LAUSR

“We are not accustomed to attending to the Gospel story in its full account, let alone looking at the four versions in their distinctiveness. But it is here that we find the Gospel writers’ sense of what the conflict is about and how they believe it could be resolved” (x). Robert Beck reads the four Gospels as distinctive narratives from the perspective of the social sciences, archaeology, and historical records as responses to social conflict in the world when each was written. There are four Gospels because each was written to address a specific social situation. They are “counter narratives” (23) to challenge social presumptions about conflict resolution. In contrast to just war theory or pacifism, B. affirms Gandhi’s view “as combining active resistance with nonviolence” (12). Thus, he rejects Reinhold Niebuhr’s claim that resistance is itself a form of coercion. There is a chapter on each Gospel that divides into four parts: “a proposal for the evangelist’s project, as situated in the crisis of the times; a description of the story’s narrative conflict as told by the evangelist; the resolution of conflict as presented in this particular Gospel; plus a final assessment in terms of nonviolence theory” (27). I will offer some comments on each chapter. “Mark’s carefully constructed narrative of Jesus takes the form of a nonviolent resistance campaign. Jesus is presented as a people’s messiah, sprung from the peasant villages of Galilee” (74). Jesus in Mark’s project and story confronts the violence and devastation of village life through his preaching, teaching, and healing. The conflict resolution includes three stages: nonviolent confrontation, a repressive response, and a deliberate act of non-retaliation, which in Mark occurs at Jesus’ arrest. Two issues could nuance this development. As in the other evangelists, the beginning is a highly theological scene that anticipates the whole story, that is Jesus accepts his death and resurrection symbolically at the baptism and confronts the power of evil in the desert. Second, the messianic secret is not the same as the miracle secret. When Jesus performs a healing it is broadcast everywhere but when he commands silence about who he is (e.g. at 8:30) nothing more is said because his identity is intertwined with his destiny as revealed in the cross. Whereas Mark is writing most likely around the time of the Jewish–Roman war of 66–70, Matthew is writing in response to a developing rabbinic Judaism as succeeding 786811 TSJ0010.1177/0040563918786811Theological StudiesBook Reviews book-review2018