An Introduction to the New
Testament (The Anchor Yale Bible
Reference Library) by Raymond E.
Brown
The Most Comprehensive Introduction You Will Find
From its earliest days as a renegade religion in the Roman Empire
through its various schisms and splits to present-day disagreements
between Eastern Orthodox followers, Roman Catholics, and hundreds of
different Protestant denominations, Christianity has been a source of great
controversy--most of it centered on the reading of Scripture. There are
those Christian conservatives who view the Bible as the literal word of
God and the events detailed therein as historical fact. Other, more liberal
Christians see the Good Book primarily as literature, a metaphor for how
people should live. Mine the pages of the Biblical Archeological Review
and youll find scientists trying to prove or disprove the historical reality of
Old and New Testament events and structures--everything from the Ark of

the Covenant to King Davids palace. In An Introduction to the New
Testament, author Raymond E. Brown, a Catholic priest, ignores the swirl
of conflict surrounding the Bible as historical artifact, concentrating
instead on the message it contains. Father Brown analyzes each of the
27 books in the New Testament, devoting painstaking attention to
sources, dates, and authorship, as well as commentary on the spiritual,
historical, and thematic aspects. He believes that modern-day Bible
readers can only interpret it within its historical context. An Introduction to
the New Testament, read with a Bible in hand, can only enrich and
deepen your understanding of that germinal religious text.
Personal Review: An Introduction to the New Testament (The
Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library) by Raymond E. Brown
`An Introduction to the New Testament' by leading NT scholar and writer,
Raymond E. Brown may be the best possible introduction to its subject for
the lay reader and for pastoral readers. I am relatively sure the book is also
used as a text in college level courses on the New Testament, if only for
the wealth of bibliography on each aspect of its subject.
I give this glowing praise with some reservations, since I have been bitten
before by praising a book on a subject on which I have not read many
different works; however, by now I have read numerous books on both
New and Old Testament subjects, on both introductory and `scholarly'
levels, and this experience assures me that this is a superior book for its
audience.
As you read this volume, you may be surprised to discover that the author
is a Catholic, since there is not one wit of `bias' which would diminish the
work for our Protestant kin. Rather, the author brings in notions from
Catholic practice for which the Protestant, even the deeply scripture -
imbued Lutheran tradition, has no easy concept. My favorite is the notion
expressed by the Latin (of course) phrase sensus plenior, or `fuller sense'
of a reading of scripture. This is totally consistent with Herr Luther's dictum
that a scriptural reading has but one meaning. It just means that one wants
to find the broadest sense of the text, taking all things into account.
Another of the author's positions which warm's my heart (and assures me
the author is intellectually sound) is his opinion that the politically correct
terms for what we all commonly call the `Old Testament' are no more
accurate than this ancient term which some feel is disrespectful to our
Jewish cousins. All common alternatives such as `Hebrew' scriptures are
actually less accurate than the adjective which says these came before the
Christian scriptures.
The greatest service I can do for you, kind reader, is to point out that the
proper audience for this book may be much wider than the title may
suggest. I would offer it as a NT complement to James Kugel's `How to
Read the Bible', which deals only with the Old Testament (as Professor
Kugel is a Hebrew scholar). It is also an excellent replacement for such
heavy tomes as `The Oxford Bible Commentary', which I have never found
exceptionally helpful in getting into an unfamiliar book of the Bible.
A dramatic illustration of how good this book is compared to some other
works is to compare it to the recent Lutheran introduction, `Opening the

Book of Faith' on four ways to read the Bible. Brown gives ten (10) different
ways the Bible has been studied, and that doesn't even include the
Lutheran text's `lectio divina' and `theological' readings. The former is a
classic devotional reading and the latter is the approach promoted by
Lutheran theologians.
If I have any reservations at all about the book for serious students, it is the
fact that it was published twelve years ago, and probably written up to two
years before that, which means the bibliography may already be slightly
dated. However, I still found the bibliography exceptionally good, even with
its limiting itself to works in English, proper for a book written for the lay
reader or beginning student.
I was tickled to find, at the very end, a bit of a polemic against the works of
the Jesus Seminar in an overview of works on the historical Jesus. He
shares the dim opinion of this enterprise held by Catholic colleague Luke
Timothy Johnson. This is the only place in the book where Brown strays
one iota from an even handed approach to Biblical scholarship.
If you are first starting out in serious Bible reading, this book is a Godsend!
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