Markus Vinzent, "Christ's Torah: The Making of the New Testament in the Second Century" (Routledge, 2023)

New Books in Big Ideas

Christ's Torah: The Making of the New Testament in the Second Century (Routledge, 2023) explores the creation of the collection now known as the New Testament. While it is generally accepted that it did not emerge as a collection prior to the late second century CE, a more controversial question is how it came to be.

How did the writings that make up the New Testament - The Gospels, the so-called Praxapostolos (Acts and the canonical letters), the Epistles of Paul, and Revelation - make their way into the collection, and what do we know about their possible historical origins, and in turn the emergence of the New Testament itself? The New Testament as we know it first became recognisable in more detail in Irenaeus of Lyon towards the end of the second century CE. However, questions remain as to how and by whom was it redacted. Was it a slow, organic process in which texts written by different authors, members of different communities and in various places, grew together into one book? Or were certain writings compiled on the basis of an editorial decision by an individual or a group of editors, revised for this purpose and partly harmonised with each other? This volume sketches out the complex development of the New Testament, arguing that key second century scholars played an important role in the emergence of the canonical collection and putting forward the possible historical origins of the text’s composition.

Markus Vinzent, who had held the H.G. Wood Chair in the History of Theology at the University of Birmingham (1999–2010) and was Professor for Theology and Patristics at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London (2010–2021, ret.), is Fellow of the Max-Weber-Centre for Anthropological and Cultural Studies, University of Erfurt (2011–present). A recipient of awards from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Agence Nationale de Recherche, France, he is the author of Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

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