550 - Ancient Judaism and the New Testament

Ancient Judaism and the New Testament
By Frederick C. Grant
153 pp. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1959. $3.50.

The thesis of this latest book by Professor Grant is a simple one. The book is intended to show "that the relations between the New Testament and ancient Judaism, that is, between the early Christian Church, it hopes, beliefs, and practices, above all its worship, and the mother-faith are such that one cannot truly understand the New Testament or the religion it enshrines without a deep and sympathetic understanding of Judaism." This thesis is ably set forward, defended, and demonstrate( throughout the book; after finishing the work no unprejudiced reader can fail to be convinced of the outstanding-in fact, essential-heritage which the New Testament and the Christian Church have received from Judaism. Not that this is really a "revolutionary manifesto" as Grant feels it may be considered by some, since most of us have always known of our incalculable debt to Judaism. Nonetheless it is good to be reminded of the extent of our debt.

551 - Ancient Judaism and the New Testament

The book is divided into four parts: an introductory section of two chapters on "The Present Situation," four chapters on "Ancient Judaism," three on "The New Testament," and a final chapter on "The Present Outlook." The best part of the book is undoubtedly the second which is a sound and sympathetic statement concerning various aspects of ancient Judaism. Herein Grant deals with the Synagogue and its prayers, the "theology" of ancient Judaism, its Messianic hope, and finally with characteristic features of Jewish apocalyptic. The last-named is carefully and correctly distinguished from either "prophetic" or "eschatological," terms only too often confused with apocalyptic.

Grant believes that Jesus was simply a prophet who taught righteousness, who felt that he was an agent of God for the establishment of the Kingdom of God. As such he has little sympathy with discussions of Jesus' Messianic self-consciousness, or with the eschatological and apocalyptic emphases in New Testament interpretation of such scholars as Schweitzer, Loisy, Bousset, and Charles. Though the nascent Church was strongly influenced by apocalypticism during the first and second generations, it had by the end of the second century sloughed off this element. "Whatever its importance," says Grant, "it scarcely belonged to the essence of either ancient Judaism or early Christianity."

It becomes increasingly evident throughout the book that the author finds the heart of the New Testament in its ethical teachings. Thus he is impatient with dogma and systems. "Judaism, happily, has never been overwhelmed by any system of dogmatic theology, and I for one wish the Christian church were equally free from it" (p. 136). He makes an eloquent plea for a new liberalism in the face of the new orthodoxy, which is caricatured as being "both agnostic and amoral: agnostic, since God is unknown, and really cannot be known; amoral, since it has nothing to say about duty but only about sin, and condemns moral instruction as tending to mere moralism-as if the Ten Commandments were out of date" (p. 148).

Professor Grant's own views about the New Testament will not persuade everyone, but it is to be hoped that the basic thesis of the book will. The Christian Church owes an enormous debt to its mother. Unfortunately, it has throughout its history often been an unnatural child, despising, fearing, and persecuting the one that gave it birth. We who love the Church have thus a dual debt to pay to the Jews: of gratitude, and of repentance.

John Wm. Wevers
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada