I picked up LTJ’s book but haven’t had the opportunity to read through it thoroughly. From what I have read, I think it will be a great contribution to anyone studying Greco-Roman religion. Johnson seeks to dispel notions that early Christian religion was wholly different from that of pagan religion. “The heart of the book, ” Johnson writes, “is a close and (I hope) careful comparison between the ways of being religious among Gentiles and in Christianity” (ix-x). He emphasizes that his book is written from the perspective of religious studies and not theology.

Johnson develops four ways or types of being religious in Greco-Roman religion. These four categories are (1) religion as participation in divine benefits, (2) religion as moral transformation, (3) religion as transcending the world, and (4) religion as stabilizing the world. Johnson then uses these categories to describe how early Christians understood religion in similar ways to other religions in the ancient Mediterranean. This book should be useful for patristic scholars as well as students of the New Testament since his discussion of ancient religion spans from the New Testament to the post-Constantine era.

Since the canon consists of a disparate collection of writings, with both the Old Testament and New Testament forming the Christian Bible, it resists reduction to any single unifying principle imposed from without as much as it lacks any explicit unifying principle within. If it excludes by its nature any “canon within the canon,” it certainly also resists any conceptual mold that either relativizes or removes the texts themselves in all their hard particularity. The resistance applies as well to any “biblical theology.” In all its forms, biblical theology is simply another attempt to reduce the many to one by means of some abstract unifying principle, whether it is denominated salvation history or justification or liberation or kerygma or regula fidei or narrativity or existential decision. All such principles demand the selection of some texts as a priori more central and governing than others. All fit the writings themselves to frames of greater or lesser abstraction. The canon resists such attempts precisely because it is made up of multiple and irreducible writings which cannot without distortion be shaped into a static symbolic system.

Luke Timothy Johnson, Scripture and Discernment: Decision Making in the Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 37.