Church Times Reviews

Reviews in today's Church Times:

Richard A. Burridge and Graham Gould, Jesus Now and Then

R. Alastair Campbell, The Story We Live By: A reader’s guide to the New Testament

These are reviewed together by John Court. Blurb: "How Jesus’s story becomes our story: John. M. Court reads two guides to the NT and the way its narratives reveal our Lord."

Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in earliest Christianity

The review is by Mark Edwards. Blurb: "Did St Paul think that Jesus was God? Or a lesser divinity? Mark Edwards on a monumental study of the subject." Excerpt:

To my mind, however, Hurtado moves too easily from dignity to divinity; forecloses controversy by writing “God” with a capital G from the beginning; and fails to observe that the hermeneutic key to John 1.1. (“the word was god”) is Exodus 7.1, “I shall make thee god to Pharaoh”. To be “god to us” in Jewish thought is not to be God in essence.

Edwards's review is fascinating and leaves one longing for more -- there is so little space given to these book reviews in the Church Times, particularly frustrating in the case of reviews that tantalise the reader like this one.