We welcome this book by Robert Voelkel on Herrmann, who in his own day wrestled with theological problems which have continued to be debated at great length. Other works have far more extensively pointed out lines of continuity between nineteenth and twentieth-century theological thought. This is not the primary aim of the author, who provides us rather with an excursus on Herrmann's thought with an interest in furthering our own.

Aremark of E. G. Selwyn, in the course of his essay ‘Eschatology in 1 Peter’ contributed to the C. H. Dodd Festschrift, deserves more attention than it has yet received. He mentions his misgivings over the term kerygma which has been so prominent in the last decades and suggests that the word martyria would be more appropriate to describe the primitive and indispensable core of the Christian message. ‘At any rate’, he writes, if we examine the comparative occurrences in the New Testament of the two sets of terms, we find that the occurrences of the verbs alone which speak of ‘witness’ considerably outnumber the occurrences of κηρύσσειν while the occurrences of the noun μαρτυρία outnumber those of the noun κήρυγμα by more than six to one. (p. 395)

The term ‘Son of Man’ is one of the enigmas of the Gospels. G. Vermes has re-examined the Aramaic background of the phrase in Appendix E of the third edition of M. BlacK's Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts. Even if his argument that barnāsh (ā) is in some passages a mere circumlocution for ‘I’ is not wholly convincing,page 2 he has demonstrated beyond doubt that the phrase was not in New Testament times a title with a clear and recognised meaning, whether messianic or other. The phrase in itself merely signifies ‘man’, whether mankind in general, or a particular man. Only the context can determine its meaning more precisely. Apart from Act 7.56 it is used virtually exclusively in the New Testament by Jesus, and the question of the crowd in John 12.34—‘who is this Son of Man?’ —shows clearly that the expression was not immediately intelligible to the first century,page 3 and that we are not at liberty to dismiss it as no more than an elaborate way of saying ‘man’ or ‘I’. This is the justification of the immense activity that has gone into the exploration of the previous history of the expression, and to which this article is a small contribution.page 4

The S.G.M. Press has published within the past decade several important studies on the place of the Old Testament within the Christian Bible and on how it is to be interpreted. Now John Bright has produced a volume (The Authority of the Old Testament, S.C.M. Press, 1967, pp. 272, 40s.), containing his own review of the questions involved—the enduring authority possessed by the Old Testament, and the appropriate method of interpreting it. Any book to which the name of John Bright is attached is an 'important' one. He is the author of a standard History of Israel, and as such, as well as in his other works particularly his Commentaries, he has shown that he is a master of organising a mass of complex material, of being fair to scholarship with which he is in little sympathy, and of being in command of such adequate expression that it is difficult to better him. All this makes it the more important to evaluate critically his present volume. The book discloses a pleasing symmetry of construction, and, as expected, a persuasive and well-expressed argument. The doubt in my mind is whether it is, conceptually, broadly enough based.