9780310238591

This highly acclaimed New Testament introductionhas now been significantly revised and expanded byDrs. D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo, extending thistext's valuable insights to a new generation of students.The primary focus of the book remains "special introduction,"dealing with questions of authorship, dates, sources, purpose, audience, and so forth. Thisfocus allows the reader to see the New Testamentbooks in their historical settings and to understandthe important debates that affected the first centuriesof the church.Significant changes in the second edition include: - Each chapter on a particular book of the Bible containsa more substantial summary of the book's content, as well as brief discussions of recent literary andsocial-science approaches to New Testament interpretation.-A brand new chapter, "Thinking about the Study ofthe New Testament," provides a historical survey examining Bible study method through the ages.- The chapter on Paul has been expanded to include an analysis of current debates on the "new perspective" onthe apostle.- The section on "Pseudonymity" has been significantly expanded and moved to an expandedsection on the Pauline letters.

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D.A. Carson (PhD, University of Cambridge) is research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois Douglas J. Moo (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is professor of New Testament, Wheaton College Graduate School

Preface

9

(4)

Abbreviations

13

(10)

Thinking about the Study of the New Testament

23

(54)

The Synoptic Gospels

77

(57)

Matthew

134

(35)

Mark

169

(29)

Luke

198

(27)

John

225

(60)

Acts

285

(46)

New Testament Letters

331

(23)

Paul: Apostle and Theologian

354

(37)

Romans

391

(24)

1 and 2 Corinthians

415

(41)

Galatians

456

(23)

Ephesians

479

(19)

Philippians

498

(18)

Colossians

516

(16)

1 and 2 Thessalonians

532

(22)

The Pastoral Epistles

554

(34)

Philemon

588

(8)

Hebrews

596

(23)

James

619

(17)

1 Peter

636

(18)

2 Peter

654

(15)

1, 2, 3 John

669

(19)

Jude

688

(9)

Revelation

697

(29)

The New Testament Canon

726

(18)

Scripture Index

744

(14)

Name Index

758

(7)

Subject Index

765

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

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An Introduction to the New Testament—Second Edition
Copyright © 1992, 2005 by D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carson, D. A.
An introduction to the New Testament / D.A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo.–2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-10: 0-310-23859-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-23859-1
1. Bible. N.T.—Introductions. I. Moo, Douglas J. II. Title.
BS2330.3.C37 2005
225.6'1—dc22 2005005186
This edition printed on acid-free paper.
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International
Version®. TNIV®. Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan.
All rights reserved.
The website addresses recommended throughout this book are offered as a resource to you. These websites are
not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement on the part of Zondervan, nor do we vouch for their
content for the life of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief
quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Interior design by Nancy Wilson
Printed in the United States of America
05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 / ?DCI/ 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
People have been reading and studying the New Testament for as long as its documents
have been in existence. Even before all twenty-seven canonical New Testament
books were written, some found the interpretation of the available
documents more than a little challenging (see the comment of 2 Pet. 3:15–16
regarding Paul). A distance of two millennia, not to mention changes of language,
culture, and history, have not made the task any easier. The torrential outpouring
of commentaries, studies, and essays across the centuries, all designed to
explain—or in some cases, explain away—the New Testament documents,
makes the task both easier and harder. It is easier because there are many good
and stimulating guides; it is harder because the sheer volume of the material, not
to mention its thoroughly mixed nature and, frequently, its mutually contradictory
content, is profoundly daunting to the student just beginning New Testament
study.
This chapter provides little more than a surface history of a selection of the
people, movements, issues, and approaches that have shaped the study of the
New Testament. The student setting out to come to terms with contemporary
study of the New Testament must suddenly confront a bewildering array of new
disciplines (e.g., text criticism, historical criticism, hermeneutics), the terminology
of new tools (e.g., form criticism, redaction criticism, discourse analysis,
postmodern readings), and key figures (e.g., F. C. Baur, J. B. Lightfoot, E. P.
Sanders). Students with imagination will instantly grasp that they do not pick up
New Testament scrolls as they were dropped from an apostolic hand; they pick
up a bound sheaf of documents, printed, and probably in translation. Moreover,
the text itself is something that believers and unbelievers alike have been studying
and explaining for two millennia.
The aim here, then, is to provide enough of a framework to make the rest of
this textbook, and a lot of other books on the New Testament, a little easier to
understand.
Chapter One
Thinking about the
Study of the New
Testament
PASSING ON THE TEXT
At the beginning of his gospel, Luke comments that “many others” had already
undertaken to write accounts of Jesus (Luke 1:1–4). Although some scholars
have argued that there was a long period of oral tradition before anything substantial
about Jesus or the early church was written down, the evidence is against
such a stance: the world into which Jesus was born was highly literate.1 From
such a perspective, the existence of the documents that make up the New Testament
canon is scarcely surprising.
These documents were originally hand-written on separate scrolls. There
is very good evidence that the writing was in capital letters, without spaces, and
with very little punctuation. Printing was still almost a millennium and a half
away, so additional copies were made by hand. In theory, this could be done by
professional copiers: in a scriptorium, one man would read at dictation speed,
several scribes would take down his dictation, and another would check each
copy against the original, often using ink of a different color to make the corrections.
This kind of professional multiplying of copies was labor-intensive
and therefore expensive. Most early Christian copies of the New Testament
were doubtless done by laypeople eager to obtain another letter by Paul or a
written account of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That
brought the price down: Christians were investing their own time to make their
own copies, and they were not having to pay large sums to professional scribes.
On the other hand, the private copy made by an eager and well-meaning
layperson was likely to include more transcriptional errors than copies made
and checked in a scriptorium.
How the New Testament canon came together is briefly discussed in the final
chapter of this book. For the moment it is sufficient to observe that as the numbers
of copies of New Testament documents multiplied, three formal changes
were soon introduced. First, the scroll gave way to the codex, that is, to a book
bound more or less like a modern book, which enabled readers to look up passages
very quickly without having to roll down many feet of scroll. Second,
increasingly (though certainly not exclusively) the capital letters (scholars call
them “uncials”) gave way to cursive scripts that were messier but much more
quickly written. And third, because the early church, even within the Roman
Empire, was made up of highly diverse groups, it was not long before the New
Testament, and in fact the whole Bible, was translated into other languages.
These “versions” of the Bible (as translations are called) varied widely in quality.2
There were no copyright laws and no central publishing houses, so there were
soon numerous Latin versions, Syriac versions, and so forth, as individuals or
local churches produced what seemed necessary for their own congregations.
Today the printing press churns out thousands of identical copies. When
each copy is written by hand, however, if the work is of substantial length, each
copy will be a little different than all others because the accidental mistakes introduced
by successive copying will not all congregate in the same place. The challenge
of producing a copy that is perfectly true to the original soon multiplies. A
slightly later Christian, making a copy of a copy, spots what he judges to be mistakes
in the manuscript before him and corrects them in his fresh copy. Unfortunately,
however, it is possible that some things he thought were mistakes were

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Introduction to the New Testament, An

Introduction to the New Testament, An

0310238595

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