The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986

This books offers an impressive synopsis of how scholars have interpreted the NT since the emergence of the historical-critical school of thought. Neill covers the pertinent names, places and ideas that have contributed to the field of study over the past 150 years. Neill's style is readable, though not especailly fluid. His scholarship and attention to detail are impeccable. If you are hungry for an intial walk-through of modern NT scholarship, this book is the perfect place to begin and will answer most of your questions. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed reading this cover to cover. I had already had some familiarity with New Testament scholarship so many of the individuals mentioned in this volume were familiar to me (Lightfoot, Westcott, Streeter, Bultmann, etc., etc.). If you don't have a similar background, I hope you would have the same delightful experience learning the "behind the scenes" of the body of New Testament scholarship from which we draw our current studies. Scholarship doesn't occur in a vacuum, but is influenced by the spirit of the times, various assumptions, institutional slants (e.g., who gets hired to fill open positions in university professorships) and the authors cover all of these factors. It's as if they take you up in an airplane and give you a bird's eye view of New Testament scholarship over the last 150 years. Without this information, we are like going through a maze of opinions, facts, and philosophies. While you will gain little understanding of the meaning of the New Testament itself, you will gain a tremendous understanding of the resources you will be using to understand the New Testament. Out of the 100+ books I've read in biblical studies (plus another 100-200 I've consulted by not read entirely), this is one of the top five most influential to me. It really puts things in perspective. If you're interested in New Testament scholarship, or make use of resources for understanding the New Testament (e.g., commentaries, dictionaries, lexicons, theological dictionaries, encyclopedias, and books on specific topics), get this and READ IT! I only hope that Tom Wright will update it to reflect the last 20 years of scholarship. I'd be the first to buy the updated edition!

Neill and Wright review various movements and trends in the understanding of the NT over the last 100 years. It is written in the nuanced and elevated British style with a nice dose of droll wit ("[he] has, of course, his own eccentricity, such as must be allowed to learned men.") and so is a pleasure to read. You have to be able to handle sentences with more than one clause, and the authors resist easy bullet-point conclusions, but the reward is a fair survey of the various movements. To be sure, the work gives British scholars perhaps more than their fair share of space, but that is a useful counterweight to the Germanic-centric style of other works.

This classic text updated by N. T. Wright provides a helpful introduction to the history of new testament interpretation for the past century. The last chapter in the book is updated by Wright and is quite useful particularly for understanding some recent activity in the area of the Historical Jesus discussion. Wright is a brilliant and now famous scholar who is a prolific author, speaker, and the voice for serious academic discussion on the Jesus of History.

The late Anglican bishop Stephen Neill first wrote this book in the nineteen sixties, updated by Tom Wright in the eighties, that reflects the love of the New Testament that animated Neill's life. The predominant lesson of the book is that readers of the works of New Testament scholars should be wary of the unproven assumptions and ideologies that animate much of this scholarly work, especially work emerging from the German milieu, including that of the still influential Rudolph Bultmann. Although Neill generously affirms that there is much to learn even from the work of flawed biblical criticism, he does not hesitate to point out the baseless and unproven assumptions that permeate much of the history of historical-critical biblical interpretation. Both the general reader and the specialized student will gain from the common sense advice of this genial lover of the New Testament. Especially valuable is the last chapter extensively updated by Tom Wright, who is now also an Anglican bishop in England. Wright has recently written a major work affirming the traditional Christian belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ. Both Neill and Wright bring a commitment to being true to the evidence that is unfortunately missing from a lot of what passes as critical biblical scholarship.