One might have thought that Paul Barnett had sorted out New Testament history aleady. But the Preface to the new book reveals a ‘regret’:

...after a lifetime of attempting to do so by other means, I am now at last beginning to grasp the message and meaning of the New Testament (p11).

Clearly we are invited to look for something fresh and profound that has emerged in this comprehensive study, something not fully grasped in its predecessors.

The publisher’s sub-title, ‘A history of New Testament times’, fails to point the way. The authorities cited on the dust-jacket liken the book to F.F. Bruce’s New Testament History, a ‘standard’ work, it’s said, to which this is ‘a worthy sequel’. But that concentrated upon the points of contact between the New Testament and secular history, thus by-passing the central themes of the gospel, even the resurrection.

This was done because, as Bruce put it, he was writing ‘as a historian, not a theologian’. Clearly he expected his readers to be students of theology who needed to be oriented to the ancient world. Dr Barnett also means to write as a historian, but his perspective is very different. He is writing, I suggest, for those who are more at home with history, and using its methods to open the way into the heart of the New Testament phenomenon. In this, I believe, he is a true pioneer. His work will be of compelling interest not only to ancient historians, but to all those who have struggled with the debates over the historicity of the gospel.

History is a method that works within the normal range of human behaviour and emotion. At those points which the gospel proclaims as revealing the divine action uniquely it reaches the end of the road. Paul Barnett brings you with scrupulous attention through the evidence, and lets it rest there. There is no apologetic, no theologising. His intention is to give full value to the historical evidence in its own right. But what has this method finally clarified for Dr Barnett?

It may be formulated as a closing of the chronological gaps that have been built into New Testament criticism, and the tracing through historical argument of a continuing of experience from the disciples of Jesus to the churches of St Paul. The contrast between ‘the Jesus of history’ and ‘the Christ of faith’ is an historical illusion. The silhouette of Christ glimpsed through the window of Paul’s letters coincides with the gospel portraits. It is the concept of Christ that is the historical motor in the main sequence of events, ‘the engine that drives the New Testament story’. It is profoundly built into the broader span of history, from the ‘sure mercies of David’ to the Roman preoccupation with Christ rather than Jesus (of whom Romans did not speak).

There are (for me) fresh insights and provocative claims all along the way. Would you like to know, for example, what the linguistic phenomenon was with the tongues at Pentecost? Or what the purpose was in Paul’s westward strategy? Scores of such questions are examined in detail.

This book crowns a sustained and dedicated program of research that would be hard to match by another living Australian ancient historian.