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Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection. By Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). Translated by the Vatican Secretariat of State. San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius Press, 2011. 362 pp. $24.95 (cloth).
This study of the Passion narratives is the second part of what will likely be the Pope's final substantial contribution to theological scholarship. The foreword promises a third and final installment, "if I am given the strength" (p. xvii), on the infancy narratives. The first volume, dealing with Christ's life and ministry from the baptism to the transfiguration, offered an appreciative engagement with historical critical scholarship, but asked a theological question to which such criticism is blind: What if the historical Jesus' relationship to his eternal Father is the most significant marker of his identity? Here he continues what he calls a "hermeneutic of faith" (p. xvii), pressing the scholarship to give depth to the Christian's encounter with Christ.
This pressing is part of a new way of reading that is, says the author, sorely needed in our time. "In two hundred years of exegetical work, historical-critical exegesis has already yielded its essential fruit. If scholarly exegesis is not to exhaust itself in constantly new hypotheses, becoming theologically irrelevant, it must take a methodological step forward and see itself once again as a theological discipline, without abandoning its historical character" (p....