Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 57:2 (NA 2006)
Article: What Do Ancient Historians Make Of The New Testament?
Author: Alanna M. Nobbs

TynBull 57:2 (2006) p. 285

What Do Ancient Historians Make Of The New Testament?

Alanna M. Nobbs

Summary

This article looks at some of the ways in which ancient historians, such as A. N. Sherwin-White, E. A Judge and A. H. M. Jones, use Acts and other parts of the New Testament as historical sources, in the same way that they use other ancient sources such as Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus. They do not use the New Testament uncritically, but take account of its individual authors and particular circumstances. Comparison is made to the ways in which some classical authors have been used for similar purposes.

In the 1960s this would have seemed a novel question, prompting some to see it as not even worth asking. Since then much of the scholarship on the Roman Empire and as especially on Late Antiquity has focused on the influence of Christianity and the conjunction of the classical and Christian within it. Tertullian’s provocative question ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ has spawned a wealth of answers from his own day till this.

German scholarship, in its conjunction of Antike und Christentum, had long been the acknowledged leader in the field. In the 1960s there appeared two works which arguably were seminal in provoking English-language classical scholars and Neutestamentler to pay closer attention to each others’ research. If this has still not gone far enough, in the coming generation we may hope for increasing dialogue.

In 1963 when A. N. Sherwin-White’s Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament appeared, it was seen in English- speaking, and probably in German circles too to a lesser extent, as truly

TynBull 57:2 (2006) p. 286

groundbreaking.1 It attracted around twenty reviews largely by eminent reviewers, in all the major Classical periodicals published in Britain, USA, Germany, France, Holland, Belgium and Italy; and somewhat tellingly was more noticed by them than by New Testament publications, though by no means ignored by the latter. Sherwin-White was of course well known as a classicist and teacher at Oxford and had in 1939 published a definitive work on Roman citizenship which won the Conington Prize. He was already known too as a frequent contributor to major periodicals such as the Journal of Roman Studies, and was to go on to be President of the Roman Society from 1974-77, and a foremost commentator on Pliny and expert on Roman foreign policy.

Roman Society and Roman Law is a small book, which began as the Sarum lectures for 1960-61, and was never meant to be a comprehensive treatment of so vast a topic. John Crook, reviewing the book not uncr...