New Horizons in Biblical Research

Book Notice

WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT. New Horizons in Biblical Research. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. 51 pp. $1.70.

Three short lectures offer the rare experience of efficiently reading the main conclusions of America’s greatest Bible scholar (judged by the scope of his skills) and certainly one of the few genuine intellectuals (Albright would prefer Christian humanists) produced by our pragmatic culture.

In his forthright and unpretentious manner Albright discusses the impact of archaeology and philology in making more understandable the accurate sequence of Old Testament literature, his own skepticism at canonizing Greek analytical thought without respecting ancient Hebrews skills in thinking and writing history, and the implications of the double discovery of a proto-Christianity in the Dead Sea Scrolls and a perverted Christianity in the Gnostic documents evolving away from second-century orthodoxy. On this last point, Albright is emphatic in his conviction that informed students cannot now date any New Testament book beyond the first century. On these and other issues the person with traditional views of authorship and dating of New Testament literature will find that the current Age of Discovery has been more favorable to his views than to the liberalism that held the field before the Second World War.

Notes

 

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