Old and New in Interpretation
Published in 1966, Old and New in Interpretation is James Barr's sustained examination of how the two Testaments belong together and what it means to read them as one book. Barr, a Church of Scotland minister and Semitic philologist, had already unsettled mid-century biblical scholarship with The Semantics of Biblical Language, which dismantled the habit of extracting distinctively Hebraic theology from the shapes of Hebrew words. Here he turns from vocabulary to architecture. The Biblical Theology Movement had built a confident consensus: the Bible is unified by revelation in history, the Old Testament relates to the New by typology, and Hebrew thought stands in sharp contrast to Greek. Barr takes that consensus apart.
His central objection to "revelation in history" is that it does not fit most of the Old Testament. Wisdom literature, law, psalmody, and cultic instruction are not narratives of divine acts, and even the narratives are not history in the sense modern theology needs them to be. Barr proposes "story" as the more honest description of Israel's tradition — cumulative, retold, theologically shaped, not reducible to a reconstructed sequence of events behind the text. He argues that typology, presented as a disciplined alternative to allegory, cannot in practice be kept clean of it, and that the New Testament's actual use of the Old is far more varied and opportunistic than any single scheme allows. He insists that the Old Testament possesses its own theology, formed within Israel's own faith, and must be read in its own right rather than solely as anticipation. And he presses the question that most unsettled his contemporaries: whether "the Bible" functions as the exclusive theological norm Protestant rhetoric claims, or whether tradition, natural knowledge of God, and the church's ongoing reinterpretation are already doing work that biblicism refuses to acknowledge.
The book is one of the documents by which the Biblical Theology Movement came apart; Brevard Childs answered it directly in Biblical Theology in Crisis, and the canonical and narrative approaches that followed were shaped partly by having to reckon with Barr's objections. His preference for "story" over "history" fed into narrative theology, often by writers who did not share his critical commitments. The book also lays groundwork for his later Holy Scripture and The Concept of Biblical Theology. Read now, it remains the sharpest available diagnosis of why grand unifying schemes for the two Testaments keep collapsing.
Who should read this: pastors and teachers who have inherited a typological or salvation-history framework and sense it straining under the actual text, and students of biblical theology who want to know why the field looks as it does. Not for devotional reading, and not for anyone wanting a constructive account of biblical unity — Barr clears ground with precision and leaves the rebuilding to others.