sermons and homilies in NT times, given that by the second century a rhetorical emphasis was being seenas suspect in some (significant) quarters. W sees no grounds for thinking that there was first centurysuspicion of rhetoric; rather that the missionary situation of the early church more or less required somekind of rhetoric of persuasion in communicative documents such as these.The style of the commentary that follows will be familiar to those who have used W’s previous socio-

rhetorical commentary. One stand-out example: W approaches 1 Timothy 2:8–15 convinced that onceread on its own socio-religious terms the text will make a fair amount of sense. He notes the text’s concernwith men and women ‘of relatively high social status’. In brief, he argues that women accustomed toallying themselves with the new philosophies and teaching which occasionally breezed through Ephesushad done the same with Christianity, but had thereby omitted what was for Paul the key step of learningwhat they were talking about first. Hence: let (these) women learn, so that as they go on to teach they willunderstand the gospel of which they are trying to speak. The story of Adam and Eve likewise highlightsEve’s lack of proper instruction (not, of course, her fault), while the ‘saved through childbearing’ referenceindicates that while it was through women that the fall came, so through a woman comes redemption aswell, with the messianic reference to Mary’s bearing Jesus being applicable to all women. If ever a readingof 1 Timothy 2 will manage to find socio-cultural reasons for its problematic surface-level content thenthis will be it, though one may confidently predict that not all will be convinced. A personal opinion: Whas found the right balance of contextual and historically plausible reasons to account for what is beingsaid, without requiring men and women today to read the NT text as requiring women not to teach.Overall this is a well-written and comprehensive commentary, to which I shall refer often, at least as

often as I refer to these relatively less central documents of scripture.

St John’s College, Durham Richard S. Briggs

From Jesus to the Gospels: Interpreting the New Testament in its Context. By Helmut Koester. Pp. xiii, 311.Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2007, $39.00.

Koester is well-known as an iconoclast and more specifically as an anti-canonist. His views have alreadybeen widely published in longer works but now a selection of his published articles have been collectedhere on the themes of ‘Gospels Apocryphal and Canonical’, ‘The Gospel of John’ and ‘Jesus, His Sayingsand His Story’. The main icon he wants to smash is the commonly held view that the Synoptic Gospelspreserve the oldest extant traditions about Jesus, which were then supplemented by the theologicaldevelopment of the Fourth Gospel that may also have preserved some authentic historical traditions;from this were derived a variety of later apocryphal writings which have little historical value. Certainlythe latter often seem fantastical compared to the comparative sobriety of Paul and the Synoptics.Koester’s view is that we have no document that presents us directly with the sayings of Jesus or reliableaccounts of events in his life. But we have what he calls the Sayings Gospel Q as our earliest source, whichwas originally a Greek collection of largely wisdom sayings from not later than AD 50, fromwhich came asecond edition shortly after AD 70 – the version used byMatthew and Luke – which added eschatologicalsayings, including apocalyptic Son ofMan sayings that may have been created at about the time of the fallof Jerusalem. He says the Gospel of Thomas originated at about that time (the middle of the first-century)but that document took the sayings tradition of Jesus off in a gnosticising direction.We are told that it was these sayings that were seen as the source of salvation in earliest Christianity. In

Q Jesus is a teacher of wisdom and there is no reference to his death and resurrection. The earliest versionof the passion narrative was constructed as a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies and the moredetailed, historicising account in Mark is significantly later and is not a report of what happened.Matthew comes later, then comes John where we can find sayings that have parallels with Thomas frommid-first-century, and finally Luke-Acts which has limited historical value. His opening article suggests anearly date for and gives a positive evaluation to five apocryphal Gospels: Thomas, theUnknown Gospel ofPapyrus Egerton 2,Dialogue of the Saviour, theApocryphon of James and theGospel of Peter, all of whichare said to be of equal value as the Synoptic Gospels. This re-alignment of extant Jesus traditions allowsKoester to bust open the canon of the New Testament. His aim is to restore the textual complexity of thefirst-century before a simplified and homogeneous Pan-Christianity, as he calls it, was imposed forpolitical reasons in the second-century. When studying these textual traditions we should dispense withpresuppositions about orthodoxy and heresy.Now, if one thinks that New Testament study is a form of cultural history, then all these sources go into

the melting-pot together and are to be valued equally, and Koester deplores those NT introductions thatconsider the canonical Gospels separately from apocryphal writings. But if one thinks that it is importantfor belief and theology that one has some sort of engagement with the historical Jesus, then it is likely that

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the canonical Gospels will be evaluated far more highly and will thus receive much more attention thanapocryphal documents. Koester, then, who represents the former camp, exemplifies a very damagingdivision in the world of New Testament scholarship.What then of the historical Jesus? The first chapter from 1980 tells us that ‘The question of the historical

Jesus . . . should be laid to rest for the time being’ but the penultimate chapter of 1997, ‘The Historical JesusandHis Sayings’, attempts to take up a position. First Koester tells us that all recent attempts at a historicalquest have focused on the sayings of Jesus. In fact this is a Bultmannean perspective (Bultmann wasKoester’sDoktorvater) and ignores Sanders statement of 1985 in Jesus and Judaism that he will set aside thesayings, the authenticity of which have no consensus among scholars, in order to determine the probabilityof events in Jesus’ life. Nevertheless, extant documents, according to Koester, ‘are not dealing with theoriginal words of Jesus of Nazareth, but with characteristic symbols of an early oral tradition that some ofthe earlier communities had fashioned (inscribed) to express their own . . . understanding of Jesus’. Thesevarious and varied Christian communities developed their own distinctive formulation of the sayingswithin particular cultural, linguistic and religious contexts, all of which were several steps removed fromthe situation of Jesus’ life and ministry. Yet we can know something about Jesus. We know a lot about theJewish people of that time and the beginnings of what became Christianity, and so ‘Jesus’ ministry andpreaching must be placed within the trajectory that leads from this Jewish milieu of his time to his memoryin the communities of his followers’. There are many sayings about ‘bread’ in Q, sometimes in connectionwith ‘the kingdom of God’ and these sayings should be related to rituals in which Jesus’ memory wassustained. Is this what the Jesus of history is to be reduced to? Sayings about bread and an eating ritual? Isthis the stuff of salvation? Koester, then, is an extreme reductionist and is explicit that ‘A reconstruction ofJesus’ life, ministry and proclamation is not possible’; we only have images of Jesus from latercommunities. For Koester Christianity is about wisdom sayings – whether they come from Jesus or not weshall never know – that allow us to understand and criticise and deal with our present existential situation.

Harrogate, UK Geoffrey Turner

The Three Gospels: New Testament History Introduced by the Synoptic Problem. By Martin Mosse. Pp. xxxii,364, Bletchley, UK, Paternoster, 2007, $50.00.

Themetaphors that spring to one’smind on a perusal of this excellent survey of the synoptic problem from ahistorical point of view are those of puncturing a balloon with a pin, questioning the emperor’s clothes, andsinging extra chorum. The author’s somewhat ironically stated standpoint vis-a-vis a surprising majority ofNewTestament scholars over the past two centuries is simply, ‘I doubt whether the optimal approach to anyhistorical problem is to jettison all the available ancient evidence at the outset.’ (p. 19) He ventures to takehis stand on what he calls ‘the overwhelming testimony of the early Church’ (p. 111) on such matters as theauthorship of the four gospels, the reality of Q (which he calls in question) and the identity of ‘John theElder’ (which he regards as a mere figment of the Eusebian imagination). His bete noire is the all too typicalNT scholar who is variously termed a source critic, a form critic, and a redaction critic, but who is notablydeficient in any historical expertise. One example of such cavalier criticism is a certain tendency to dateMark ‘around 70’,Matthew ‘about 80’, Luke ‘about 90’, and John ‘about 100’, concerning which the authorwryly comments, ‘In any other scientific discipline such regularity would be considered remarkable anddemanding of instant investigation.’ (p. 135) The implication is that this kind of criticism can hardly beconsidered either scientific or disciplined, without a historical training such as this author brings to his task.Whereas nowadays it is all too often taken for granted by NT commentators, whether scholarly or

otherwise, that there is no necessary connection between the four evangelists traditionally named asauthors of their respective gospels and the real authors whose names are glossed over under a veil ofanonymity – according to ‘the modern tendency to assume that in early Christianity only unknowns knewhow to write’ (E.Ellis, p. 281) – this author insists that ‘a failure to investigate historically the originatingwriters constitutes an indefensible flaw of methodology’ (p. 141). It is, on the other hand, by observing hismethod that he comes up with the names of St. Mark, the disciple of St. Peter, as author of the first Gospelin Greek for the Christians in Rome, St. Matthew, as author of the first Gospel in Aramaic (or ‘Hebrew’)for the Jews in Palestine but the second in Greek, St. Luke, the companion of St. Paul, as author of thethird Gospel for the Gentiles, and St. John, ‘the beloved apostle’, as author of the fourth Gospel and thewhole Johannine corpus, including even the Book of Revelation. In other words, he is at once outspokenlyradical in his opposition to NT scholarship, as it has developed since the nineteenth century under F.C.Baur and his Tubingen School, and die-hardly conservative in his acceptance of the old Catholic tradition.Not that he is opposed to any scholarly consensus built up over the centuries, but what surprises him is theextent to which ‘somany excellent scholars have arrived at so many and widely differing solutions’ (p. 155).

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