APPLICATION OF SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE TO THE NEW TESTAMENT

The Application of Sociological Perspective to the New Testament is an interesting field to research on, however, the idea is not entirely new. As early as the 70s, the uses of Social Sciences have played a vital and prominent role in the studies of the New Testament. The efforts of the early scholars concentrated on the application of specific sociological theories to the studies of the New Testament, but recently, researchers have drawn from wider range of socio – scientific fields and disciplines, including but not restricted to anthropology, community studies, political science and psychology. More detailed studies is equally ongoing in sociological concepts like class, role, sect, cult, millennia and authority. In this research paper, I will attempt to use some of the recent discussions in this regards and introduce sources of literatures that have raised relevant interesting questions in this field of sociology and the New Testament. This paper will look at the sociological needs and trace its historical development in the New Testament laying emphasis on some of its principles which are in use at the moment. This research will also draw out concerns on how sociology is used in the New Testament. Therefore, it is imperative that a brief analysis of a significant early work in the study of the first century Christianity is reviewed. This paper will further use the Gospel according to Matthew as a case study to help us understand the application of sociological perspective to the New Testament. In conclusion, this paper will show strengths and weaknesses of the sociological approaches by way of evaluation. Most recent scholarly works have portrayed the reality of the growing importance of sociological approach to the study of the New Testament. This idea on the basic concepts was an idea conceived from the sociology of literature, namely, the type of literature that are bound to shape the lives of people using a specific type of social life settings. This idea was introduced into the New Testament from Form Criticism but it was not favoured by many due to the fundamental shift in cultural and theological views and it declined for nearly fifty years; instead it appeared in dialectic theology and existential hermeneutics of Biblical texts and its focus was on theology and individualism. The social life of the existing communities were left aside, however, Form Criticism was directed at finding the social basis of the life and faith of the early Christians in respect to their community. As such, Thomas F. Best comments “it cannot be denied that even Form Criticism with all its talk of the life – setting (Sitz – im – Leben) of the text, was a literary and theological discipline which produced hardly any concrete historical, social and economic information about the traditions which it studied”. This criticism arose a certain interest for more knowledge and research about concrete social history of the sociological approach. As a result, the last three decades have witnessed a flood of inquiries concerning the social life of the early Christians and its contemporary world in the New Testament studies. We noticed phenomena like slavery, women and children, family life, poverty and riches, social classes and status and many others in books and other social writings, yet with little or no serious attention to the life – setting. According to Abraham J. Malharbe “Another reason for the sociological interest of those involved in the enterprise is their discontent with the present status of historical inquiry and theological interpretation”, for instance, this discontentment led to the formation of a group of scholars who have focused on their religious life and culture of the Aegean in the early Church period under Helmut Koester of Harvard University. In reality, this trend started in the middle of the twentieth century and researchers have realised that the key to the understanding of the New Testament on ..