Henry Wansbrough is excellent company in this tour through the New Testament. He has an easy style, and a gift for conveying technical information with clarity. His first step, however, is to take us to the Old Testament. The first chapter is entitled ‘Why read the Old Testament?’ His answer is that it provides the framework for the view of the human condition developed and brought to a conclusion in the New Testament.
Another advantage of starting with the Old Testament is that it allows for a gentle introduction of the idea that the authors of the gospels were not simply recorders of facts, but shapers of their material and even creators of narratives. This is especially relevant to the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. Matthew wants to portray Jesus as in the line of David and as a Second Moses, forced to flee into exile to escape a violent king, whereas Luke stresses the role of the Spirit in Jesus’ birth, and has the angels proclaim him to the shepherds as ‘a saviour’. Wansbrough comments: ‘Stories of a great man’s birth are often more illustrative than factual’ (p.98). He suggests that the feeding of the Five/Four Thousand is a similar construction (pp 142–43).
Wansbrough makes it clear that he is following the ‘historico-critical method’, and has a helpful summary of what this involves (pp 12–14). Although his book is not a commentary, he manages to explain the structure, approach and interests of each author in around ten pages (for the gospels). Matthew is fond of ‘starkly contrasting characters (unlike Luke’s delicately painted likeable rogues)’ (p.53). The book has a chapter on each of the gospels, plus chapters on the parables and the passion narratives. Subsequently each book of the New Testament is given a chapter to itself. The annotated bibliographies at the end of each chapter are very helpful, as is the glossary at the end. There is also a general bibliography.
There is also a chapter on ‘the Historical Jesus’. Wansbrough says that we are now in the third ‘quest for the historical Jesus’, associated with E.P. Sanders, who emphasises Jesus’ Jewishness, and he gives a list of what Sanders regards as ‘virtually unassailable’ facts about Jesus (p. 149). In passing, he is uncharacteristically rude about the Jesus Seminar (p.147).
When we leave the gospels behind, we are in a very different world. As far as the genuine letters of Paul are concerned, it is an earlier stage of Christianity, with ‘precious nuggets of the most ancient tradition of the Church’ in Paul’s discussion of the eucharist in 1 Cor 10–11. And perhaps surprisingly, ‘in the earliest writing of the New Testament [1 Thessalonians], Jesus is already being given divine honours and divine prerogatives’ (p.295). The main concerns in this world are, in the early years, the relations between Christian and Jewish belief and practice, later the failure of the End to occur. A running thread, from Paul through the Catholic Epistles, is divisions in the community.
What is absent, however, is any interest in the historical Jesus: ‘It is striking that narrative material about the ministry and sayings of Jesus seems to have contributed little to the formation of the parts of the New Testament other than the gospels’ (p. 356). An exception of a sort may come in 1 John. In discussing this, Wansbrough returns to a hypothesis he mentioned approvingly in his discussion of the Fourth Gospel, that it went through three editions (pp 120–22), and suggests that the famous insistence in the first verse of 1 John on the physicality of the first disciples’ contact with Jesus, ‘that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life’, may be a corrective to a false spiritualisation of the Christian message based on the Prologue to John’s Gospel.
If there is anything in this hypothesis, the religion of the communities of the first century may have been more like the ‘mystery religions’ and the imperial cult, with which they disputed terms such as soter and kurios, than what we would recognise as Christianity today. In this sense, the thesis that Paul invented Christianity looks more plausible than we often think.
Francis McDonagh read classics at Cambridge and is a keen student of the Greek New Testament. Now retired from his job at CAFOD as Andes Programme Manager, he is a translator and freelance journalist for The Tablet and other media.
Henry Wansbrough. Bloomsbury T.&T. Clark (London 2015). Pbk. 424 pages. £17.09.