Abstract

Hamilton takes the tools of the competent New Testament scholar that he is and uses them to strip past the cultural overlays left on the New Testament by the first few centuries A.D. He does this to discover the primitive Jewish Christian Church's way of speaking about Jesus. This way of speaking, Hamilton feels, can inform our own cultural setting in a way that the less obscure, more Hellenistic New Testament traditions, with their elaborate metaphysical commitments, cannot. Basically, this primitive Hebraic tradition sees Jesus as the eschatological prophet and emphasizes the fact that he was a Jew. Hamilton begins by tracing the primitive conception of "the future world," and then demonstrates its relation to the resurrection which, properly understood in that context, should serve to underscore the importance of the historical Jesus. An important part of Hamilton's project is to trace the separation of Hellenistic and Jewish cultures and to examine Christianity's unfortunate preference for the former. The book is forceful and convincing. Hamilton pays close attention to the texts, but his feeling for contemporary culture is as important a component of his persuasiveness as his dispassionate and penetrating scholarship.--S. O. H.