Bible Review

Though the majority of mainstream scholars accept the two-source theory, a movement centered around Prof. W. R. Farmer of Southern Methodist University has been pressing vigorously for a reexamination of this position. See, for example, Farmer’s Jesus and the Gospel (Philadelphia; Fortress, 1982).

For an accessible summary description of the criteria, see W. Barnes Tatum, In Quest of Jesus: A Guidebook (Atlanta: Knox, 1982), pp. 76–77. For a more sustained discussion, see Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 15–49; Perrin seems to me to give too much priority to the criterion of dissimilarity.

These differences can easily be seen by anybody spending even a small amount of time with a “synoptic parallels” in which the texts of Matthew, Mark and Luke are printed in parallel columns. The most widely used edition is B.H. Throckmorton, ed., Gospel Parallels (New York: Nelson, 1967).

Cullen Murphy, “Who Do Men Say That I Am?” The Atlantic, December 1986, pp. 37–58; John P. Meier, “Jesus Among the Historians,” The New York Times Book Review, December 21, 1986, pp. 1, 16–19.

See my essay, “A Renaissance in Jesus Studies,” Theology Today 45 (1988), pp. 280–292.

See, for instance, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York: Crossroad, 1983).

Max Stackhouse, “Fundamentalism Around the World,” The Christian Century (Aug. 28–Sept. 4, 1985).

Hunter describes this as the evangelical “couching of theology in the grammar of empiricism.” See Hunter’s American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1983), esp. pp. 72–84.

George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870–1925 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), p. 16.