Fr. Daniel Harrington, SJ, professor of New Testament at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, is general editor of New Testament Abstracts. He received a doctorate in biblical languages from Harvard in 1970 and is a past president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America.

In the week before Easter of this year, Time, Newsweek, and US News & World Report all had cover stories on "the Search for Jesus." Each featured quotes from members of the Jesus Seminar (a group of scholars devoted to determining what Jesus really said and did) as well as their scholarly critics. These stories left many readers bewildered and asking questions. What do New Testament scholars do? Where does one find their writings? What is behind their statements? How representative are the views of these scholars?

For 40 years, the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass., one of the two national Jesuit schools of theology in the United States, has sponsored New Testament Abstracts. Indeed, by supplying manpower and financial support over those 40 years, the Society of Jesus has made a generous gift to biblical scholarship.

New Testament Abstracts (NTA) provides summaries of current literature on the New Testament and its world. Summaries in volume 40, some as long as 200 words, cover 1,900 articles and 850 books, originally published not only in English, German, and French but also in Afrikaans, Danish, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and several other languages. The journals covered range from Aegyptus to Zygon and number well over 400.

Almost all the abstracting is done by general editor Fr. Daniel Harrington, SJ, and managing editor Christopher Matthews. They occasionally call on outsiders to abstract articles published in languages they do not handle (e.g., Modern Greek, Swedish, Polish). The periodical abstracts and book notices are objective summaries, without value judgments or critical assessments. The journals and books that are summarized then go to the Weston Jesuit School of Theology Library, which operates in cooperation with Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge; it is one of the best New Testament libraries in the world.

The periodical abstracts and book notices appear under five general headings: New Testament General, Gospels/Acts, Epistles/Revelation, Biblical Theology, and New Testament World. These general headings are broken down into subheadings, which include such topics as interpretation, textual criticism, computer-assisted research, archaeology, Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinics, and gnosticism. There are also sections for each book of the New Testament.

As a record of current literature now covering 40 years (1956 to 1996), NTA allows the reader to trace the recent history of New Testament scholarship. The first volume (which contained 529 entries--compare that to the 2,700 in volume 40!) gave particular attention to the debate started by German theologian Rudolf Bultmann about biblical interpretation and demythologization as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered just a few years earlier.

A look at volume 40 shows that methodology in biblical interpretation remains a hot topic. But the parameters of the hermeneutical task have expanded into literary theory, structuralism, social-science methods, postmodernism, semiotics, and deconstructionism. The Dead Sea Scrolls continue to be controversial. Fifty years after the first discoveries at Qumran and six years after the release of all the textual material to the general public, the official edition, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (see Fr. Joseph FitzmyerÕs article on pp. 6Ð7), is reaching its conclusion. Following a brief period in the early 1990s of wildly irresponsible books and articles, there have appeared many good preliminary editions of texts and competent articles and books on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure in the New Testament and is therefore naturally the central figure in New Testament research. When NTA began 40 years ago, there was great interest in "the new quest for the historical Jesus." Begun by students of Bultmann (and as a reaction to his skepticism about the historical Jesus), this movement tried to reach the existential self-consciousness of Jesus by careful analysis of Gospel texts that very likely originated with Jesus. A related topic was the examination of the Gospel parables as a means of hearing the "voice" of Jesus. In those days the most creative and controversial ideas came from German Protestant biblical scholars, a fact that gave rise to the standing joke that German was the most important biblical language.

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