Dr. Henry Thiessen is the author of Introduction to the New Testament. The book is divided into two parts, one which discusses matters of General Introduction and the other which treats Special Introduction. Dr. Thiessen's book provides detailed general information about how the New Testament has been preserved over time. It also presents detailed specific information about each book of the New Testament, including attestation and authorship, background and destination, date and occasion, and purpose and plan.
Dr. Henry Clarence Thiessen wrote this book in the early 1940s. He is a former chairman of the Faculty of the Graduate School at Wheaton College and has also published Introductory Lectures in Systematic Theology.
In the General Introduction, which is about one-third of the entire book, Dr. Thiessen thoroughly discusses the issues of canonization and textual criticism. He also addresses the inspiration of Scriptures and the two major methods that were used for coming up with the various latter day Bible interpretations. He writes about the Textus Receptus, which was used to give us the King James Version, and he also talks about the Westcott-Hort, which was used to produce the New International Version.
In the Special Introduction, he evaluates each book of the New Testament by looking at attestation and authorship, background and destination, occasion and date, and purpose and plan. He answers questions about how we can know that a particular book of the New Testament was written by a particular author. He provides information about when each book was written and about which theologians of the early Church recognized those books. He also discusses the purpose of each book and provides background information about why the book was written.
In this second part of the text, Dr. Thiessen has provided detailed information about each New Testament book. He has also given some very useful biographical information about the various writers of those books by discussing the lives of the Apostles Paul, Peter, and John and also those of James and Jude. By going into so much depth throughout the whole book, this text is a very valuable resource for the diligent theology student. The only drawback is that the book is not easy to read. The author covers so much material, that the reader can easily be overwhelmed. Dr. Thiessen's book, therefore, must be studied rather than just read.
Dr. Thiessen's book was particularly interesting in its handling of the following special points of interest.
A. Canonization. The author dealt exhaustively with the topic of canonization. He provided fascinating, very enlightening autobiographical sketches of numerous key figures of the first four hundred years of the Church, and he carefully showed the path of the canonization process from its very beginning. Before reading Dr. Thiessen's treatment of the Canon, I had always thought that the Council of Nicea, in 325 A.D., was the important meeting relative to canonization, but he pointed out that the Third Council in Carthage, in 397 A.D., was when the first councilor decision on the canon was actually made.
B. Textual Criticism. Dr. Thiessen's book provided a very detailed account of the manuscript evidence which has been accumulated over the past nineteen hundred years and spoke to some of the logical issues which have surfaced concerning those manuscripts, such as the numbering of fragments and their association with a particular time period. He discussed the history of the different types of manuscripts, including the papyri, uncials, minuscules, and lectionaries.
Relative to the actual manuscripts that have been accumulated, Dr. Thiessen presented some of the textual criticism methods which have been used to give us our present day Bible. This part of the book was especially interesting to me because textual criticism is a still somewhat new study for me. I was not aware of the attempts to gather external and internal evidence about a particular reading, nor had I ever considered that the scribes could have made copying mistakes or even inserted some of their own interpretations into a translation.
Dr. Thiessen spoke favorably of Westcott and Hort and of their leaning toward the minority view, rather than majority view, for the handling of ambiguous readings that do not agree. In so doing, he opened my eyes to these two different approaches for translating Scripture and also showed how these methods led to the King James and New International Versions of the Bible. As a result of studying Dr. Thiessen's book, I now have a much better understanding of what thought processes went into the development of each translation.
C. The Synoptic Problem. Dr. Thiessen dealt extensively with the Synoptic Gospels problem. He presented the problem of the first three Gospels, which is that these three separate accounts of Jesus' life have numerous similarities but also many differences. Then, he discussed the six theories that have been proposed by theologians through the centuries. He talked about the Urevangelium, the Interdependence, the Fragmentary, the Oral Tradition, the Two-document, and the Formgeschichte theories, all being theories which have tried to offer a human, non-spiritual solution to this problem among those three Gospels.
Dr. Thiessen followed that presentation with his own belief about the Synoptic Gospels, by suggesting that each of the three Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, had had access to key information. He talked about their various sources of direct knowledge, either through personal eyewitness accounts or from discussions with those who had actually been there. He identified the oral teachings of that day, plus the possibility of short written accounts, as ways that these men could have learned what they needed to know. Finally, and most importantly, he reminded the reader that the Holy Spirit was the major Contributor to the authoring of those Gospels.
In this part of his book, as in the rest of the book, Dr. Thiessen has been very detailed and has provided a great deal of information.
Dr. Thiessen's book of introduction into the New Testament is very scholarly. He covers topics like canonization and textual criticism, as well as the specifics of each New Testament book, and he goes into great detail about everything. This book is not as easy to read as Dr. Borland's, A General Introduction to the New Testament, but the book is well worth reading and studying.
Tom of Spotswood "He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." (I John 5:12)
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