This collection of fifteen essays from Kavin Rowe (eleven on Luke and Acts, five on Paul) allows us to see the beginnings of Rowe’s development of a powerful vision for New Testament scholarship – an agenda that often emphasises the relationship between our particular human existence and ancient text, between history and theology, between thinking and living. While the essays touch on a wide variety of different topics, all of them are, as Rowe notes, ‘an attempt to think holistically’ (p. vii). Rather than summarise each of the fifteen essays, allow me to set forth three themes or qualities that pervade Rowe’s essays, with the hope that this will offer a small taste of his ongoing contribution to the field of New Testament studies.

First, Rowe is consistently attuned to the New Testament’s creative articulation of the identity of God. For example, the Gospel of Luke depicts Jesus as himself ‘Lord’ and as one who shares an identity with Israel’s ‘Lord’ (ch. 2 – ‘The God of Israel and Jesus Christ’). Jesus is the very presence of Israel’s God. Luke, in fact, refers to Jesus with language that the Jewish Scriptures reserve almost entirely for the God of Israel: ‘Lord’ and ‘Savior’. Rowe states this clearly: ‘There is a fundamental correspondence between the one God of the OT and the person of Jesus such that they share the same name’ (p. 60, ch. 3 – ‘Luke and the Trinity’). Luke’s manner of showing the relationship between Jesus and the God of Israel, in fact, is what exerts the pressure upon later interpreters to articulate ‘the Trinitarian understanding of God’ (p. 69). Rowe argues similarly with respect to Paul, particularly in Romans 10:13, where Paul’s application of an Old Testament ‘God of Israel’ text (Joel 3:5) is used by Paul to speak of the God of Israel and the human Jesus (ch. 15 – ‘Romans 10:13’). This not only has christological and trinitarian implications, but it also provides powerful testimony for the unity of the Old Testament and the New Testament, predicated on the conviction that the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament. These essays preview Rowe’s fuller work on Lukan Christology, published in his Early Narrative Christology: The Lord in the Gospel of Luke (de Gruyter, 2006).

The second theme that pervades Rowe’s work is his emphasis on Christianity as a way of life. Rowe explores how the Acts of the Apostles narrates God’s identity through the early Christian conflict with Graeco-Roman life and culture (ch. 6 – ‘The Book of Acts and the Cultural Explication of the Identity of God’). One sees here the early seeds of Rowe’s important monograph, published later as World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (OUP, 2010). Worshipping the God of Israel required from pagans not simply the addition of some new information or changing a practice or two; the Christian God required ‘an extraction or removal from constitutive aspects of pagan culture (e.g., sacrifice to the gods) and a concomitant cultural profiled that rendered Christians identifiable as a “group” by outsiders’ (p. 111). His aptly titled essay ‘The Grammar of Life’ (ch. 4) offers a powerful reading of Paul’s Areopagus sermon in Acts 17. Rowe argues against the long tradition of understanding this speech as a placid sermon on philosophical monotheism, a sermon somewhat lamely trying to translate the gospel in Stoic philosophical categories. Rather, Rowe claims that the sermon is one that emphasises conflict precisely because Paul’s theological claims demand that the Athenians reject one way of life for the sake of another. One simply cannot translate the Christian gospel into Stoic categories. Rowe concludes: ‘In Lukan logic, neither Stoicism nor Christianity is subsumed under anything else. They are – and remain – different and competing languages about the truth of the world’ (p. 94). Rowe explores some of the communal and social implications of this in his essay ‘The Ecclesiology of Acts’ (ch. 7). The church’s way of life in Acts is simply an outworking and recognition of ‘a communal form of life that is living in obedience to the Lord of all’ (p. 145). These essays preview Rowe’s substantial argument that Christianity and Stoicism are ‘rival traditions’ and that humans can only know the full truth of a tradition by living it (see his One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions (Yale University Press, 2016)).

Thirdly, and more briefly, Rowe’s essays are marked by careful attention to the reception history of the New Testament texts. I have noted this already, albeit quite briefly, in Rowe’s emphasis on the relationship between the New Testament texts and later trinitarian arguments for the identity of God. It is also on display in his claim: ‘Luke and Acts were not treated as Luke-Acts because they were not issued as one work in the first place; separate publication and circulation amounted to separate treatment’ (p. 177, ch. 9 – ‘Literary Unity and Reception History’; see also, ch. 8 – ‘History, Hermeneutics, and the Unity of Luke-Acts’).

If I may be permitted a personal reflection here, reading these essays has provided me with the opportunity to reflect on how much of my own scholarship has been worked out and articulated in conversation with Kavin Rowe. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that Rowe’s work is marked by strong exegetical readings of texts, careful historical analysis, and theological and methodological sophistication. There are places where I have ongoing questions and see matters differently than Rowe.Footnote ¹ But there are not as many scholars who do indeed attempt to think so holistically and this gives his work a certain excitement and energy that makes him always worth reading and engaging.