Books by Anthony Tyrrell Hanson

Anthony Hanson here opens up fresh lines of interpretation for the Pauline epistles, and uses these as the approach to a fresh consideration of Paul as exegete and theologian. Focusing on passages, mainly in Romans and Galatians, where the argument is superficially strange, he explores biblical and rabbinic parallels and frequently uncovers an unexpected significance. Drawing out the implications of his detailed studies, Professor Hanson argues that the apostle''s method of biblical interpretation can be justified in terms of modern theology and can put us on the road to a right understanding of the relation of the Old Testament to the New.

Anthony Tyrrell Hanson was Professor of Theology at the University of Hull, and former senior editor of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament.

The New Testament Interpretation of Scripture is an important and challenging contribution to New Testament scholarship. As a contrast to form criticism, it presents a fresh, in-depth study of Scripture interpretation within the tradition of Judaism.Professor Hanson''s analytical study of Paul''s use of the Scriptures on the question of his meaning in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 concludes that these verses constitute the strongest possible assurance that the advent of Christ had been predestined by God and that his death and resurrection were the means of self-revelation and redemption for those who chose to enter the fellowship of the Christian church. His examination of these verses further leads to the conclusion that assumptions of gnosticism as their inspiration are erroneous. And in the logion in John 1:51, he perceives that it is the church that is indicated as the place where God is to be encountered and worshiped.He surveys and elaborates on current studies on the scriptural sources for the doctrine of the ""descent into Hades"" to reveal that the doctrine was partly based on a messianic interpretation of the 16th, 68th, 88th, and 89th Psalms, as well as on a typological interpretation of the book of Jonah.The New Testament Interpretation of Scripture is a thoughtful, erudite work, persuasively and lucidly argued by one of Britain''s most respected New Testament scholars.Anthony Tyrrell Hanson was Professor of Theology at the University of Hull, and former senior editor of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament.

A study of the Book of Revelation suggested to Dr. Hanson the idea of tracing the conception of the wrath of God through the Bible, from its primitive and personalized form in the earliest strands of the Old Testament to its final development in the New. Under the impression that "the wrath of God" in the New Testament must be interpreted as if it had the same meaning as in the Old, some theologians have been driven to formulate a distorted doctrine of the atonement and others to repudiate the idea of the wrath altogether. Dr. Hanson shows that this is a false dilemma, and that there is a true New Testament doctrine of the wrath, profoundly influenced by the revelation of the love of God in Jesus Christ and at certain points essentially related to the Cross. This doctrine he finds most fully expressed in the Book of Revelation.

This wide-ranging study of the doctrine of the incarnation results from the author''s own intellectual quest. He offers a genuine Christology, as distinct from the non-Christologies of some recent writers. His starting-point, like theirs, is that Jesus was a real human personality--a man, in fact: an assumption with which few will quarrel, though it is not easily reconciled with the teaching of the Council of Chalcedon.Anthony Hanson sees the man Jesus as the revelation of the divinity in the humanity through human obedience and suffering. He finds that the New Testament writers, with the probable exception of John, while believing in Jesus'' personal pre-existence saw him as a fully human personality. They recognized God in Christ, as we do today, not by direct apprehension, but because he is indeed full of the hesed and ''emeth (grace and truth) which the Old Testament reveals as God''s essential character.Professor Hanson''s discussion is marked, as one would expect, by disciplined exegesis and familiarity with the other solutions that have been propounded. In his final chapter he reviews the traditional Chalcedonian doctrine and its modern defenders, and assesses the views of modern theologians--Barth, Rahner, Pannenberg, Pittenger, Baillie, Robinson among them--who have written on the subject. He claims for his account of the incarnation that it is at least as firmly rooted in Scripture as that of Chalcedon, and has a much stronger foundation in the Old Testament.Anthony Tyrrell Hanson was Professor of Theology at the University of Hull, and former senior editor of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament.