In Search of the Early Christians: Selected Essays - Book Review

In Search of the Early Christians: Selected Essays. By Wayne A. Meeks. Edited by Allen R. Hilton and H. Gregory Snyder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xxviii and 314 pages. Cloth. $35.00.

Wayne Meeks, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Yale University, has been one of the most significant American New Testament scholars of the last forty years. In The First Urban Christians (Yale, 1983) he called New Testament scholarship to the importance of reading Paul within the context of Early Roman Empire society. Later he provided significant resources for interpreting the ethical teachings of the New Testament in The Moral World of the First Christians (Westminster Press, 1986) and The Origins of Christian Morality: the First Two Centuries (Yale, 1993). He also published significant essays over the years.

This volume collects twelve essays, written over a generation. The first eight are original interpretations of significant themes in New Testament thought (women in early Christianity, John, Paul's letters), while the last four range widely over hermeneutical issues, variety in Paul's ethics, the relation of Jews and Gentiles, and a mosaic in Thessalonica. All of these essays are clear, well documented, and illuminating. I myself found the essay "On Trusting an Unpredictable God: A Hermeneutical Meditation of Romans 1-11" one of the most illuminating in the book.

Meeks provides an introduction, "Reflections on an Era," which describes the path he took in biblical interpretation and at the same time gives a coherence to what might otherwise appear as disjointed essays. His "Afterward" describes briefly the challenges faced by New Testament interpretation today, in the face of fragmenting methods of interpretation. This volume is thus both are cord of a generation of study and a challenge to the next generation of scholars. It deserves--and will get--wide reading.

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