The Faith of the New Testament: A Pauline Trajectory by Roy A. Harrisville III (review)

Reviewed by: The Faith of the New Testament: A Pauline Trajectory by Roy A. Harrisville III Kristofer Phan Coffman The Faith of the New Testament: A Pauline Trajectory. By Roy A. Harrisville III. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2023. 138 pp. With his latest book, retired scholar and pastor Roy A. Harrisville III has provided a companion and expansion to his earlier work, The Faith of Saint Paul: Transformative Gift of Divine Power (2019). In that work, Harrisville advanced the thesis that "the letters of St. Paul characterize Christian faith as a transformative gift of divine power" (xiv), seeking to find a way beyond the debates of the so-called New Perspective on Paul. This companion and expansion work sets out to explore the question of whether the rest of the New Testament stands in the same trajectory as Paul. This book starts in media res, nodding at Harrisville's earlier arguments in the introduction. From there, he divides his work into three parts. In chapter 1, The Faith of St. Paul's Disciples, he discusses the so-called Deuteropauline letters, though he does not include Titus. Chapter 2 deals with the faith of Hebrews, the General Epistles, and Revelation and Chapter 3 with the faith of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Chapter 4, The Faith of the New Testament, offers a brief summary and a call to action. Within each chapter, Harrisville proceeds in chronological order. He discusses the occurrences of the words "faith" and "believe" (pistis and pisteuo in Greek), then offers summarizing comments. For books that he considers a group, such as the Synoptic Gospels, he offers an overall summary. Harrisville's work helps the reader to see that the different authors in the New Testament use words such as "faith" or "believe" with a variety of emphases. It provides a convenient compendium of faith references and summaries of the books in question. For readers who End Page 74 appreciated Harrisville's earlier The Faith of Saint Paul, this book will come as a welcome addition and expansion of his thesis. For other readers, Harrisville's work may not prove convincing. It has a few shortcomings that merit mention. For one, it interacts minimally with other biblical scholars. The majority of the citations are from large commentaries, which Harrisville himself notes "often do not address the passages in which faith is mentioned" (xx). The bibliography contains only one non-commentary published after 2010, and that book, Teresa Morgan's Roman Faith and Christian Faith (2015), is dismissed out of hand in the introduction (xx). This dismissal is unfortunate because The Faith of the New Testament would have benefitted from placing the discussion of faith within a wider Greco-Roman context. Finally, even though he calls attention to the growth of "churches in Africa and Asia" (xiii), Harrisville could not be bothered to interact with any of their interpretations. The only scholarship from the Global South that he cites is Nijay K. Gupta's commentary on 1st and 2nd Thessalonians (2019), which amounts to a non-citation based on Harrisville's earlier point about commentaries. Kristofer Phan Coffman Luther Seminary Saint Paul, Minnesota Copyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.