A few weeks ago, I reviewed What the Old Testament Authors Really Cared About. This companion volume completes the set. Does it deliver on the bold promise implicit in its title?
Strengths
This volume takes the same format as its partner, giving minimal attention to historical background and focusing its efforts on the theological messages of each New Testament book. It roughly groups the books by author (thus putting Acts together with Luke, and discussing John’s epistles and Revelation along with his gospel) so as to emphasize, as you’d expect, what the authors cared about in writing these books.
The writing is comprehensible. The visuals are attractive and relevant. The biblical text is ever-present. This overview would be a useful text for a Bible overview course for adults or teenagers.
Weaknesses
While there is much to commend this book, I believe it takes the minor weakness of the Old Testament volume and magnifies it.
That is, the contributors often don’t “show their work” very well. While this was the case for only a few of the OT entries, I felt it was the case for a majority of the NT entries. It was more difficult for me to find chapters where I believed the author not only stated his conclusions, but proved them from a literary analysis of the text. The best examples are Huffman on Luke, Kelly on Acts, Guthrie on Hebrews, and Cate on 1 &2 Peter.
I would not say the remaining chapters are in any way bad. They might be great. It just wasn’t clear in many of them whether the key points represented what the NT author really cared about, or whether they more represented what the contributing scholar really cared about.
I don’t find any chapters to be communicating things that are not in the text at all. Instead, they simply present a select number of themes without showing why those themes are any more important than a number of other themes that could be mentioned.
Conclusion
I am grateful to Kregel Academic for sending me a complimentary copy of this volume in exchange for an honest review. I am glad to add it to my library, and I will likely make good use of it with teenagers and adults in my home and church. But I am more enthusiastic about the rich big-picture thought and literary analysis presented in the OT volume than that which I find in this one.
You can check it out at Amazon.
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