This is the further volume in the well-established series of Marshalls Theological Library, now appearing in paperback. The book is by a New Testament specialist teaching at Ridley College, Melbourne, and is based upon a degree thesis; and though it has been simplified for publication, it retains a somewhat technical flavour. It is a study of New Testament teaching on ministry, as found in the synoptic gospels and the ‘chief’ Pauline epistles, and argues that the themes of apostleship, servanthood and ‘the role of the Spirit’ figure both in Jesus’s conception of his own ministry and in his conception of the ministry of his followers; and further, that the same three ideas, along with additional ideas, figure in Paul’s teaching about his own ministry and that of the Christian community. He believes that his conclusions have lessons for Christian thinking about ministry today.

Any responsible discussion of things said in the New Testament is bound to benefit its readers, but whether this book is really more than a discussion of isolated passages may be questioned. The organisation of the material leaves a great deal to be desired. The word ‘ministry’ itself, which should bind the material together, is never defined, and though the author occasionally alludes to the institutional ministry, he usually takes the word in a much more vague and general sense, whether in his lessons for today or in his discussions of Jesus, Paul and the early Christian communities. One of his three leading notes of ministry, ‘the role of the Spirit’, is again extremely vague, and is used in a variety of ways. Also, in the discussion of Pauline teaching, it is not made clear whether the three leading notes are held to apply to the ministry of all Christians, or whether apostleship is wholly confined to Paul and a few others; and if the latter, how this affects the comparison of Paul’s teaching with Christ’s.

Further questions are raised by the author’s exclusion of the fourth gospel when discussing the teaching of Jesus, and of the pastoral epistles and Acts when discussing the teaching of Paul. If he had dealt with these books separately, and then considered how far they agree with, and how far they add to, the picture given by the other sources, no one would complain; but to exclude them is really to make the tacit assumption that they either add nothing to our knowledge of Jesus or Paul, or nothing that can be relied upon. Whether the author really thinks this, one wonders; but if he does not, he ought to realise that to exclude these books actually invalidates his comparison of the teaching of Jesus and Paul.

These exclusions are symptomatic of the general approach of the book, which (at least for practical purposes) is cautiously liberal. This comes out again in chapter two, which deals with the question of the authenticity of the sayings of Jesus in the gospels. The author discusses the commonly used criteria of dissimilarity, coherence and frequency of occurrence, and says that, used negatively, these criteria could exclude genuine sayings. Nevertheless, having criticised the criteria, he apparently decides to employ them, and states that he will try ‘to draw conclusions consistent with the degree of certainty which, in the view of the writer, the evidence for authenticity allows’ (p. 12).

Too many evangelical scholars are today thinking and writing in this fashion. They presumably suppose that otherwise non-evangelicals will not take notice of what they write. But if one can only secure this notice by conforming, in practice, to non-evangelical presuppositions, what is achieved? Such a policy simply undercuts one’s own position.