‘The A to Z of the New Testament’ by James McGrath – A Review

James F. McGrath. The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023. Pp. vii + 304. Paperback. $21.99. ISBN 9780802882301.

In James McGrath’s The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too, readers will find an expertly written guide to the major topics of concern in the field of New Testament studies. Structured around the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet, the volume covers a wide range of material from eating habits to transliteration to humor and more. Most chapters feature sidebars that highlight a particular term or idea and offer a brief explanation. So, if you’re not familiar with terms like “typology” or “tetrarchy” or “pericope,” or if you’re unaware of the meaning of “criteria of authenticity” or “eclectic critical edition” or “amanuensis,” McGrath has you covered. In addition to this, each chapter ends with a “For Further Reading” section that includes books and articles from which an interested reader can learn more. 

Setting these valuable features aside, what else can readers expect from The A to Z of the New Testament? If you’re like me, you probably have a number of introductions to the New Testament sitting on your physical or digital shelves. My first introduction to introductions to the New Testament came in the form of the late Robert Gromacki’s New Testament Survey,¹ a text that was dated when I purchased it for NT 101 at Pensacola Christian College way back in 2001. (Gromacki was a fundamentalist² which was fitting because PCC was [and is] a fundamentalist school.)³ In the nearly two and a half decades since I first took NT 101, other introductions have crept into my library: D.A. Carson and Douglas Moo’s An Introduction to the New Testament,⁴ Raymond Brown’s An Introduction to the New Testament,⁵ Delbert Burkett’s An Introduction to the New Testament and the Origins of Christianity,⁶ and Bart Ehrman’s The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings,⁷ to name a few. McGrath’s The A to Z of the New Testament is an introduction but one that is not anything like any of these aforementioned texts. 

For starters, and as I’ve already explained, it is structured around the alphabet, with each chapter covering a different subject. So, for example, chapter Q (“Quotation Marks Required”) is about how authors make use of sources at their disposal, whether it is the Evangelists quoting Jesus, the apostle Paul interacting with Corinthian slogans, or NT writers making use of texts from the scriptures of Israel. Chapter X (“X Marks the Spot”) on the other hand deals with the nature of Roman crucifixion, especially the shapes Roman crosses could take, as well as burial practices that are pertinent to the conversation about the burial of Jesus. As McGrath explains, the basic idea of the book is to offer his readers a “lighthearted and interesting” read that also tries to cover “all the kind of introductory information a student is expected to cover in an advanced high school or introductory university course” (p. 2). 

While every chapter of The A to Z of the New Testament has its value, I found some more interesting and useful than others, none more so than chapter O – “Only One God.” In it, McGrath takes on the so-called “Early High Christology Club,” an appellation which, the late Larry Hurtado noted, was “a jocular self-designation coined by a group of scholars” at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in the 1990s.⁸ McGrath’s discussion of Christology is not exhaustive – again, this volume is an introduction – but it does raise some important points.  For example, while many read “son of God” as “God the Son” thanks in large part to the legacy of Nicaea, in truth the monicker could be applied to gods (e.g., Psalm 82:6), angels (e.g., Job 38:7), Israel (e.g., Hosea 11:1), and more. Particularly relevant for the study of the Gospels is that the Davidic king was understood to be God’s son (e.g., 2 Samuel 7:14; Psalm 89:26-27). Pondering this, our author stresses the importance of context, rebuffing the idea that the earliest followers of Jesus would have viewed him as “God the Son” and emphasizing that based on the available evidence they “proclaimed Jesus was the Messiah, the anointed one descended from David. They didn’t proclaim a radical redefinition of the nature of God” (p. 163). 

Another point raised in that chapter is that bearing the divine name Yahweh does not in and of itself confer equal status with Yahweh. The apostle Paul wrote that Jesus was exalted by God and given “the name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9, NRSVue). This exalted name is surely that of Yahweh for two reasons. First, writing as a Jew, the apostle Paul would have affirmed that the divine name is the highest name in the cosmos. Second, in the logic of the encomium (i.e., Philippians 2:5-11), Jesus is exalted after his death. Prior to that, he was known as Jesus and so it would make little sense that he would receive an exalted name that was one he already possessed. But bearing the divine name does not turn Jesus into Yahweh, as McGrath shows: “The divine name Yahweh…was central to the unique identity of Israel’s God, and yet that didn’t mean the name could not be shared,” he writes (p. 163). Illustrative of this is that in some ancient Jewish texts a being other than the god of Israel could bear the divine name. For example, in the Apocalypse of Abraham the patriarch encounters an angelic being named Yahoel whose name is a composite of Yahweh and El.⁹ While Yahoel is a being to whom God has delegated authority (cf. Apoc. Ab. 10:6-14), later in the Apocalypse God himself is referred to as Yahoel (Apoc. Ab. 17:13). Thus, it appears that this angel shares the same name as Yahweh himself, and yet no one would argue that the angel is Yahweh, at least not without doing so at the expense of the narrative claims within the Apocalypse. 

McGrath draws a line from this to the rather sound conclusion that what is going on in texts like Philippians 2 and the Apocalypse of Abraham is the establishment of divinely authorized agents. And this, for our author, is a high Christology indeed because it portrays Jesus as the singular mediator of the divine, earned by his being “obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). For the apostle Paul, Jesus was lord but he wasn’t God; his lordship is “to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:11), an action undertaken by God on behalf of Jesus. 

Readers of The A to Z of the New Testament will find that where McGrath lacks thoroughness he makes up for in excellent selections for further reading. For chapter O, the reading list includes works by Richard Bauckham, Bart Ehrman, Larry Hurtado, J.R. Daniel Kirk, and more. On the subject of Christology, there is a lot of variety among these scholars and our author shows that he is no partisan. He is inviting his audience to put down his book and to dig deeper into the works of scholars with which he no doubts has disagreements. This only serves to bolster the author’s credibility, signaling not only that he has done his homework but also he isn’t afraid for his audience to encounter arguments that he no doubt finds problematic. 

That to me is why I have found McGrath’s work so useful, not only here but also in his book What Jesus Learned from Women. When a scholar is open about his views but is also more than willing to point to work that contradicts his own, a layperson like myself can feel more secure in the knowledge that what I’m reading is born of scholarly curiosity and not dogmatism. It has been said that the inability to appreciate nuance is a hallmark of fundamentalism, and as a child of Christian fundamentalism I cannot help but agree. Introductory works like The A to Z of the New Testament offer up nuance in large servings such that readers will find themselves simultaneously satisfied and unsatisfied. Satisfied because they have an excellent tool for further research; unsatisfied because McGrath has merely whet their appetite for more. 

Happy reading!

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1. Robert G. Gromacki, New Testament Survey (Baker Books, 1974).  ↩︎
2. Not only does Gromacki use primarily the King James Version of the Bible “since this is still regarded as the text of fundamentalism” (p.xii, emphasis author’s), he also contends that the Bible “is inerrant truth, no matter in what area it speaks (theology, ethics, history, science, etc.)” (p. 49) and lambasts certain redactional hypotheses concerning the origins of the Synoptic Gospels as “based upon a human, evolutionary development of Scripture” (p. 57).  ↩︎
3. See, e.g., “Biblical Foundations,” pcci.edu. ↩︎
4. D.A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to thew New Testament, second edition (Zondervan, 2005). ↩︎
5. Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, ABRL (Doubleday, 1997). ↩︎
6. Delbert Burkett, An Introduction to the New Testament and the Origins of Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2002). A second edition was published in 2018. ↩︎
7. Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, sixth edition (Oxford University Press, 2016). This is perhaps the introduction that I recommend most both because of the scope of its coverage and the excellent “Suggestions for Further Reading” section to be found at the end of most chapters. The eighth edition of this textbook came out in 2023 and was coauthored by the phenomenal Johannine scholar Hugo Méndez.  ↩︎
8. See Larry Hurtado, “The Early High Christology Club (EHCC)” (2.6.13), larryhurtado.wordpress.com. Hurtado, who passed away in 2019, was a full-fledged member of the “club” and lists in this piece other members that include some prominent names like Pheme Perkins, Loren Stuckenbruck, and Richard Bauckham. Hurtado dedicated his book Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003) to the EHCC.  ↩︎
9. Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, second edition(T&T Clark, 1998), 79. Hurtado writes that the fact that Yahoel is “indwelt by God’s name suggests that this figure has been given exceptional status in God’s hierarchy, perhaps superior to all but God himself” (p. 80). This seems to be how the apostle Paul understood Jesus’s status as well – superior to all but God himself.  ↩︎