The Authority of the Old Testament

Extract

The S.G.M. Press has published within the past decade several important studies on the place of the Old Testament within the Christian Bible and on how it is to be interpreted. Now John Bright has produced a volume (The Authority of the Old Testament, S.C.M. Press, 1967, pp. 272, 40s.), containing his own review of the questions involved—the enduring authority possessed by the Old Testament, and the appropriate method of interpreting it. Any book to which the name of John Bright is attached is an 'important' one. He is the author of a standard History of Israel, and as such, as well as in his other works particularly his Commentaries, he has shown that he is a master of organising a mass of complex material, of being fair to scholarship with which he is in little sympathy, and of being in command of such adequate expression that it is difficult to better him. All this makes it the more important to evaluate critically his present volume. The book discloses a pleasing symmetry of construction, and, as expected, a persuasive and well-expressed argument. The doubt in my mind is whether it is, conceptually, broadly enough based.