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[JGRChJ 11 (2015) R27-R32]
BOOK REVIEW
Schröter, Jens, From Jesus to the New Testament: Early Christian
Theology and the Origin of the New Testament Canon (trans. Wayne
Coppins; Baylor-Mohr Siebeck Studies in Early Christianity, 1; Waco,
TX: Baylor University Press, 2013). xiv + 417. Hbk. USD59.95.
The studies in From Jesus to the New Testament are designed to offer a
historical solution to the ongoing problem of ‘the diversity and theo-
logical unity of the New Testament’ (p. xiii). True to that task,
Schröter’s goal is not merely to elucidate the task of critical history that
has moved beyond historicism, but also to use this kind of historical
criticism as a point of departure for discussing the contribution New
Testament research must make towards theological discourse. If all
New Testament research can offer is a history of early Christian
religion, then it has not achieved its goal. Its goal, he claims, it to render
comprehensible the process of development that ultimately led to the
decision of early Christianity to bind itself to a specific set of
documents.
The title is intended to suggest four loci of development, cor-
responding to parts I through IV: (I) methodological refocusing on how
a distinct Christian view of history and reality emerged by the third
century; (II) analysis of Luke’s Doppelwerk (‘two-volume work’),
which meaningfully relates Jesus and Paul, Jews and Gentiles; (III) the
emergence of a standard, the fourfold gospel, by which traditions were
evaluated, as well as Acts, which not only marries the Jesus traditions
with the Pauline letters, but thereby creates a trajectory for the inclusion
and exclusion of other documents and traditions; and (IV) the prospects
of assembling a unified New Testament theology from a variety of doc-
uments. Schröter advocates a methodology-of-history perspective
throughout, wherein history is ‘the result of the past appropriated un-
der the conditions of the respective present’ (pp. 47-48). The past can-
not be appropriated on its terms due to our distance from it, nor can it
be approached neutrally. Rather, a methodology-of-history perspective
R28 Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 11
seeks to reconstruct the past in as plausible a way as possible. Plau-
sibility is a value judgment relative to the present conditions of know-
ledge. Critical engagement, then, should be oriented towards ‘the dif-
ference between past reality and its representation’ (p. 56).
In Part I, Schröter gives a methodological exploration of historical
‘constructivism’ as it pertains to New Testament research. Historicism
explains the past positivistically, but reflects a methodological over-
sight: how can one derive history, not just data, from the sources?
Rather than seeking to produce a purely factual account of the past,
historical research must first engage critically to ascertain the facts, and
then also point the way forward through interpretation, with the goal of
rendering the sources coherent. The text is not open-ended, but neither
does it explain itself to us. So while the present meaning of the text is
relative, it is not given over to nihilistic chaos.
In Part II, Schröter reviews the progress towards the canon regarding
Jesus, Paul and Luke. He claims that previous historical Jesus research
has not been epistemologically reflective on its own relative plau-
sibility. Rather than equating supposedly authentic sayings with what
really happened, he says historical research ought to be an interactive
process between past witnesses and present conditions of knowledge.
The problem he perceives with the works of Strauss, Wrede and
Bultmann is that they stretch plausibility: it goes unexplained how the
early Christians could have come to the conclusions they documented.
The historical Jesus, argues Schröter, was not buried beneath the
past-effacing interpretive categories of his followers, but rather was
embedded within interpretive narratives. Event and interpretation must
both be explained plausibly; historical Jesus research has, however,
tended to explain the nature of the interpretation by eliminating the
event. Schröter relativizes the value of historical Jesus accounts,
claiming they must be viewed as abstract hypotheses that mediate
between the Jesus of history and the present conception of him.
As an aside, some readers will be pleased (or dismayed) to find a
challenge to the prevailing eclectic-text approach to textual criticism in
this section: if various versions and translations of the New Testament
writings existed alongside one another with equal validity, then the
modern eclectic construct is merely a collapsed version of these texts.
Besides the Jesus tradition, the author claims in this section that Paul
also made several significant moves that shaped the Christian tradition
as it began the task of canon formation. Paul recognized multiple forms
Review: SCHRÖTER From Jesus to the New Testament R29
of the one gospel in Galatians, and Schröter proposes that Paul
universalized the Law by (1) claiming a similarly enslaved past for both
Jews and Gentiles, and (2) presenting the Law as the ethical norm for
the Chris-tian community.
I believe that there is an incomplete application of Schröter’s
questioning of Paul here, retaining a twofold tension: (a) despite the
disclaimer that Paul is not the ideal source for reconstructions of early
Judaism, it is a specific (debated) reading of Paul that is at issue: if Paul
does present Judaism negatively as a ‘works-righteousness’ religion,
then it is hard to claim, as Schröter implies, that Christians should not
construe it likewise, other, more even-handed sources notwithstanding;
also, (b) if the pre-Christian state is universally idolatrous, as Schröter
reads Paul, then the interpretive question of why the Law is re-
appropriated at all must be addressed, not merely the descriptive
question of how Paul does it. If Paul does relate the pre-Christian,
Jewish orientation towards Torah as the cultural equivalent to the
idolatry of the pagan Gentiles, as Schröter claims, then the question of
why the Law should be re-appropriated becomes all the more
important. The discussion lacks an explicit rationale for Paul’s use of
the Law, and readers are left to suspect it to be found in a submerged
division of the Law, if not into three parts, then at least into ‘boundary
markers’, on the one hand, and the ostensibly ‘ethical’ laws, on the
other. The implication is that the ‘ethical’ laws need to provide the
norms for the new community, while the ‘boundary markers’ must be
set aside in pursuit of a higher goal. Appeal to the love command may
provide a direction to Paul’s use of the Law, but it does not explain its
use in the first place—which is precisely the kind of further explanation
Schröter’s aforementioned methodology calls for.
In Part III, Schröter explains that the canon did not emerge through
an arbitrary decision made in the fourth century, but through a long
process of producing and redacting texts that represented the con-
fession, and culling those that did not. These two types of writings,
moreover, were not always easily distinguishable based on content,
although in this process the Jesus tradition was always the central
regulating feature. Churches’ canonical lists were first of all des-
criptive, not prescriptive. The emergence of the canon was thus a dia-
lectical interaction between the confession and the tradition. Thus, the
tradition was ultimately fixed in writing according to the confession,
R30 Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 11
over against challenges that were raised by those who came to be
known as heretics.
Whereas Part I focuses on methodology and Parts II and III describe
the formation of the Christian identity as told by the biblical sources,
Part IV seeks to provide a bridge between the disciplines of biblical
studies and theology.
Schröter claims that the establishment of the canon, being a
dialectical process and not the subjection of the writings to an a priori
theological principle, does not remove diversity from the tradition, but
only limits it. This observation is an ethical one, implying the resistance
of the canon to facilitating premature exclusions and inclusions.
Schröter thus provides a historical answer to the problem of unity and
diversity in the New Testament.
Schröter concludes by explaining the theological significance of a
canonical interpretation of the New Testament and early Christian re-
ligion. New Testament research must make its goal that of explaining
precisely why each canonical text is part of the canon. In light of the
generic and theological diversity within the canon, explaining the
presence of each text is an extremely sensitive task, and any answer to
the question would have to take the form of a narrative hypothesis, not
only describing the sources, but also interpreting their connections. He
claims that such explanation is a realistic goal because the canon was
not an arbitrary decision. However, as the historian can only arrive at
hypotheses about these connections, the project is incapable of final
assessment.
In his conclusion, although relying on progressive methodological
claims, Schröter’s analysis of texts actually leads to some strikingly
conservative conclusions about the canon, the relationship between
Jews and Gentiles in the early church and the prospects of a unifying
New Testament theology.
Schröter’s big-picture argument might be summarized in this way:
New Testament research cannot revert to a pre-historicist state, and
must therefore cope with historicism in a reflective and responsible way
via a hermeneutics of history. Through this reflective coping with
historicism, New Testament research, rather than simply furnishing a
list of early Christian theologies, can play a decisive role in theological
reflection on the unity of the New Testament. One implication of his
argument is that it provides a potential stimulus for post-secular
apologetics. This point deserves further thought.
Review: SCHRÖTER From Jesus to the New Testament R31
While Schröter does not make much overt reference to Christian
apologetics, he is optimistic that a methodology of history can provide a
coherent explanation of the way the biblical sources present the past.
While a coherent explanation of why the Gospel writers said what they
did could never lead to ‘proof’ about the referentiality of the texts to the
events themselves, it can provide a strongly plausible hypothesis about
the connection between the two. In other words, though unable to
establish positively the factual basis of the Gospels, Schröter claims his
approach can demonstrate that what the Gospels say about the past
makes sense. Historical truth, he claims, is an ideal that conceptions of
meaning pursue. A conception of meaning is a way of understanding
the events (as witnessed by the sources), and historical-critical study
checks the ties between past and appropriation of past, and ‘historical
truth is therefore a regulative idea’ (p. 47). Schröter points out that to
doubt the historical referent of the Christian recollection does not get to
the historical reality behind the texts any more than does the decision to
trust in its facticity. The Christian recollection, however, exhibits
strength in its ability to integrate the seemingly ‘bad’ events of the
cross, which might have seemed better to forget, into its self-
understanding. The Christian conception of history, he claims, is
therefore an ethical interaction with the past, because it does not efface
the past, but integrates it into the Christian self-understanding in a
comprehensible way. Christians treat all texts according to the same
standards of investigation, but do not assign meaning to them apart
from the fundamental convictions of those texts. In the case of the
Bible, the claim that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead shapes the
way the text is understood to have meaning. The result of Schröter’s
approach is that the Christian view of reality is given a coherent voice
in the marketplace of ideas.
In this volume, Schröter demonstrates the possibility of integrating
rigorous historical criticism into theological studies. Biblical theology
in Germany has tended toward fragmentation, he claims, due to its
interest in ‘purely historical’ study. The way beyond fragmentation,
however, is not an uncritical investigation of sources via deference to
dogmatics. Schröter paves the way forward for biblical theology to
move beyond theologies in pursuit of a theology. Although such an idea
rightly sends up warning flags for readers, as past attempts have proved
incapable of offering a satisfying center of unity, Schröter is well aware
R32 Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 11
that both the ‘theological centre(s)’ approach, and the ‘canon-within-
the-canon’ approach ‘could not be more unsuited’ for the task (p. 341).
Schröter’s work encourages greater self-reflection, especially con-
cerning methodological considerations (which extends to exegetical
work). He presents his view as a mediating perspective between two
counter-movements: historical positivism and narrative criticism.
Schröter provides an alternative that navigates the tensions of both,
without premature dogmatic interference, liberal or conservative.
Although theologically justified readings are common, they can reflect
an uncritical interaction with the sources as historical sources. When
such uncritical interaction happens, theological readings have a hard
time adjudicating between the relative plausibility of historical con-
structions. Such readings can be guilty of sidestepping critical issues.
Critical research should be able to weigh the coherence, not just the
orthodoxy, of modern presentations of history.
As the book addresses unity and diversity in the New Testament,
Schröter’s resistance to premature dichotomizing is congenial to the
discussion. He claims that from a historical-critical perspective the
issue need not be unity or diversity, theologies or theology, but, through
a self-reflective methodology, the goal can be historical research that
seeks plausible explanations of the sources. He considers the can-
onizing process as a source in need of explanation to make it com-
prehensible. Explaining the process of the canonical formation, he
claims, should unearth those features of the documents that ultimately
determined their inclusion or exclusion from the canon, and thus pro-
vide the foundational observations in constructing a unifying theology
of the New Testament without mere abstraction.
Wayne Coppins deserves thanks and recognition for translating
Schröter’s text; his goal of facilitating dialogue between German and
Anglophone studies has been advanced by this significant work.
Ryder Wishart
McMaster Divinity College
Hamilton, Ontario