On “The Reluctant Parting” by Julie Galambush ***

Like Metzger's book, this work is essentially an introduction to the New Testament, providing summaries of each work and a short account of how it came to be. What differentiates this work is that it purports to provide a Jewish view of the New Testament. Galambush's thesis is that before the New Testament became Christian it was a Jewish work, one in which Jews debated Jews about the meaning of Judaism. It's a provocative thesis, one that I would have thought would have led to many more unique readings of the New Testament works than it did.

There are some valuable observations here but on the whole the work seems more an introduction to the New Testament to Jewish readers who would otherwise be unfamiliar or less familiar with the works, so it didn't offer as much new info to one familiar with the New Testament as I would have expected. Complicating this further if Galambush's standard Protestant reading of so much of Christian doctrine. With the author having been a Christian that converted to Judaism, I felt as if I were getting two rather distorted views of the scripture rather than a fresh read of it. Galambush takes the standard secular line on the late creation of most of the works of the New Testament, merges that with standard readings of Christian doctrine (e.g., harrowing of hell) that likely were not part of the NT authors' original intent, and then places all of that within Jewish arguments over what would have made for proper Jewish teaching at that time.