Book Reviews | 461 Gustav Mahler, Norman Mailer, Pratap Chandra Majumdar, Malcolm X, Charles Malik, Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan (husband of Agatha Christie), Nelson Mandela, Thomas Mann, and Mao Dun come into view, in some cases for quite substantial treatment. Readers already conversant with all of these individuals probably have little to learn from this volume. A delicious irony is the warning against “parontocentrism,” defned as “the fallacy of taking the present as a normative point of departure in study- ing the past” (col. 662). Is this not at the core of Troeltsch’s triad of Kritik— Anologie—Korrelation, the backbone of historical-critical method, and still prevalent in social-scientifc readings, which depend by defnition on mod- els validated by current convictions often characterized by transience? Lit- tle wonder, then, when Bible interpreters fnd “no clear answers” regarding apartheid or homosexuality (col. 250) in Scripture, discover “masculinity” in the Bible to be a matter of contingencies still being determined by cur- rent preferences and behaviors (col. 669), and “Masculinity Studies” (cols. 1248–56) to point to the fnding that “the Bible itself. . . seeks to undercut any hegemonic version of masculinity (see, e.g., Gal 3:28)” (col. 1255). So much depends on defnitions. Whether discerning hermeneutical complexities like the above or his- torical challenges like the identity of the 13 diferent fgures in the Bible called Malchijah, the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception in its eventual 30-volume fullness is an invaluable resource for tracing the vast expanses and efects of scriptural investigation and interpretation across centuries and cultures. robert w. yarbrouGh Covenant Theological Seminary doi: 10.5325/bullbiblrese.30.3.0458 Rainer Riesner. Messias Jesus. Seine Geschichte, seine Botschaft und ihre Überlieferung. Gießen: Brunnen, 2019. Pp. xvii + 537. ISBN 978-3-7655-9410-6. $67.00; €58.00 cloth. Academic books on Jesus continue to proliferate. In this one, the last of three appendixes lists such books, most published since 1970: their number comes to about 140. Messias Jesus should be ranked high among them. The author has already contributed to this discussion, most notably with Jesus als Lehrer (3rd. ed., 1988; 4th ed. to appear in 2020). This earlier book treated Jesus’s putative Messianität in a signifcant subsection (see esp. Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/biblical-research/article-pdf/30/3/461/1267539/bullbiblrese_30_3_461.pdf by guest on 06 February 2022