Top Five NT Books from the Last 25 Years

There have been many excellent, and even seminal books written over the course of the last quarter century, but here I am picking five items that really belong in every serious student of the Bible’s library in the field of NT studies.  There are of course others that could be listed, but these are not only must haves, but must reads.  I am not ranking them in any particular order— you need them all.  I will mention one of my books after listing these five, to forestall later questions.

John Barclay’s, Paul and the Gift (Eerdmans, 2017).  This is a landmark study in the broader field of Pauline studies, and it finally helps particularize the various different ways grace is viewed, defined, and perfected in differing contexts. Barclay not only helps us understand the various way Paul uses the term ‘charis’  but how later handlers of the Pauline material have understood ‘grace’ and in various ways gone beyond, and in some cases even against the way Paul used the term.

My second must have title is Richard Bauckham’s  Jesus and the Eyewitnesses 2nd ed.  (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 2017).

This crucial study makes very clear as to why the old source, and form critical ways of reading the Gospel traditions was wrong in various ways.  The Jesus traditions were handed down carefully from the eyewitnesses to those in contact with the eyewitnesses, and did not go through a long process of development, alteration, change, and reinvention .  Nor did the Gospel writers see themselves as the ‘creators’ of the Jesus tradition. To the contrary, what Papias later says about the Gospel of Mark (Mark got his materials from the preaching of Peter), and what  Luke says about his own source material (Luke. 1.1-4– he relied on what he learned from consulting the eyewitnesses  and the original preachers of the Good News), and what the collector of the Johannine Gospel material says about the eyewitness testimony of the Beloved Disciple is true.  All four Gospels address communities with the life and teachings of Jesus in various ways. They are not the creations or fabrications of those communities.

While Tom Wright has written many important books in his long career, there are none more important than The Resurrection and the Son of God,  (Minn. Fortress Press, 2003).  Wright in a clear and  detailed way investigates afterlife theology in the NT era, and makes evident that the talk about resurrection, a Jewish way of viewing the afterlife, is not about having visions, or about some spiritual state that doesn’t involve a material body.  Resurrection is quite specifically about something that happens to a dead person  involving a body which, to judge from the Easter event, involves a body that is tangible  and immune to disease, decay, and death.  Furthermore, there would be no Jesus movement, or later Christianity if Jesus did not rise from the dead, and appear to various disciples in a real tangible body, and also to two persons who were not yet his disciples— James his brother, and Saul of Tarsus his opponent (see 1 Cor. 15).

One of the fields of NT study which has undergone the most scrutiny and careful attention over the last 40 years is apocalyptic literature.  For many years the SBL held seminars where there were careful attempts to study, and define what exactly the term apocalyptic means when it comes to literature.  What is its genre, is it genuine prophecy or not,  what do we make of the retrojection of various books (e.g. the  Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs or 1 Enoch, or 4 Ezra) back into the mouths of long dead ancient Biblical figures to make history look like ancient prophecy?  And was there some genuine prophecy by real NT figures  that also used this genre to express the truth (answer yes, in the case of John’s Revelation, but not in the case of the Apocalypse of Peter)?  One of the main leaders in the study of this vast corpus of literature, who helped define terms and genre features is John J. Collins,  and his work The Apocalyptic Imagination, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016) has become the standard textbook in this field.

The last of the five must haves, is Richard Burridge’s What Are the Gospels? 3rd ed.  (Waco: Baylor U. Press, 2020).  This book began as a doctoral dissertation, became a CUP monograph,, and then gradually was revised and added to when it became clear it would be a standard reference work.  What Burridge made clear is that the NT Gospels are not terra incognita,  not like a unicorn, distinctive from all other literature, but rather were written by authors in a way that comported with the standards of ancient Greco-Roman biographies, not modern ones.  This study made clear that one should read the Gospels in light of their original historical contexts, in this case in the light of ancient biographies by Plutarch and many others.  I would add however,  that while there was considerable overlap between ancient biographies and ancient historical monographs, on the whole, Luke’s Gospel is surely of the same genre as his volume of Acts, as the prologue in Lk. 1.1-4 indicates— namely it is part of a two volume historical monograph about ‘the things that have happened among us’.

Here I would say that no serious student of the NT should be without these five seminal books.  They have all stood the test of time, and are all still in print and selling.

As promised here is one of my own more important books, which in recent years won the national Prose Prize for Book of the year in Religion and Philosophy (in a tie with Tom Wright’s History and Eschatology),  namely my Biblical Theology. The Convergence of the Canon, (Cambridge: CUP, 2020).

Besides dealing in detail with the definitional questions of how Biblical Theology differs from OT or NT theology,  I deal with the major topics of relevance such as covenant, salvation, election, salvation history, grace, and much more.  I also tackle the important subjects of progressive revelation and also the progressive understanding of revelation amongst the writers of the OT and NT, showing that not only is the Christ event the most important part of all this revelation, but also the basis for a better understanding of the divine identity involving three persons– Father, Son and Holy Spirit.