A New New Testament: Are You Serious?

On By Daniel B. WallaceIn Contemporary Issues, Early Christianity, New Testament Studies, Theology77 Comments

Just released from the giant publishing firm, Houghton Miflin Harcourt: A New New Testament: A Bible for the 21st Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts, edited by Hal Taussig.

The advertisement from HMH distributed widely via email last week was not shy in its claims for the 600-page volume. The subject line read, “It is time for a new New Testament.” In the email blast are strong endorsements by Marcus Borg, Karen King, and Barbara Brown Taylor. Borg and King, like Taussig, were members of the Jesus Seminar (a group headed up by the late Robert W. Funk, which determined which words and deeds of Jesus recorded in the Gospels were authentic). King and Taylor are on the Council for A New New Testament. All of them share a viewpoint which seems to be decidedly outside that of the historic Christian faith, regardless of whether it is Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant.

The New Books

The title of the book sounds provocative; the reality is just as much so. “A council of scholars and spiritual leaders” was convened to determine which books besides the traditional 27 should be added to the New Testament. Significantly, it’s not called a “council of scholars and church leaders” for a reason. Although, to be sure, there were bona fide scholars on the council, not all were church leaders; arguably, in fact, almost none were. The council of 19—including two rabbis—examined several ancient writings which the jacket blurb euphemistically calls ‘scriptures’ and determined which of these worthies deserved a place at the table with original New Testament books. Ten books were selected for this honor, along with two prayers and one song. The song (if that’s the right term) is called “The Thunder: Perfect Mind” and is one of the Nag Hammadi codices. There are no references to it in the ancient world; it never mentions Jesus and may, in fact, have been written three centuries before he was born. Some of the council members wanted it to be listed first in the New New Testament, in spite of (or because of?) its apparent non-Christian perspective. How it is possible for the jacket blurb to say this book was ancient ‘scripture’ when our only knowledge of it comes from Nag Hammadi staggers the mind.

Here is the list of new books added to the New Testament by this council:

  • The Prayer of Thanksgiving
  • The Prayer of the Apostle Paul
  • The Thunder: Perfect Mind
  • The Gospel of Thomas
  • The Gospel of Mary
  • The Gospel of Truth
  • The Acts of Paul and Thecla
  • The Letter of Peter to Philip
  • The Secret Revelation of John
  • The First, Second, Third, and Fourth Books of the Odes of Solomon

What strikes one immediately is that most of these additions seem to be of two types: Gnostic or proto-Gnostic essays and writings that exalt women. Further, what is also striking are books that did not make the cut. Among them are the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, First Clement, and other books in the collection known as the Apostolic Fathers. In other words, the books selected by the council were selected with an agenda in mind; they were not chosen because they ever made a serious claim to canonicity. Indeed, as was mentioned above, at least one of them is not even mentioned in any extant ancient writing.

Consider again the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. These are writings that were considered orthodox in that they offer a similar viewpoint on doctrinal and practical matters as is found in the New Testament. They are purportedly written by first-generation disciples of the original apostles, though in some cases they are another generation removed. The Shepherd of Hermas was so highly regarded in the ancient church that we have more copies of it from before AD 300 than we do the Gospel of Mark. The Muratorian Canon speaks highly of it but stops short of treating it as bearing the same authority as the New Testament books because of its known recent vintage (mid-second century). But certainly the Shepherd has far better credentials than any of the 13 newly discovered writings for canonization. That the ancient church rejected even this document is implicitly damning evidence that none of the new discoveries really belong within the pages of Holy Writ. We will revisit this issue of the ancient church’s view of authoritative writings at the end of this short review.

The Council of Nineteen and the Ancient Church Councils

The council of nineteen that is attempting to do nothing less than reshape Christianity into an image more compatible with their worldview requires some scrutiny. Who are these people and on what basis does this council have any binding authority on anyone? Most of them are professors, pastors, authors, or rabbis. I cannot say for sure, but I do not believe that any one of them would consider themselves to be orthodox in the sense of holding to the seven universal creeds of the ancient church. John Dominic Crossan and Karen King are perhaps the best known scholars in the group. All we are told about their purported authority to add thirteen writings to the New Testament (bringing the total to 40, a number which often speaks of trials and judgment in the Bible!) is that this group was “modeled on early church councils of the first six centuries CE that made important decisions for larger groups of Christians” (A New New Testament, 555). But the similarities with the ancient councils stop there. Perhaps this is why nothing more is said.

The ancient church sent representatives to the great councils who would make decisions that the churches agreed were to be binding on all. These ancient councils especially hammered out doctrinal issues. And today, all branches of Christendom embrace the decisions and viewpoints of these universal councils as at least good guidelines on what constitutes orthodoxy, if not fully authoritative. There is one key exception to this: the liberal Protestant branch of the church rejects these councils because it rejects the divinity and bodily resurrection of Christ. And the council of nineteen? I cannot speak for all of them, but a good portion of them at least are adamantly against Christ’s deity, his bodily resurrection, his atoning death, the Trinity, and that the Bible has any kind of authority in doctrinal matters.

And they certainly did not conduct their meetings in the spirit of the ancient councils. Those councils were populated by persecuted Christians, representing the major churches and sees, who came to theological decisions based on the final deposit of revelation in the New Testament. Many of them were exiled or lost their lives after the state was swept along by every wind of doctrine while the persecuted saints remained steadfast in their beliefs. The council of nineteen may claim some semblance to these ancient councils, but there is more dissemblance than semblance in the their attempted coup.

Ancient Canon Decisions

As for thinking through what belonged in the New Testament, there was no universal church council that ever made an official list. Here is another point of incongruity between this postmodern council and the ancient ones: the council of nineteen has, by its own self-asserted authority, pronounced a verdict on what goes into the New Testament. At least they did not throw out the Gospel of John, something that more than one member of the Jesus Seminar was wont to do!

Even though there was no ancient universal council regarding the New Testament canon (suggesting, in the words of Bruce Metzger, that the canon is a list of authoritative books [the Reformed view] rather than an authoritative list of books [the Catholic view]), the ancient church did follow three basic guidelines: apostolicity, orthodoxy, catholicity. These will be briefly explained below.

Apostolicity meant that a book had to be written by an apostle or an associate of an apostle if it was to be included in the New Testament. Practically speaking, this meant that any document written after the end of the first century was automatically disqualified. This is why the Muratorian Canon—the first orthodox canon list, composed in the late second century—rejected the Shepherd of Hermas as authoritative, even though it considered it to be very beneficial to Christians. Further, any book that was known to be a forgery was rejected by the ancient church. Not one of the thirteen books proposed by the council of nineteen was written by the person it is ascribed to. The ancient church would—and often did—immediately reject such books because of their spurious nature. The test of apostolicity alone thus disqualifies all thirteen newly discovered books. Relatively speaking, almost all of these newly discovered books should also be called new books.

Orthodoxy meant that those books considered for canonical status needed to conform to what was already known to be orthodox. Orthodoxy was known even before any writings were accepted as scripture. It was known through hymns, the kerygma, and the traditions passed down by the apostles. If there never had been a New Testament, we would still have enough to go on to guide us as to what essential Christianity looked like. And it looked nothing like most of the thirteen books proposed by this new council. The Gnostic and proto-Gnostic books were soundly rejected by the ancient church. And even those that were closer to orthodoxy (like The Acts of Paul and Thecla) were rejected because they failed the test of apostolicity. To put The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, and The Gospel of Truth into the New Testament, side by side with writings that embraced a diametrically-opposed view of the Christian faith, is unspeakably brash. And although Professor Taussig and his friends think they are doing Christendom a favor by including known heretical writings in their expanded New Testament, they are doing so at both the cost of historical integrity and pedagogical method. This can only confuse laypeople, yet even Barbara Brown Taylor—considered one of the ten best preachers in America, and thus someone who knows better than to create Chicken Littles out of the chaos that this tome will almost surely incite—has endorsed the plan and layout of this volume. Orthodoxy seemed to be the furthest thing from the minds of the New New Testament council.

Finally, catholicity was a criterion used in deciding what earned a place at the table of the New Testament canon. By ‘catholicity’ I do not mean Roman Catholicism. No, I mean that for a book to make the cut it generally needed to be accepted by all the churches. To be sure, some New Testament books struggled in this department, but not all did. In fact, within a century of the completion of the New Testament, the ancient church throughout the Mediterranean world achieved a remarkable unanimity concerning at least twenty of the twenty-seven books. This included all thirteen letters ascribed to Paul and the four Gospels. The rest would find acceptance by the fourth century, in both the eastern and western branches of the church. Most of the new additions to the New Testament fail this test miserably, too. Again, catholicity is not something that the council of nineteen considered when deciding on what books to put in. Rather, catholicity is something that this book aims to achieve. And yet it does so principally through a Gnostic-like route: by urging Christians to accept these books on the basis of their largely politically correct viewpoint, the council is seeking to reshape Christianity into something more palatable to the postmodern world, where presumably knowledge replaces faith.

(For more on these criteria, see Reinventing Jesus, by Ed Komoszewski, James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace.)

Conclusion

In short, the New New Testament is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The council that put these books forth is a farce. It has nothing to do with the councils of old, yet implicitly seeks to claim authority on the basis of concocted semblance. The books were selected by those who, though certainly having a right to scholarly examination of the Christian faith, are not at all qualified to make any pronouncements on canon. That belongs to the church, the true church. Outsiders may address, critique, and comment on the New Testament. They have that right—a right given them by the very nature of the Bible: this book is the only sacred document of any major religion which consistently subjects itself to historical inquiry. Unlike the Bhagavad Gita, the Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha, the Qur’an, or the Gospel of Thomas, the Bible is not just talking heads, devoid of historical facts, places, and people. It is a book that presents itself as historical, and speaks about God’s great acts in history, intersecting with humanity in verifiable ways. This is where orthodoxy and heterodoxy should meet, dialoging and debating over whether the Bible is in any sense true. But to suspend the discussion by a sleight of hand is both cowardly and bombastic.

 

Epilogue: The Value of the New New Testament

After reading the critique above, one might be tempted to ask, “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?” There actually is value in this book—even, I think, for laypeople. These are important ancient books that show both continuity with the early church and discontinuity. Some are essentially orthodox; most are subchristian. But they represent how ancients perceived the Christ event and remind us that even in the early period not all ‘Christian’ groups truly embraced Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God. Heresy is found in the earliest period of the Christian faith, too: it dogged the apostle Paul and even found a home in some of his churches after he left for other mission fields. At bottom, the question that we must all grapple with, and what many of these ancient writings grappled with, is this: What will you do with Jesus of Nazareth? That question is still the most important one that anyone can ever ask.

Snoopy Seminar coming on Feb 22–23, 2013

On By Daniel B. WallaceIn Bible Translation, Textual Criticsim24 Comments

On February 22 and 23, I will be conducting a “Snoopy Seminar” at the Hope Center in Plano, Texas (2001 W. Plano Parkway). This seminar is a fun, interactive, and challenging exercise about textual criticism. Enrollment is limited to 60 people. Intended audience: motivated laypeople, though we are not limiting it to them (seminary students may also come, for example).

Here’s the basic idea: On Friday night I will teach some of the basics of New Testament textual criticism. Then, I ask for 22 people to volunteer to be scribes. They go into a separate room and copy out a short text (in English), each with specific instructions designed to increase errors in the copying process and corrupt the text. The text goes through six generations of copying. Meanwhile, the rest of the people (the “textual critics”) are trying to reconstruct the genealogy of the transmission of the text (namely, which scribe copied from whom) and think through what kinds of skills and biases the scribes would have brought to their tasks.

On Saturday morning, we will all get together and the textual critics get busy working on the remaining manuscripts that the scribes produced. Unfortunately, most of the earliest manuscripts have strangely disappeared overnight (including all first-generation copies). The textual critics do the best they can with the manuscripts they’ve got to work with.

They record all the variants and there are always more variants than words in the original text. But unlike New Testament textual criticism, the variants are usually meaningful (the vast bulk of New Testament textual variants are not). The textual critics work in small groups for about three hours. They debate, wrestle with a variety of possibilities about corruption (and which manuscripts are more corrupt than others; all of them are corrupt to some degree), and try to determine the wording of the original “Gospel According to Snoopy.”

Then, all the groups get together and I function as secretary. I write down the major variants on a white board and list what the whole group thinks is the original wording in each place. When I get done posting the variants, the white board is a mess! No one is confident that they have reconstructed the text of Snoopy exactly. Then, a miracle happens: The original text of Snoopy is discovered and they can compare how they did. How close do they get? Well, I’ll leave that for the seminar. I’ve done this 70 times since 1979—in churches, seminaries, colleges, etc. It takes concentrated brain power, a desire to engage verbally with others, and a Sherlock Holmes mindset.

Once we’re finished with the exercise, I show the relevance to New Testament textual criticism. The Snoopy manuscripts and groups of manuscripts actually correspond to known New Testament manuscripts and groups. And this year, we are adding a packet of materials that has notes on some of the most important textual problems in the New Testament.

If you’re interested in joining us, please visit the website for more information or contact Dana Cooper at danacooper@csntm.org —and soon! It’s a great confidence-builder about scripture, suitable for high school students on up. We hope to do this a couple of times a year at the Hope Center, so if you miss out on this one there’s always another one coming down the pike.

Do Manuscripts of Q Still Exist?

On By Daniel B. WallaceIn Exegesis, New Testament Studies, Textual Criticsim37 Comments

A favorite argument against the existence of Q is simply that no manuscripts of Q have ever been discovered. No more than this bare assertion is usually made. But a little probing shows that this argument has some serious weaknesses to it. In particular, three come to mind: (1) If Matthew and Luke swallowed up Q in their writings, why would we expect to find any copies of Q? Or to put this another way, Luke says that he used more than one source, presumably more than one written source. If so, why haven’t we found it/them? The fact that we haven’t surely doesn’t mean that Luke was not shooting straight with us, does it? (2) Even the Gospel of Mark has few copies in the early centuries, yet it was endorsed as an official Gospel by Ireneaus. Yet this is a canonical Gospel, which apparently was regarded in some sense as authoritative before the end of the first century, or at the latest in the first decade or two of the second century, because of its association with Peter. Yet if there are only two copies of Mark in Greek before the fourth century still in existence (at least as far as what has been published to date), what chance do we have of finding a non-canonical gospel-source in the early centuries? And as the centuries roll on, the likelihood that such a document would continue to be copied becomes increasingly remote. (3) Apart from having the text of Q, as it has been reconstructed, what other criteria should scholars demand of such an alleged discovery? Do they expect the document to have a title such as “The Gospel according to Q”? That neologism won’t wash. Perhaps just such manuscripts have been discovered but were mislabeled. The burden of this short essay is to examine that possibility.

Eight papyri are known to exist that contain portions from only the Gospel of Luke. On the assumption that Luke is closer to the wording of Q than Matthew is (an assumption that all two-source theorists embrace, I believe), it is at least hypothetically possible that one or two of these papyri are actually manuscripts of Q rather than of Luke. A closer examination, however, severely limits this possibility. The eight papyri are:

P3 (VI/VII): L 7.36–45; 10.38–42

P4 (III): L 1.58–59; 1.62–2.1; 2.6–7; 3.8–4.2; 4.29–32, 34–35; 5.3–8; 5.30–6.16

P7 (III–IV?): L 4.1–3

P42 (VII/VIII): L 1.54–55; 2.29–32

P69 (III): L 22.41, 45–48, 58–61

P82 (IV/V): L 7.32–34, 37–38

P97 (VI/VII): L 14.7–14

P111 (III): L 17.11–13; 17.22–23

In order for these to be manuscripts of Q, we might expect the following: (1) an early date, probably no later than the fourth century; (2) exclusively double-tradition (with Matthew) material; (3) no original-hand markings that identify the text as from Luke (e.g., title, Eusebian canons); (4) the order of the material might be other than what we see in Luke or (a) at least each fragment involves only intra-pericope material rather than inter-pericope material, or (b) the inter-pericope fragments of a single manuscript do not have the same order as is found in Luke; (5) perhaps some slight differences between Luke and this papyrus, with this manuscript displaying a somewhat more primitive text.

In reality, almost none of these expectations is a requirement, though if all are present in a manuscript they increase the positive identification of that manuscript as from Q. The reasons these expectations are not ex hypothesi necessary are as follows:

(1) There is the possibility that Q was copied for centuries; we have some evidence of ‘The Gospel of the Hebrews’—a first-century gospel, most likely (it’s mentioned by Papias)—existing for centuries, judging by patristic comments (see James Edwards’ The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition [Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2009]). If that document can exist, why not Q?

(2) Q can conceivably be found only in Luke rather than in Luke and Matthew. That there are 235 verses found in both Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark gives a solid basis for the existence of Q, but it does not equally argue that Q is no more and no less than these 235 verses. Such a conclusion would, in fact, be bizarre. Analogously, if the only way we could tell if Mark existed was its use by Matthew and Luke in double-tradition material, we would have to say that Mark was about half as long as it really is! Further, we would expect there to be some overlap between Q and Mark, so it can also be found in triple tradition material (the ‘blessed overlap’).

(3) Original-hand markings that identify the papyrus as from Luke is the one piece of evidence that would exclude a particular manuscript. The reason is simple: the original scribe of such a manuscript would have copied out the whole of Luke rather than writing fragments. Of course, if the text is an amulet or some other snippet from the Gospels, the scribe may have claimed that such a text was from Luke mistakenly.

(4) We really have no idea what the order of pericopae in Q was—assuming that it was a single written document (an assumption that has not yet been satisfactorily demonstrated). Thus, if parts of two or more pericopae are found in sequence in a given papyrus, this does not necessarily rule out that the manuscript is a copy of Q. But if multiple fragments from one Luke papyrus seem to be rearranged from the order found in Luke, this could argue for such a document being a copy of Q.

(5) Textual differences, especially if the papyrus in question displayed a more primitive form of text than that found in Luke, would signal the possibility of the papyrus being a copy of Q. But if Luke did not alter the text of Q in a given pericope, then we would expect to see no differences, apart from the usual corruptions, between the established text of Luke and the text of the papyrus in question.

In light of all these points and counterpoints, we would nevertheless conclude that the surest way for scholars to detect a fragment from Q would be for the five guidelines to be in place. Thus, of the eight Lukan papyri listed above, do any meet most or all of these qualifications? The five guidelines will again be enumerated, but this time with the best candidates for each category.

(1) Date: five of the papyri are from the fourth century or earlier: P4, P7, P69, P82 (fourth or fifth), and P111. The rest of the criteria will be examined only for these candidates.

(2) and (4) Of the five earliest Luke papyri, P4 is not restricted to double-tradition material and it also has fragments that encompass more than one pericope (at one point it has text in sequence covering five pericopae in Luke); P69 involves more than one pericope and has parallels in both Matthew and Mark (thus, triple-tradition); P82 involves two pericopae, with the second being in the triple tradition; P111 has one single-tradition pericope followed by a triple-tradition pericope.

The best candidate is P7, which has only Luke 4.1–3, one of the double-tradition texts. Of course, with only three verses, to claim that we have found one of the copies of Q is far more weight than this slender evidence can bear—unless there were strong corroborative evidence.

(3) I have not yet examined P7 to see if there are telltale signs that the original scribe thought that he was copying Luke.

(5) According to the Nestle apparatus, there is nothing out of the ordinary in the text of P7 for Luke 4.1–3.

Altogether, the evidence thus far presented can hardly be said to build confidence that any missing Q fragments have actually been discovered. But at least, ex hypothesi, such a discovery has some reasonable expectations laid on it so that papyrus discoveries yet to come may be examined for whether they supply any evidence of being copies of Q. Still, I’m not holding my breath.

For further reading:

Kurt Aland, Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum, 15th edition (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007)

Mark Goodacre, The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (T & T Clark, 2002)

John Kloppenborg, Q, the Earliest Gospel: An Introduction to the Original Stories and Sayings of Jesus (John Knox Westminster, 2008)

John Kloppenborg, et al., editors, The Critical Edition of Q (Fortress, 2000)

Robert Stein, Studying the Synoptic Gospels: Origin and Interpretation, 2nd edition (Baker, 2001)

Paul and Justification by Faith: The Real Jewish Evidence

On By Daniel B. WallaceIn New Testament Studies, Theology48 Comments

The New Perspective on Paul (NPP) has argued that Paul didn’t really disagree with Judaism in terms of what it meant to be justified by God, but rather disagreed on whether Gentiles were included in that justification. NPPers have charged the ‘old perspective’ folks (viz., the Reformers) with misreading the Judaism of Paul’s day.

At the Evangelical Theological Society meeting in Milwaukee last November, I heard a very stimulating paper by Preston Sprinkle (a recent PhD grad from Aberdeen) contesting this view. Entitled, “Way Outside the Box: Why Paul’s Doctrine of Justification Was Risky, Offensive, and Unparalleled in Early Judaism,” Sprinkle argued, like his title suggests, that “Paul’s assertion that ‘God justifies the wicked’ would have been seen as risky, offensive, and is actually unparalleled in the world of early Judaism—yes, even among the Dead Sea Scrolls.” What a bold statement! He backs it up with some impressive evidence, too.

The paper that Sprinkle read is part of his forthcoming book, Paul and Judaism Revisited: A Study in Divine and Human Agency (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013).

Among his many points, Sprinkle notes that in the OT God did not justify wicked people, citing, inter alia, Exod 23.7 and Isa 5.23. In my class on the exegesis of Romans, which I have taught at Dallas Seminary for the past seven years, I have argued that these two texts are key to Paul’s thinking and that the Jews of his day would have realized this. Exodus 23.7 clearly involves legal language. It is this language which lies behind Paul’s points in Rom 3.23–24 and 4.4–5. In v. 7 we see δικαιόω used with ἀσεβής: ‘you shall not justify the ungodly for a bribe’ (οὐ δικαιώσεις τὸν ἀσεβῆ ἕνεκεν δώρων). This can only mean ‘you shall not declare innocent the ungodly for a bribe.’ Three things are significant here: (1) δικαιόω means, in this legal context, ‘declare righteous/innocent’; it does not mean ‘make righteous.’ (2) The person who might be declared innocent is in fact guilty (ἀσεβῆ), precisely the situation we have in Rom 3:23–24. (3) The word for bribe is δῶρον, a cognate of δωρεάν found in Rom 3:24. It would of course not do for Paul to say that God declares sinners righteous ‘for a bribe,’ so an appropriate substitute is needed—one that is a cognate of δῶρον, but does not use ἕνεκεν or imply anything except that God acts freely when he justifies sinners. δωρεάν is the accusative singular of δωρεά; as such, it is adverbial (always so in the NT) and means ‘freely.’ It is not insignificant that we again see in the LXX of Isa 5.23 the collocation of δικαιόω with ἀσεβής and δῶρον. And again, we see that δικαιόω must almost surely mean ‘declare innocent’ since the pronouncement is made on the ungodly who do not deserve it.

Sprinkle does not develop the points of contact between these two OT passages and Romans, but he does bring in other significant texts from Second Temple Judaism to show that the OT view has continuity into the time of Paul. In particular, he interacts with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Among the texts he discusses are CD 1.18–21; 4.6–7 (the Damascus Document), 4QMMT 26–32 (the Halakhic Letter), and 1QS 10–11 (Community Rule). It is this latter passage that is sometimes seen as in line with Paul’s view of justification. Sprinkle gives a penetrating analysis of the text, noting major differences that have been overlooked. In particular, Paul focuses on initial justification while 1QS focuses on final justification. It is a point not to be missed. Sprinkle began the section on 1QS by asking, “does Qumran anywhere affirm that God’s initial declaration of righteousness is unilateral—based on no measure of human goodness, obedience, or godly potential?” He answers with a resounding no.

In the conclusion to Sprinkle’s paper he states plainly: “The assertion that ‘Paul’s doctrine has exactly the same shape as that of MMT’ or other documents from Qumran, as N.T. Wright thinks, simply cannot be sustained.”

It will be interesting to see the responses to Sprinkle’s forthcoming book. The debate will surely continue for some time. Meanwhile, N. T. Wright is busy producing yet another work on Paul’s understanding of justification (Paul and the Faithfulness of God). Whether evangelicals need to jettison the old perspective on Paul in toto, as if the Reformation got it all wrong as Wright seems to affirm, is still an open question for many. But Sprinkle’s treatment of the Jewish materials will surely have to be wrestled with. Perhaps Luther and the Reformers got it right after all.