The approaches of contemporary New Testament scholarship to Jesus and the Gospels have been, in the author's view, inadequate

He offers instead some imaginative and well-articulated reflections on several new and promising approaches. These "have meant a great deal to me over the past few years, he writes. "since in fact I had a change of personal commitment from a former liberalism which had run dry. to the rediscovery of the vitality of my earlier evangelical heritage." This change was precipitated by "the investigation of the data that this pro-vocative volume details.

In part 1 the author employs a phenomenology of persons, borrowed from Wittgenstein, to highlight the fundamental claims of Jesus. Though limiting himself to the core of sayings accepted by radical critics as authentic, the author concludes that Jesus' concept of Himself is so incredible on any human level that it becomes academic to insist on separating His implicit from His explicit christological claims. The use of redaction criticism to distinguish the two, therefore, is misguided.

Part 2 introduces hermeneutical approaches which, though varied, agree that a deep phenomenology can be achieved only when the phenomenon being described (in this case the person of Jesus and His claims) is con-fronted by the interpreter with belief and commitment.

Marshaled in support are Lewis, who urges attentiveness and obedience to the story, Ramsey, who points to the logically odd supernaturalism of the Gospels, Polanyi, the tacit dimension of trust, Marcel, Jesus cre-ative fidelity: Tolkien, the spell of the story, and Van Til, the importance of presuppositions in Gospel research

Royce Gordon Gruenler is professor of New Testament and chairman of the New Testament department at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary He holds a Ph. D. degree from the University of Aberdeen and has written. in addition to numerous articles the book Jesus, Persons, and the King-dom of God