Incarnation: 2contemporary Writers on the New Testament

n this earnest, scholarly complement to David Rosenberg's Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible , Reynolds Price maintains that John bar Zebedee, the Beloved of Jesus, authored the Gospel according to John: ``The suggestion that a fisherman who studied with Jesus might not have been as competent a theologian as his modern doubters is amusingly small-minded.'' John Hersey is dismayed by the Revelation of Saint John the Divine: ``The book allows--almost commands--doing nothing about social ills and dangers; God will take care of those things.'' Marina Warner points to misogyny in Paul's First Epistle to Timothy; and Anthony Hecht, a Jew, cites specific acts of anti-Semitism committed in the name of Christ but finds that Jesus himself, in words reported in Luke, makes ``the best and most telling answer to the solipsism and contemptuous repudiation of the Law of Moses by Paul.'' In the book's most personal essay, David Plante recalls his homosexual love for his roommate at a Jesuit college, contemplates Saint Paul's enormous love for Christ and tackles the contradictory nature of Paul, who damned the flesh yet used images of the body to praise the soul. Corn is the author of The Metamorphoses of Metaphor. (June)