always applies to speech and dialogue rather than
writing, and was not therefore originally used to describe a book.'
Likewise, Paul's use of letters for preaching purposes has left scholars
uneasily conscious of how different is the result from ordinary letters in
the ancient world. And although the title 'Acts' (praxeis) was
conventionally used to describe narratives of heroic deeds, the author of
the book we now call The Acts of the Apostles does not use the word at
all. The canonical title was added long after the book was composed.
Finally, although John's Revelation draws on examples of apocalyptic
writing from the intertestamental period, it differs from them by not
being pseudonymous, and by its strong emphasis on prophecy.2
The language of the New Testament is also a mixture of elements. The
actual texts are in koine, the popular Greek of the Hellenistic world.
Koine was not a literary language, and seems not to have been Jesus'
first language either, for he spoke Aramaic, a dialect akin to Hebrew but
distinct from it. Yet Greek was widely used in Palestine, and Jesus
might have been bilingual. as many Jews were. Certainly, the New
Testament texts abound with echoes of Aramaic, as they do also with
echoes of the Hebrew scriptures, though these frequently come through
the Greek Septuagint. As Amos Wilder says, none of the New
Testament writings would have been classified as 'literature' in the
1
2 Reading the New Testament
Roman Empire.3 The New Testament, in short, is an anomalous and
peculiar set of documents without conventional literary pretensions.
Indeed, it is sometimes held that the New Testament is authoritative
precisely because it is not literary in a conventional way. Critics such as
C. S. Lewis and Helen Gardner make this point in order to highlight the
overriding historical claim that Jesus, the chief character in the New
Testament story, is in fact God! Whatever else one might think about
Jesus the crucified-and-risen-one (as the early church would have it),
the claim that he was God has made history on a grand scale, and that is
one clue to his identity. And from the centre of that identity comes a
piercing utterance about the Reign of God, a declaration that salvation
is available in the present moment and that judgement will come upon
us. Jesus thus proclaims himself as the event which clarifies history, so
that there can be no turning back, no avoidance of decision. 'I and my
Father are one' (John 10:30), he says with breathtaking effrontery, and
if we are to have eternal life, we must believe (John 3: 36); otherwise, we
stumble amidst the shadows of this world, to our own undoing and the
undoing of others' good around us. Such claims might well be sustained
by a fascinating set of narratives and letters, symbols and parables, but
basically they are impatient of a merely fictive imagination.
The distinction which I am now beginning to draw between literature
and history, however, can easily be over-simplified, and a great deal
depends on how I have used the word 'conventional'. The New
Testament might not fit accepted notions of literary excellence in the
Roman Empire, but our decision about its historical claims is
inextricably bound up with the vision of human experience which the
story presents. In St. Paul's epistles, for example, we can feel on the one
hand a theologian's mind at work, convinced that definitive truth has
been revealed in Jesus and now must be understood. Paul's semi
technical terms - flesh, spirit, body, heart, law, grace, charity and so on
- declare his conviction that Jesus is the Christ who introduces a new
dispensation of grace and offers salvation to those who believe in
redemption through his death and resurrection. Yet, on the other hand,
Paul's special words are often used with shades of meaning appropriate
for his different audiences, and reflect his own developing thought.
Although he struggles to make clear the one, central fact of Jesus' saving
significance, Paul's concepts are imbued with the suggestiveness of
metaphor, presenting us with ideas richly fraught with emotion and the
rhetoric of desire. The very fractiousness of his audiences, with their
misunderstandings and enthusiasm, their resistance and evasions,
causes Paul's writing to veer and swerve as would a dialogue (or, more