Loren Rossen has proposed another meme, which Stephen Carlson has re-titled “The Five Frustrating Books Meme.” Rossen’s explanation of the meme is as follows:

… five biblical studies books or essays you think have made extremely important and necessary contributions to the field, yet heavily disagree with in spite of this? I have in mind scholarship you find yourself burning to agree with, or a closet fan of, envying the author’s critical acumen, applauding the fact that all the right (and perhaps long-overdue) questions are being asked, but regretfully finding most of the conclusions just plain unpersuasive. … This is about books for which one has enthusiasm, albeit frustrated enthusiasm.

Both Rossen and Carlson have good lists of their own, several books of which could be on my own list. But my own list of books about which I am enthusiastic and with which I share many sympathies and agreements, but nonetheless frustrate me is as follows (note: in compiling this list, I was surprised by how few books there actually were about which I carried this sort of passionate ambivalence):

5. Douglas A. Campbell, The Quest for Paul’s Gospel (2005). This is really a quite brilliant book; Campbell does a tremendous job of absolutely shredding many of the traditional readings of Paul and really forcing some outside-the-box thinking about Paul’s theology. Part of what makes this book so frustrating to me is how close I think Campbell gets to solving the questions he’s asking. That said, a few critical holes (such as the always sticky question of the Jews and Israel in Paul’s theology) keep this book from being entirely convincing to me on some of the main points. It is, nonetheless, a book I’d highly recommend.

4. Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1971). This book started a major sea-change in the way early Christianity was viewed; no longer could a scholar simply repeat the traditional Eusebian model (that is, there was once a “pure” gospel message that was perverted by later heretics). There can be little doubt that Bauer is correct that “heresy” preceded “orthodoxy” in many areas and was in fact the majority in these areas (and probably some others) for quite some time. Simple probability is against the idea that orthodoxy necessarily came first in every place, and Bauer’s argument that the struggles attested by the proto-orthodox documents themselves presume “heresies” that are legitimate threats—even winning the battle at times—is quite persuasive.

Nonetheless, there are methodological flaws that do limit the persuasiveness of Bauer’s suggested narrative. First, Bauer too often uses arguments from silence in constructing his case. For example, does Polycarp not mentioning a bishop in his letter to the Philippians really mean there was no bishop there (pp. 73–74)? Bauer also occasionally applies a late text to a much earlier situation with little thought for chronology, sometimes leading to leaps in judgment; for example, his use of the very late Mar Aba narrative in the attempt to demonstrate Marcionite ownership of the term “Christian” in second century Edessa is quite a stretch. In addition, Bauer’s reconstruction relies too much on a unified and dominant Roman church spreading its own brand of Christianity. What then is to be made of documents (like the Shepherd of Hermas) that speak of disunity and false teachings within the Roman church itself? A monolithic Roman church is probably as unlikely as a monolithic orthodoxy throughout the empire at this early time—Marcion’s impact in Rome in the mid second century was not insignificant (nor was that of Valentinus).

The picture of a dominant and controlling Roman church smacks of an anti-Catholic bias common in the scholarship of German Protestants in the 1930s, and Bauer’s treatment of Rome does not seem to reflect the same kind of attention to conflict and diversity he displays elsewhere. Despite these flaws, this book is valuable for its demolition of the Eusebian model alone, a contribution that opened important new avenues throughout scholarship on early Christianity.

That said, the evidence does not warrant a wholesale abandoning of the possibility that there was some “pure” or “original” gospel originally preached by the earliest Christians. That “heresy” preceded or outnumbered orthodoxy in many places a century later does not preclude such a possibility. Much of my frustration with this book lies in the extension of its conclusion to the impossibility of such an “original” proclamation common to earliest Christianity. The data, at least so far, does not preclude this possibility, and as such it should not be entirely ruled out.

3. Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (1987). I could just as easily have made this entry Gager’s Reinventing Paul, but that was so heavily dependent on Gaston that it really is more suitable to list his book here. Gaston engages in some very clever exegesis and launches on a project with which I very much sympathize: the attempt to eliminate anti-Judaism from Paul’s theology. Unfortunately, Gager’s solution (the so-called two-covenant model) is entirely unconvincing. The book gets points for asking many of the right questions and poking some holes in the traditional models, but it is unconvincing in its final aim.

2. J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle (1980). This book makes some excellent points (most notably, the emphasis on the contingency of Paul’s letters), but it all too often is unsatisfying, with Beker sometimes making outright baffling assertions, such as where he says that Paul uses the concept of χάρις (grace) in order to “protect” the “covenantal language of righteousness … against the idea of reciprocity between God and his people” and keep Paul’s message “unilateral,” as opposed to covenantal. The book is helpful inasmuch as it highlights Paul’s apocalypticism (though Beker incorrectly asserts that apocalypticism inherently involves immanence) and the contingency of his letters. Nonetheless, the book’s strengths only make its flaws more frustrating.