Behind the Scenes of the New Testament (the companion to Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament) presents 62 concise essays by different scholars, pairing cultural and historical insights to inform our biblical interpretation. The book is divided into three parts (with a short summary of each section below):
- Setting the Stage (symbolic worlds and geography),
- Inhabiting the Stage (literature and key people), and
- Themes on the Stage (how the New Testament interacts with theology, society, and the household).
Growing up, the Bible was largely detached from history, and when history was brought in, I wasn’t paying much attention. David deSilva’s works, specifically his introduction to the New Testament, really made an impact on me in how I could get under the hood of the NT letters and understand the mechanics that were at play. Mechanics that the first-century audience understood that many of us who live in an individual Western society completely miss (or who live in Eastern collective societies will already be familiar with some of these social mechanics). Understanding the history, politics, background, and the way people thought in the New Testament era can help us moderns from projecting our modern assumptions onto the biblical text.
Why should you be interested in this book?
An Overview of the Book’s Structure
Part One: Setting the Stage
- Symbolic Worlds explores Judaism, Hellenism, apocalypticism, and Greco-Roman philosophy as formative worldviews that framed the intellectual scaffolding for early Christian thought.
- Places surveys Jerusalem, the Decapolis, synagogues, and houses as meeting spaces. These chapters give us insights into the different settings where the early Jesus movement (not the one in the ‘70s with SoCal hippies) emerged and flourished.
Part Two: Inhabiting the Stage
- Scripts helps us understand the importance of the Septuagint, Qumran, and genres such as ancient biography, parables, and letters. Here we learn how early Christians interpreted, communicated, taught, and preserved the Jesus tradition.
- Actors focuses on social groups like Gentiles, Judeans, Samaritans, women, masculinity, and disabled bodies. This section focuses on how identity and social interaction shaped the Jesus movement as seen in the Gospels and epistles.
Part Three: Themes on the Stage
- Divine Society addresses the first-century understanding of the divine realm: cosmology, eschatology, angels, demons, and purity.
- Human Society discusses wealth, empire, ethics, and social obligations. It helps us understand how Christians lived under the empire and within communities with their cultural beliefs of gift-giving, hospitality, meals, and how Christ upended that system (to some degree).
- The Household deals with marriage, sexuality, widowhood, and domestic worship. The household was originally the primary hub of Christian theology and practice.
I can’t comment on every chapter, but here are a few that I found very interesting.
In his article on “Judaism,” Matthew Novenson believes that in order to understand the religious context of the New Testament, one should look first to the symbolic world of Judaism—“The Jerusalem temple, its priestly sacrifices, diaspora synagogues, the great annual festivals; the stories of Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, and other heroes; customs including daily prayer, circumcision, kashrut, ritual purity, vows, tithes, marriage rites”—before moving on to the Roman and Hellenistic world. He gives examples of how, by looking to the symbolic world of Judaism first (that is, by understanding both Old Testament and Second Temple literature), we can better understand things like ritual purity in the Gospels and the law of Moses in Paul’s letters. Unfortunately, his example on the law of Moses was not a strong one. He writes that Paul believed “that—because the Messiah has just risen from the dead at the end of the ages—his own generation [was] the last generation of mortals, that henceforth people [would] literally no longer sin or die.” Yet, because this hasn’t happened, Christian interpreters have botched Paul’s meaning and made him say something other than what he wrote. Or maybe Paul didn’t actually believe that? Novenson does push for understanding Christianity within a stream of Judaism. How much it stands within that stream is part of the overall debate these days.
In her article “Ancient Biography and the Gospels,” Helen Bond writes that the canonical Gospels share formal, structural, and moral features with the ancient genre of Greco-Roman and Jewish bios literature. This type of literature focused on modeling virtue through the life of a particular character. In the case of the Gospels, it is Jesus. Instead of getting insights into his thought life, we see how he models care and concern for sinners as well as obedience to God. The purpose of all of this is to inspire us toward Christ’s example. The Gospels blend Greco-Roman literary forms with Jewish narrative structures (from the Old Testament) to form character in Christians.
In Matthew Thiessen’s article “Purity and Holiness,” he explains how the concept of purity, rooted in Leviticus, was understood in the Second Temple period, and that it dealt with how one could be acceptable to approach the sacred. Ritual impurity isn’t the same thing as moral sinfulness (though in some cases it could be). Jesus restored purity. While he touched lepers and corpses, he didn’t become unclean; he healed and purified them. Christians, having the Spirit, are made clean, holy, and sanctified. Yet we should also strive to be morally pure by avoiding sexual immorality, idolatry, and other sins (1 Thess. 4:3–8; 2 Cor. 6:14–7:1). (See Max Lee’s article on “Moral Transformation and Ethics”).
In his article “Gift-Giving,” John Barclay shows how by understanding how gift-giving worked in the Greco-Roman world, we can see how the gospel both fits into and upends that cultural exchange. God’s gift of righteousness, for example, is given to the unworthy—the ungodly, sinners, Gentiles. God gives freely to all who believe. Instead of trying to repay God, we are transformed through the Christ gift. We actually become more like Christ, and in so doing, reflect the love and mercy of God to others.
This isn’t a work of biblical theology, but is instead somewhat like a cultural dictionary. It is more sociological in nature, making historical connections with the New Testament. With a wide array of authors, not all agree on the trustworthiness, inspiration, or inerrancy of Scripture. This makes sense of certain things, such as Novenson writing that Paul believed his own generation was the last generation of mortals (but he was actually wrong), or William Loader’s last sentence in an otherwise good article on sexuality that Paul’s statements have been called into question as we have “learned more” about intersex people and “others with inner orientations not matching their outer equipment.” I have written about that elsewhere.
Recommended?
Behind the Scenes of the New Testament is an insightful book that will help you understand the New Testament’s background. While the book as a whole is not written from a conservative, evangelical standpoint, there is a lot I could still agree with and benefit from. This is a great work with plenty of material for further reading on sixty-two different topics (you can find the Table of Contents here).
Buy it on Amazon or from Baker Academic!
Lagniappe
- Editors: Bruce Longenecker, Elizabeth Shively, T. J. Lang
- Paperback: 544 pages
- Publisher: Baker Academic (November 2024)
Review Disclosure: I received this book free from Baker Academic. The opinions I have expressed are my own, and I was not required to write a positive review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/16cfr255_03.html.
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