What manner of book is this, with its computer-generated camels bearing down on us from the front cover inviting us to chase the eastern star? It is that rare animal: an utterly gripping academic book that entertains, enlightens and edifies in equal measure. I picked up my review copy to see what was in it and didn’t put it down until 24 hours later when I’d read every word.

The book falls into three very different parts. Part one examines ‘meaning’ and begins with the claim that texts are polyvalent. In fact it begins anecdotally with good evidence from Powell’s own experience as both a writer and a reader that texts are open to various surprising interpretations. It also includes the key analytical device of the book: the distinction between expected and unexpected readings. Powell is very careful here: these categories do not imply good and bad, or right and wrong, or conservative and radical, but they dofollow from careful examination of the narrative itself. Each text proposes certain expected readings that follow the detail wherever it leads.

This is a controversial claim in a world of postmodern hermeneutical sophistication, but Powell would rather accept the label ‘postmodern’ for himself because it reminds us that his own hermeneutic is reader-orientated and not author-orientated (for the reasons set out in the autobiographical opening). This is ‘narrative criticism’ because it examines a narrative for what is in it. It is ‘reader-response criticism’ because it tracks the narrative by way of asking what tire ideal (or implied) reader is expected to notice. Finally, it is both historically orientated and focused on the final form of the text, thus avoiding many of the false polarizations in this particular hermeneutical arena.

Part two of the book works all this out in terms of the basic questions about expectancy: what is a reader expected to know and to believe in the process of reading? The discussion is kept tethered to the lives of ordinary Bible readers by the decision to focus it around reading the Gospel of Matthew. What are Matthew’s readers expected to know and believe? How are they expected to read? Even those with no interest in Powell’s aims could learn a great deal here about Matthew’s gospel.

Part three then delivers on the promise of the theory by exploring the magoi of Matthew 2. I will not spoil all the delightful surprises of this section, although I will point out that Powell agrees with ‘virtually all’ modern critics that the magi could not have been kings, but he agrees in a quite unexpected way, to his own chagrin.

In a concluding chapter Powell makes tire daring move towards an explicit theological evaluation of what this approach tells us. What Powell sets down in this chapter (‘The Magi and the Gospel’) should be compulsory reading for all who have ever taken courses in hermeneutics and wondered where it leaves them with regard to their role in the wider community of Christian believers. Essentially, he avers, it is the gospel which judges the desirability of any reading, expected or unexpected, and even if it is not exactly the Lutheran gospel (as various recounted objections to this proposal clarify) it is going to be something like it if Powell’s reading of Matthew has any merit. The implications of this position are spelled out in the closing pages: implications not just for hermeneutics but for the lives of all those trained to study the Bible professionally.

The book closes with a couple of ‘bonus tracks’: a sermon and a short story that exemplify the delightful style of the whole book.

It is exceptional stuff. On the back cover Robert Gundry says, ‘Buy it. Read it. Join the chase.’ Such words are overdone, but at least for those with anything more than a passing interest in how to interpret the Bible I would for once concur.

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