James Resseguie is an American professor of New Testament who previously published books on the literary analysis of John and Revelation. In the author’s own words, the present book ‘attempts to show the merits of close reading for biblical studies and its applicability to New Testament exegesis’ (11). These merits are shown to be that narrative criticism views a text as a whole, that it reads it as literature, and that it emphasizes the effects of the narrative on the reader (cf. 38–40). This information is from the long introductory chapter. The main chapters focus on rhetoric (including figures of speech), setting, characterization, point of view, and plot respectively. Many New Testament examples come from John’s Gospel but a few secular short stories are reproduced and analysed as well.

The final chapter applies the preceding material to the story of Nicodemus. It is here that the limitations of the method becomes most clearly apparent. Resseguie shows how scholarly opinions are divided over the interpretation of the last of the three scenes in which the Pharisee appears, the single verse John 19:39: is Nicodemus now a real disciple who sides with Jesus or does the narrator mention the overweight of spices to show that he is merely burying a dead Messiah? At this point Ressegule quotes the words of Robert Alter that ‘a character revealed through actions or appearance leaves us substantially in the realm of inference’ (252–53) but he fails to take the issue seriously. I would have appreciated a discussion of the specific problem of New Testament narrative that comes to the fore here, which is that many stories are too short and have too many gaps to preclude a diversity of readings. Another case in point is the enigma of the jar left behind by the Samaritan woman in John 4; Resseguie mentions the riddle (105–106) but admits that he can’t solve it.

The book closes with a bibliography which is helpfully organized by subjects, and good indexes.

Is this book really ‘an introduction’? Yes, in so far that it is accessible and not idiosyncratic. No, in the sense that it is pretty long and contains many examples and lengthy discussions. Resseguie takes 16 pages to introduce the idea of characterization but then adds 28 pages of illustrations, such as the women with a haemorrhage (Mark 5), Mary Magdalene, the man born blind (John 9), Zacchaeus and Judas. These little studies are useful but they take us beyond the merely introductory. On the other hand I missed a discussion of the state of the art of narrative criticism. Resseguie explains how it differs from New Criticism and reader response criticism but there is no overview of the achievements of people like Alter, Kermode, Frye and McKnight. We see how Resseguie does it—and he makes it attractive to students, not least to evangelicals—but we are not really introduced to the discipline.

Those who are already familiar with the narrative analysis (why continue to call it ‘criticism’?) may not need to buy this book, but those for whom the above is new should surely get hold of it. It could serve in classes if the lecturer fills in the gap I mentioned.

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