If anyone needed any convincing that study of the New Testament at Oxford and in the United Kingdom has been given a considerable boost by the appointment of Ed Sanders to the chair of New Testament at Oxford University Jesus and Judaism will surely provide it. After two important contributions to the debate about Paul’s theology Sanders has turned his attention to the thorny question of the message and mission of Jesus and his relationship to Second Temple Judaism. As well as demonstrating that he is one of the world’s leading New Testament exegetes, he has used his wide-ranging knowledge and clarity of mind to provide a book of great historical conviction. Some will find his presentation of Jesus as a ‘reasonable visionary’ of the first century very disturbing. Others will find it strangely conservative: not only does it use the gospels to say more about Jesus than many contemporary exegetes would allow, but its main thesis is reminiscent of another great contribution to the debate about Jesus, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God by Johannes Weiss. Whatever one’s point of view, evident throughout this book is the great ability to cut through muddled thinking in a provocative and stimulating way, to disentangle complicated issues and rigorously to pursue the truth wherever it may lead.

The atheistic character of Marxism has often been regarded as an obstruction to dialogue and debate between Marxists and Christians. A recent contributor to this discussion suggests that if Marx has anything to offer Christians, it is ‘in spite of his atheism’, while others have pressed for a modus vivendi between science and faith; materialism and religion. Yet the atheism of the Marxist tradition is, I want to argue, an atheism which ‘transcends’. It is an atheism which translates the preoccupations of world religions into the language of a dialectical science and in this way offers a way out of the conceptual rigidities in which conventional materialists and believers alike find themselves increasingly trapped. It is an atheism which is far more positive and liberating than is commonly assumed.

I shall begin by presenting the Marxist case for atheism both in historical terms and as I believe it stands in logic. Once this is done, it will become clearer why Marxism has an essentially affirmative attitude to the religious heritage which it transcends.

As every schoolboy once knew, the Church of Rome accepts the Longer Old Testament Canon rather than the shorter one read by Protestants and Jews. This means that she can invoke OT authority for the immortality of the soul (Wisd. 3. 1—9) and for the propriety and efficacy of prayers for the dead (2 Macc 12. 43—45). Apart, however, from a few proof texts of this sort, it is doubtful whether the so-called Deuterocanonical books and passages have much influence on Catholics. Take the case of the Book of Daniel. When they set out to expound Daniel Catholic writers tend either to give scant attention to the passages peculiar to the Longer Canon (so, e.g. Delcor, 1971 and Collins, 1981) or, as the present writer did in his brief commentary on Daniel (Robinson, 1971), to ignore them altogether. Should we not, perhaps, take our Canon more seriously?

In what follows, I shall first consider some general problems involved in taking one’s Canon, whether the Shorter or the Longer, seriously, without however getting entangled in the ‘canonical criticism’ debate.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the early Christian Church did not simply inherit an OT Canon from the Jewish people. The Jews, in fact, did not possess a fixed Canon for the OT as a whole until the late first or early second century of our era: the contents of the Pentateuch and of the Prophets had certainly been settled by the time of the beginning of Christianity, but the extent of the third division, the Writings, remained unclear.

Our practical reasoning goes well and attains its truth when we identify ways of adequately getting or realising really desirable objectives. And our objectives are really desirable (good) when they either are really desirable in themselves, or are steps on the way to getting or realising some such intrinsically desirable objective or objectives. If there is but one such intrinsically desirable objective, our practical reasoning cannot go well unless we know what it is. If, as seems much more plausible, there are a number of intrinsically desirable objectives, our practical reasoning cannot go well unless we know whether there is some further objective to be attained or realised by or in the pursuit of some or all of these intrinsically desirable objectives, i.e. whether there is some further point to pursuing them; and if so, what that further point or objective (‘last end’) actually is.

Some say that the true last end is some one of the intrinsically desirable human goods, say, the highest instantiation of the highest good attainable in this life, thus contemplation of God to the extent that God is knowable through His creatures. Others agree that it is some one human good, but place it beyond this life, and beyond merely human capacities, in the beatific vision and contemplation of God.