The Theological Riddle of History

The antithesis between [the gospel] and modern idealism arises, not because Jesus and primitive Christianity were less human than humanitarianism, but because they were infinitely more so. The primitive Christians found the revelation of God in an historical figure so desparately human that there emerged within the early Church a faith in men and women so deeply rooted as to make modern humanitarianism seem doctrinaire and trivial. The New Testament does not present a complex chaos of conceptions about God and man from which one or another may be picked out and proclaimed as ultimate and true because it satisfies the highest idealism of this or of all ages; it presents a concrete and definite solution of the problems of life and death, of right and wrong, of happiness and misery in a form which consistutes a challenge to all thought and to all ethical idealism. The New Testament presents the solution in a unique event, in a particular history of human flesh and blood. The New Testament is therefore neither a collection of thoughtful essays nor an attempt to construct a system of ethics. It bears witness to a unique history, and it discovers the truth in the history.

Sir Edwyn Hoskyns and Noel Davey, The Riddle of the New Testament (1931), pp. 180-181

On the Future of New Testament Studies

"Our journey began by suggesting a diagnosis of a discipline that is now widely felt to lack agreed criteria not just for appropriate methods and results, but in many cases about even the very subject to be studied. What future can there be for scholarly New Testament studies amid the ruins of so many "assured results" of the past? Two initiatives in particular, I suggested, may hold promise for a reenergized, common conversation about the New Testament: first, to investigate the implied readership and the implied readings that arise from its engagement with the text; and, second, to harness the New Testament's plural and diverse effects as a resource for renewed reflection on its interpretation. I have argued, in other words, that the question of the implied readers is linked, both exegetically and historically, to that of implied readings. More specifically, both of these questions are illuminated by the study of how the apostolic voices were in fact remembered, heard, and heeded in the early postapostolic period--and vice versa."

Markus Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study

(Baker, 2006) pp. 229-230