An Introduction to the Making and Meaning of the Bible, Michael B.Shepherd, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2024 (ISBN 9780802883933), xiv + 209 pp., Pb $26.99The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know that Everyone Else Should Too, James F.McGrath

Neither of these books is a typical ‘Introduction to the New Testament’, in that neither concern themselves with authorship, date, audience, message, theology and the like of the various New Testament books. Each, though, has a distinctive style to it. McGrath's book takes an interesting approach to introducing the materials of the New Testament. He takes a letter of the alphabet and finds a match somewhere in the New Testament and then investigates that particular narrow subject. So, for instance, for ‘B’, his go-to notion is the birth of Jesus, which he titles ‘Born in a Barn’. Then he discusses, in a few pages (for each letter) the topic at hand. ‘M’ is ‘Mud in your Eye’, where he discusses the miracles of the New Testament. Naturally, this approach misses more than it includes. ‘B’ could have been baptism, or born again, or Bethlehem, or Beelzebub. Or many others. McGrath's, then, is a very selective and narrow field of vision suited more to the author's own proclivities than the needs of people genuinely interested in learning about the New Testament as a whole, even if the subtitle is ‘Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too’. Shepherd's book is even less interested in the New Testament than McGrath's. Shepherd's ‘Introduction’ introduces readers to the Bible per se rather than the biblical materials per accidens. His focus tends to be textual and compositional, although only one chapter is explicitly related to the composition of the New Testament, ‘The Meaning of the Bible in the Compositional Strategy of the New Testament’. People interested in the ‘How’ of the Bible may wish to start here, but if they do not move on to more thorough introductions to the text of the Bible (Hebrew Bible, Greek New Testament), they will find their knowledge gaps to be quite massive. Both books are OK. Although neither are ‘Introductions’ in the normal sense of that term in biblical scholarship, beginners may find them useful and interesting.