The New Testament as Canon: A Reader in Canonical Criticism

This wide-ranging collection of essays provides the reader with a critical introduction to the New Testament as the church's canon. The authors' conviction is that the Bible belongs first of all to the community of believers rather than to the guild of biblical scholars. But that does not make the tools and tasks of modern biblical criticism unimportant. Rather, they are the constructive means by which the scholar discerns the nature of the ongoing conversation between the church and its biblical canon and helps form the church into a community of worship and witness. Whether from a particular composition's point of origin, or from the various properties added to it during the canonizing process, or from its location within the final canonical product, the scholars recover multiple clues from the ancient church's dialogue with its scriptures that help delimit the boundaries and establish the aims of the same dialogue between today's faith community and its biblical canon.

• Table of contents
• Forward
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The Fourfold Gospel of the New Testament
  • The gospels and canonical criticism -
  • The parables of the great supper and the wedding feast: history, redaction and canon -
  • The commands to love God and neighbor: history, redaction and canon -
  • Father and son in the synoptics and John: a canonical reading -
• Part II: The Acts of the Apostles
  • The Acts of the apostles in canonical context -
  • Peter, 'son' of Jonah: the conversion of Cornelius in the context of canon -
• Part III: The Letters of the New Testament
  • Romans 1.1-15: an introduction to the Pauline corpus of the New Testament -
  • The problem of the multiple letter canon of the New Testament -
  • Ecumenicity and ecclesiology: the promise of the multiple letter canon of the New Testament -
  • Law and gospel, church and canon -
  • James and Paul in pre-canonical context -
• Part IV: The Revelation of St John
  • The apocalypse of the New Testament in canonical context -
• Appendix
  • Introduction: New Testament ethics -
  • Ephesus and the New Testament canon -
• Index of References
• Index of Authors