Southwestern Journal of Theology 2023 Book Award (Honorable Mention, Theological Studies)

New Testament Theology is a major new contribution to New Testament scholarship by renowned scholar Eckhard Schnabel.

While many New Testament theologies approach the material through a particular thematic construct (e.g., covenant), Schnabel takes a different approach. First, he focuses on Jesus Messiah and his significance for the early church. Second, he seeks to describe the theology of the New Testament as it was written and read in its historical context. This approach honors the fact that the authors and original readers of the New Testament were real people dealing with real issues in their specific ecclesiological, cultural, and missiological settings. Schnabel comprehensively combines a historical description of the New Testament’s theology with a systematic reflection on the New Testament’s message and the convictions of Jesus and his early followers.

This valuable contribution to the field will be insightful reading for students, scholars, and pastors.

Generations of students have known G.B. Caird as a penetrating and lucid guide to the many questions and problems posed by modern biblical study. His brillant commentaries on St Luke, the Book of Revelation, and St Paul’s Prison Epistles, as well as his other studies on theology and the Bible, have won for him a place among the twentieth century’s foremost biblical scholars. This new and masterly presentation of New Testament theology, completed and edited since the author’s death by Professor L.D. Hurst, takes the unique step of setting up an imaginary debate amongst the various authors of the New Testament themselves. As central concepts (predestination, sin, atonement, the church, sacrament, ethics, eschatology, and christology) are `discussed’ between such figures as Luke, Paul, John, and the author of Hebrews, the work moves to its climax with a presentation of the theology of Jesus himself. The result provides a particularly fresh and illuminating picture of the ideas at the heart of Christianity, deserving a place on the shelf of every serious pastor, theologian, and student of the Bible.