Each of the chapters of the 1972 book was then a summary of the widely known scholarship of the time. As New Testaments scholarship it was popularization, not fresh research. Its preparation back then had required a few years’ attention to the then current scholarly publications, but I never pretended to be a professional New Testament scholar.
Obviously I am farther from being a specialized scholar in that field today than I was a quarter-century ago. Meanwhile, each of the major subfields represented in the book has seen considerable new scholarly work since I wrote. These themes have continued to receive attention during the past twenty years, not because of what I wrote in 1972, but because what I wrote then was representative of the lively research agenda in the field.
It would therefore have been quite inappropriate, in the frame of reference of such a brief text as this, that I should have attempted to rewrite the text proper to catch up with a quarter-century of frontier scholarship on all its topics. After all, the original purpose of the book had not been to offer a compendium of New Testament scholarship for its own sake, but only to select a few representative specimens pertinent to the general thesis of the book.
That “general thesis” belongs in the field not of exegesis but of ethical methodology. It has to do not with the substance of the moral testimony of the New Testament texts for its own sake, but with whether their total witness is “political.”
Nevertheless the reader will be right to wonder whether the kinds of insights summarized in the synthesis of 1972 have been supported or left behind by ongoing research. By and large, the answer is “supported,” but of course only study in detail could validate that summary. What that state of affairs means for this present revision of The Politics Jesus is that while leaving the text proper with only minimal changes, most chapters will be followed by a brief epilogue, by way of update, in which I seek to identify the lines that further research has taken. In the preparation of these epilogues and in other updating details I have been aided by Kim Paffenroth.
Two things that I generally cannot and should not do in an update like this are: (a) to give an overall accounting for “how my mind has changed in a quarter-century” or (b) to respond in detail to criticisms of particular passages. There are of course numerous points where my original statement in the 1972 text would need to be corrected or retracted. There are others where it would be fitting to defend it against misinterpretations or to argue it further against interlocutors who understand it correctly but disagree. That kind of argument would, however, usually call for much more text, and a more fine-grained kind of argument, than the original passage. To do that generally would unduly burden the revision.
A separate matter is the style changes needing to be introduced within the original text for reasons of tone, and to take account of today’s sensitivities as to gender-related overtones. In this editing the most important contributions have been made by the Reverends Augustus and Laurel Jordan.
My first preface referred to “biblical realism” as characterizing my mode of reading Scripture. That phrase was current among specialists in the 1960s. It was, like the substance of the survey no idea of my own. Yet it never became widely known, nor did the scholars whom it then described try in any concerted way to work together as a team or a “school.” It named an approach which sought to take full account of all of the tools of literary and historical criticism, without any traditional scholasticism, yet without letting the Scriptures be taken away from the church. In a way foreign to my intentions, this book has been taken by some as representing an original way to relate the Bible to the church or to ethics. Others have called it “fundamentalist”; also a misreading.
If I had known the book would be put on review as a prototype of something methodologically ambitious or profound, I might have gone further into the discussion of theoretical prolegomena--or I might have refused to do so, since one can very soon come to a point, in the abstract discussions of method, where that very discussion gets in the way of letting the text play its role as the documentary spine of the church’s identity.
