De-Introducing the New Testament

In this provocative and probing study, authors Todd Penner and Davina C. Lopez re-evaluate and re-narrate the field of New Testament studies and the constitutive stories its practitioners tell in introducing the discipline to non-specialists. Their chosen strategy, what the authors call “de-introduction,” is not deployed as a new or better way to introduce novices to the field. Rather, Lopez and Penner attempt to use the lens of “de-introduction” to explore the field, defamiliarize it, interrogate it, and prod at its foundational assumptions. This results in a highly original contribution and a valuable perspective on what New Testament studies is, has been, and might yet be. Although relatively slim for a volume exploring the discourses and habitus of an entire field, Penner and Lopez successfully cover much ground with clear, well-written, and engaging prose. Unlike many monographs produced in New Testament studies, this was both illuminating and fun to read (see, for example, the subtle and witty jokes throughout).

The authors are able guides on this tour, and self-consciously “brand” their work as a kind of Foucauldian archaeological study, rendering unfamiliar what the field has taken for granted for generations (e.g., 31–33). The first chapter queries and critiques “the New Testament order of things” (25), and the epistemology upon which New Testament studies, and its flagship approach—historical criticism—are based. Chapter 2 explores the taken-for-granted approach in New Testament introductory textbooks of emphasizing particular contextual backgrounds (such as Jewish or Greco-Roman) against which the New Testament should be read. The authors make the interesting observation that, among many scholars, the reading of the New Testament against the background of Jewish/Judean or Roman imperial matrices often results in a narrative in which the New Testament, its characters, and composers are drawn as liberating heroes who win out over or against the oppressive Jewish or Roman religious and political regimes (107). New Testament studies, like most fields, prizes originality in research; it is thus not without irony that some “imperial critical” approaches can be so easily compared to earlier—and often anti-Judaic—readings. The authors explore approaches to material culture in New Testament studies in chapter 3, arguing that objects, such as texts, do not speak for themselves: they “are not fixed or transparent,” and “they do not work on their own; we put them to work for us” (122). The authors, thus, foreground the agency of the scholar in the contextualizing of material objects and the deploying them, in the modern study of the New Testament (161). In the final chapter, cleverly titled “Brand(ish)ing Biblical Scholars(hip),” Penner and Lopez contextualize the proliferation of methodological approaches within neoliberalism—the dominant economic model of the modern West—arguing that “branding” is “a critical means of performing a type of neoliberal subjectivity in New Testament scholarship wherein scholars construct and promote themselves as ‘brands,’ ‘sellers,’ and ‘consumers’ in relation to intellectual currents and content” (173). Newer approaches, such as identitarian or imperial critical readings, are often juxtaposed against the “old guard” of historical criticism. This juxtaposition, whether helpful or not (and it often is), is ultimately an act of branding, which is itself an outworking of neoliberal subjectivity (196).

This fascinating book raises important questions about the field of New Testament studies, and how scholars and students perform it. It represents the kind of careful, thoughtful work most valuable in our field: that which gives rise to new questions, and in-roads to exploration and interpretation. Readers, depending on their professional context and disposition, will grapple and at times differ with the authors’ de-introduction of the field. While I very much appreciate the authors’ comparison of newer, imperial critical readings to the older, often anti-Judaic readings of the New Testament, I was left to wonder if there isn’t some substantial truth to the claims that early Christianity presented real liberation from particular forms of Roman hegemony. That is to say: if New Testament scholarship can be criticized for its at-times nascent (and sometimes outright) anti-Semitism, does it necessarily follow that postcolonial or anti-imperial readings are simply re-performing an old script? No first century Jews—that I am aware of—made a common practice of public torture and execution; it was Rome that did that. With this in mind, and a critical awareness of the missteps of earlier scholarship, and subjective work of the scholar who chooses which background to emphasize, we may yet be on firmer ground to emphasize the liberative aspects of particular texts within the New Testament. Scholars of such empire-critical persuasions would nonetheless do well to heed the authors’ warnings that such contextualizations must not devolve into black-and-white readings that eschew too much nuance for ideological or theological purposes.

Despite this minor criticism—or better: critical engagement—I think that every academic discipline ought to have a book like De-Introducing the New Testament. Although written specifically about the field of New Testament studies, and particularly for its professional practitioners, the authors’ attempt at “excavating and unmasking the most basic categories and operative frameworks in the field” could be ported to other fields within religious studies and the humanities (ix). The ways in which any field is constructed and performed are not self-evidently the only options available. By “de-introducing” the field, Penner and Lopez illumine the stories we’ve told about it, and offer up new ones for its future. While written particularly for students and scholars of the New Testament, De-Introducing would be a welcome addition to the library of any scholar of religion, no matter the subfield. As a model for future studies on other subfields in religious studies, Penner and Lopez’s narration of New Testament studies should inspire other similarly fruitful “de-introductions” throughout our broad discipline.

Danny Yencich is a Ph.D. student in New Testament and Christian Origins at the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology.

Danny Yencich

Date Of Review:

September 26, 2016