Three Books

AS READERS HERE may have guessed, I've been studying the New Testament scholarship of Luke Timothy Johnson for the past several months, following studying the First Testament depending heavily on the scholarship of Walter Brueggemann for a while, now.  I could go into the differences and different conclusions as well as the many connections found between the Mosaic Law, the Prophets and the Gospel and Epistles but I'm not ready to do that.  I'm not, by the way, anything like done with Walter Brueggemann or those whose scholarship he cites nor the Scriptures.  That subject is as oceanic as the music of Bach, Beethoven or Schoenberg, you don't get to the bottom of it.

This is a recommendation of three books by Luke Timothy Johnson. His extremely extensive and impressive book often used as a university level textbook, The Writings of the New Testament: An Introduction is one of those books which I can say has changed my life, supplanting understandings of Jesus and those who wrote the Scriptures which have formed my thinking on that for decades.  That I didn't read it when it was first published is one of the strongest personal regrets I have.  It is the kind of book you'll have to read repeatedly and study, looking up the enormous number of Scriptural and other citations to really get how powerful Johnson's interpretation and understanding of Scripture is.  If I disagreed with something he concluded about that I'd have to really look hard at it but that would be because I would suspect that I was the one who was wrong about that.  I expect to be working on this book for years, maybe the rest of my life, reading Scripture more deeply than I ever have, as a result.  I would have no hope of going through all of his sources and citations, the massive bibliographies at the end of each chapter reveal the scope and depth of Johnson's scholarship as the questions for discussion are useful to the re-reading of the book.  

If you aren't ready to take that deep dive, as I didn't feel I was before, you can get a very good abbreviation of many of his points from his much shorter The New Testament: A Very Short Introduction, part of a large series of such Very Short Introductions published by Oxford University Press.  It isn't a replacement for the longer work but it serves as a very effective means of deepening your knowledge of the New Testament.  Its brevity, however, is a virtue in itself.  You will find many of the major points of the longer book easier to grasp for the relative lack of supporting detail.  

I may look at some of the other "Very Short Introduction" books to see if they are as good as this one, if I get around to that in the fall and winter.  This one is wonderful. Though the copy I have has very small print which means I've been reading it with a large Fresnel lens that I find I need more and more as my eyesight fails.

More than either, though, I would recommend his book Living Jesus which, dealing with the experience of the Living Jesus by living People, gets you to the practice in real life of what the Gospels and Epistles, and so The Law and the Prophets as well exhort us to live.  The letter of the Law kills, it's the spirit that gives life, I had never really grasped that The Spirit is an expression of the Living Jesus as we experience Jesus in our lives, know that or not.  Just as I had never really understood the difference between facts to be learned and mysteries to be experienced and to ponder but which will never, in this life, give us a final answer.  If I were going to read only one of these, that would be the one I'd choose.