This highly personal Festschrift celebrates one aspect of the remarkable range of the honorand's scholarship signalled also by the diversity of his publications list, much of it off the beaten track and in collaboration with friends from other fields, some outside academe. The focus of the collection is less reflective of the extraordinary creativity of Rowland's New Testament theology and his related professional expertise in the history of early Judaism, and the place of mysticism in both. One of the links between those areas and the ‘radical Christianity’ on which he has also written with distinction is his more recent enthusiasm for the reception history of the New Testament which in hands as skilled as his or those of Ulrich Luz on Matthew, or Judith Kovacs on 1 Corinthians, has certainly brought fresh illumination to the texts. The editors’ introduction refers to the essayists’ aims to exemplify how, in Rowland's words, the past is ‘viewed afresh, with its meaning determined by the experience of the love of Christ. Engaging with scripture means trying to get at what the Bible might point to about conformity to Christ rather than be preoccupied with what its literal demands might be or what the text might have meant in the first century ad’. The text is to become a catalyst, ‘a gateway to new understanding’.

The fifteen contributions are inevitably disparate – reception history covers the whole of church history, and radicalism also has a broad scope – but they are all worth reading. Their authors are currently working in the United States (8), South America (2), England (6) and New Zealand (1). It would be invidious to choose between David Gowler on Luke's both preserving and domesticating the radical message of Jesus, Peter Garnsey on Peter Olivi, Judith Kovacs on Valentinian interpretation of New Testament imagery, Paulo Nogueira on the Book of Revelation, Christine Joynes on the reception history of the gospel women (and Mark's ‘radical critique of the medical profession’), Jane Shaw on Mabel Barltrop, a vicar's messianic widow in Bedford, Brad Braxton on African American Christology, Ivan Petrella on some possible futures of liberation theology, Tim Gorringe on the theology of building, Andrew Bradstock on public theology as radical action, and Marilyn Adams explaining homophobia in civil and religious institutions and their leadership. These are all germane, but some of the most distinguished contributors have addressed Rowland's passions more directly: John Collins on apocalyptic, Rowan Williams on Blake, Denys Turner on Winstanley, and Ched Myers on discipleship in the crisis of managerial capitalism. A much to be welcomed development of the Festschrift genre is the honorand's response to the proferred gifts. The combination of insightful analysis and personal warmth brought to this task is reminiscent of its author's Oxford seminar where he is always able to bring a new angle to the topic from a mind well-stocked with Jewish sources and brimming with ideas looking for partnerships and possibilities for a better world. Many former students and colleagues will echo the editors’ thanks for his generous friendship and will recognise in their tribute more than the conventional courtesies. A foreword by the Mennonite luminary Alan Kreider recalls how this ‘scholar and churchman’ has been ‘restlessly patient’ with institutions in need of ‘a change of heart and practice’. That judgement is worth a gloss-reference to its subject's own remark on p. 263 about ‘the radical impasse in which we find ourselves as liberal Christians’, but from the jacket cover drawn by Blake to the final biographical note this book exemplifies the joy of learning as it hints at the joy and hope to be found in a liberal and radical Christianity.