Religious booknotes:

...its strong sensitivity to the Jewish matrix out of which Jesus emerged...

...and the care with which she made this work accessible to the general reader...

...Despite these reservations, one must say that this book covers a good deal of ground, has some suggestive ideas, and manages to keep the historical narrative lively and readable...

...She sets out- once again-on that stupendous task of tracing out the relationship of the historical Jesus of Nazareth to the Christ preached by the early church against the background of both classical and Jewish culture of the first century of the common era...

...Robert Krieg's book, a volume in the esteemed Paulist series Theological Inquiries, also concerns itself with narrative theory...

...Following his advice, I found it also useful to keep a Gospel parallels handy to uncover fully the range of possibilities that he offers us in this study...

...This book exudes profound scholarship, worn lightly, as well as a readability that is not always common in the world of scriptural studies...

...Schreiter wants to get beyond both the fundamentalist use of that term ("washed in the Blood of the Lamb") and the more sentimental effusions of Catholic devotionalism...

...John Donahue both summarizes the fruits of that intense study and adds fresh comments that not only help us to read the parables in the synoptic Gospels with intelligence but-and this is a singular merit of the work-demonstrates their usefulness in the preaching, and the living out, of their message...

...is a conspicuous omission in a book on the historical evolution of Christian education...

...A crisply written epilogue assays, by way of summary, a spirituality based on the Blood of Christ...

...This book had its origins in a series of lectures delivered in Chile to his confreres in the Society of the Precious Blood which helps to explain the liberationist resonances in his subtitle and, more substan-tively, in the text itself...

...This is not an evasion...

...The work has an introductory section on parables in themselves and the ways to study them...

...Marianne Sawicki's field is religious education and her book attempts to show how the Gospel was taught over the centuries...

...Schreiter considers texts that extend from Exodus and Leviticus to John's Book of Revelations, using, roughly, a method of correlation as he unfolds the exegetical tradition over against our contemporary situation...

...It is always a pleasure to open a book which keeps the reader's needs so firmly in mind...

...She not only writes well but supplies us with bibliographies, suggested readings, indices of both the scriptures and of ancient sources in addition to a thorough general index of names and subjects...

...There is a helpful summary of her main points at the end of each chapter...

...The merit of Sawicki's approach is that it puts Christian education into close dialogue with both history and historical theology...

...He takes a theme, not conspicuously honored in contemporary Christianity, and shows how that theme has a deep history in the past both biblical and ecclesial and, further, how that theme can be revisited in the light of our theology and experience and given new rigor and pertinence...

...We need the historical enterprise because, as she says in the penultimate paragraph of the book, "bad history, for the church, results in bad theology...

...He rightly points out that the term blood has a complex and polyvalent range of meanings in the Bible which touch on a large number of various doctrines...

...Readers who work through this volume will not only learn about what has been done but get some tantalizing hints on directions for further study...

...They also testify to the ways in which the biblical proclamation incarnates itself in concrete ways in the historical unfolding of the Christian tradition...

...Robert Schreiter writes that if "spirituality cannot relate to the great religious traditions from which it has sprung, then it has lost its memory and its roots...

...Despite the many splendid general works on the medieval church, for example, she relies heavily on the not very reliable Will Durant and such old warhorses as Charles Poulet and Joseph McSorley...

...I was particularly taken with Krieg's summary assertion that the unity of Jesus Christ's life is an actual narrative that "begins before time, runs through history, and reaches into the future.'' That is not only true of the Christologies of the New Testament but indicates something which John Donahue also emphasizes in his work on the parables: the reception of the New Testament includes not only how the Gospels were "received" by their respective destinations (e.g., the Markan church) but how they have been received in the history of the tradition and how they might be received as they are proclaimed against the pull of the future...

...It is precisely the kind of enterprise that is much needed today...

...Fredriksen feels that such a procedure is unnecessarily teleological, i.e., such strategies often assume that the evolution of the Jesus proclamation towards the high Christology of John is inexorable and monodirectional...

...To forestall that happening he has given us an extended meditation on the concept of blood as it has been used in the Christian theological tradition...

...Like the householder of the gospel, they bring forth both old things and new.h both old things and new...

...His books include The Catholic Experience and The Catholic Faith: An Introduction, both from Paulist Press...

...We stop where our texts leave us, in the Gentile communities of the Mediterranean around the year 50 A.D., some twenty years after Jesus' execution...

...How explain that anomaly if one insists on an evolutionary trajectory...

...I can tell you what I liked about it: its sense of scholarship and a becoming intellectual modesty (she tells us when she is launching a hypothesis and she is honest to note her use of "it may be" or "it is plausible...

...Professor Fredriksen's book is much more ambitious in scope than that of either Donahue or Krieg...

...If I have a criticism of the book at all it is that the sources Sawicki used for her historical chapters are not very appetizing...

...Not to use, to cite just one notable example, Jean LeClercq's classic study The Love of Learning and the Desire for God...

...In Water and in Blood falls somewhere between a collection of carefully edited biblical meditations and a systematic theology of a particular theological theme with a long and rich tradition behind it...

...There is, in short, a keen pastoral edge to his work which nicely complements careful scholarship...

...Krieg takes seriously the conviction of scholars from any number of disciplines that personal narratives can, and indeed, should under-gird conceptual discourse, so he is at pains to sketch out the comity which can exist between the narrative line of the gospel proclamation and the more abstracted work of systematic theologians...

...the book also has a satisfactory index...

...His book is not one of exegesis but of systematic theology in dialogue with the researches of both biblical scholars and other theologians...

...All of the books discussed in these notes testify to the enormous fecundity of present-day biblical scholarship in one way or another...

...Nor was I enamored of her decision to do her own translations of the Bible since her renditions are, in places, laughable...

...Schreiter's book is valuable because it nicely illustrates what, ponderously, I will call a hermeneutics of retrieval...

...Non-experts will also appreciate his concern to show how the fruits of his study might be applicable to the contemporary scene...

...Donahue advises his readers to work through this book with Bible in hand...

...She wishes to stay with the available texts and so "by tracing their backward trajectory, we move chronologically closer to their point of origin, that documentary vacuum inhabited by Jesus of Nazareth...

...In that final section, Donahue brings alive Paul Ricoeur's argument that the parable is, in terms of narrative structure, the Gospel narrative writ small and vice versa...

...Her strategy is to reverse the normal order of proceeding with such an enterprise...

...As Martin Marty notes in his Foreword to the volume, there is more than church history here...

...Finally, in their various ways, they demonstrate how other disciplines can energize and illumine the study of the scriptures and their reception in history...

...She begins with the last of the New Testament documents like the Gospel of John and works her way back to the earliest testimonies of Paul and the Gospel of Mark...

...Those involved in the educational ministry will find much instruction in these pages...

...Schreiter provides us with a model to show us how it can be done...

...hence the title of a book which is, in my estimation, an exemplary study of the teaching of Jesus in parables in particular and the New Testament in general...

...RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES His story in history Lawrence S. Cunningham A hundred years ago, the German scholar Adolph Julicher argued, in a pioneer-ing work, that the Gospel parables were not to be read as elaborate allegories but as narratives with a sharp rhetorical point...

...I am too much of an amateur in this area to know whether or not this book will receive the accolades of Frederik-sen's scholarly peers...

...The scope of Krieg's book is vast but in a compact space he ranges over a good deal of learning with clarity and conviction...

...Each chapter examines not only teaching formally understood but how teaching gets fleshed out in care-giving and cult...

...He is concerned to distinguish narrative (a recital of events) from both mythos and biography and, with that distinction in hand, to engage the Christologies of representative theologians, preeminently, Walter Kasper, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Frans Josef van Beeck...

...She shrewdly points out that when one compares early material (Paul) and very late material (John) one finds, in both, a high Christology...

...LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM is a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...She stops there, of course, because she writes as a historian and that, she feels, is where the evidence leaves her...

...She does this, she says, in order to avoid the common pitfalls of trying to uncover the earliest strata about Jesus in the New Testament and working forward...

...and a concluding section summarizing the whole...

...Sawicki blends a selective history of the church in the West (she examines selected centuries in successive chapters) with a pedagogical theory that involves awareness of what is being taught, who is doing the teaching, and how the teacher(s), of necessity, modify and shape the content of the teaching for an audience that also lives in a determined culture...

...a middle section which treats each of the parables in the synoptic tradition...

...In the past generation, building on Julicher's pioneering work, very fine scholars have used the tools of both exegesis and literary theory to expand and elaborate on his insight...