The academic discipline of New Testament theology has fallen on hard times. Uncertainty as to the purpose, method, and audience has made for quite-limited successful and helpful executions of the project in recent decades. Dale Martin suggests that a further contributing factor to its demise, at least for him, is the hermeneutical breakdown between history and theology, that is, between the relationship between the historical ancient meaning of the text and its theological meaning and purposes. This book, then, is not a theology of the NT but is, rather, something like a “theology with the New Testament” (p. 5).
In other words, the book is an articulation of Martin’s “experiments in theological interpretation of Christian scripture that use but are not subservient to historical methods and historical criticism” (p. 5). This is not an arbitrary choice, for Martin believes that even the best practitioners of New Testament theology are incapable...
