Aileen Guilding

Here is a review comprised mainly of quotes from the book.

"Early in the fourth century BC, or perhaps a little later, the constituent documents of the Pentateuch were finally adapted to suit a triennial cycle of synagogue lectionary readings."

"Our investigation would thus appear to support the view that the Gospels are the written deposit of the apostolic preaching, and that this preaching was based on old testament texts which were selected according to a recognizable principle, and not at random."

Regarding the fourth Gospel then~ "The evangelist seems to have wished to preserve a tradition of Jesus's synagogue sermons that has found no place in the Synoptic Gospels, and to present them in a form which would be familiar and acceptable to Christian Jews who had been recently excluded from the synagogue."

"The connexion, then, between Jesus's teaching and Jewish liturgy is historical and not merely editorial."

The book is very technical with many untranslated examples in both Greek and Hebrew, but from a technical point of view, it is a virtuoso display of the first water. For me personally, the book addresses many questions that I have had about the fourth gospel for a long time such as "Where did it come from?" or "What was the context of it's composition?" or "What is the principle of its organization?" This book is altogether terrific.… (meer)