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Book Review: The Spirit of the New Testament

pre-modern, rather than postmodern. The consensus of the last two centuries is that the subject of the Gospels is the faith of the Church in the third quarter of the first century. Storkey proposes that the Gospels arise from ‘reporting’. The gospel writers went around interviewing eye-witnesses. This is a return to pre-modern literalism and it is difficult to imagine how such a position could be credible to a sociologist of culture. He speaks of reading the texts as if they were the Guardian or the Independent. But surely we should always ask about the agenda of those who produce newspapers – or gospels. For example the writer of Acts, possibly Luke, presents us with an apologia pro imperio, a guarantee that the Church is loyal to Rome. We are therefore not surprised to see how events in the life of Jesus are depoliticized: the death of John, the question of taxation, the entry into Jerusalem, the trial before Pilate, the death of Judas. Storkey claims that the God of the Old Testament is against slavery, yet the first matter dealt with in the ordinances following the Ten Commandments is the regulation of slavery, not its prohibition. Slavery was the economic foundation of the Roman Empire, yet Jesus was entirely silent on this subject. How do we interpret this? The book is sermonic and rather naively written, an adult version of WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?).