New Visions: Historical and Theological Perspectives on the Jewish-Christian Dialogue.

New Visions reproduces a series of lectures sponsored by Tulane University's chaff of Judeo-Christian Studies. Although the subtitle advertises the Jewish/Christian dialogue, not all the essays deal ex professo with that subject; indeed, only one essay in the book is by a Jew (Jacob Petuchowski's study of the Lord' s Prayer from the perspective of Jewish prayer) and some of the essays are not about Judaism at all.

Like most potpourris of this sort, there are some excellent things to be found. In this volume. I would single out Scan Freyne's two essays in which he contrasts Jewish/Christian interaction in the first century, when Christians were a struggling minority, to the Christians of the fourth century, who had, as a group, "triumphed." Jurgen Moltmann's study of Christology in the context of the Christian-Jewish dialogue and Lawrence Frizzell's assessment of the same dialogue now that we are a generation away from Nostra aetate were helpful. Robert Wilken's essay on patristic hagiography is first rate (and on a subject dear to my heart) but hardly fits under the ecumenical rubric advertised in the subtitle of this volume.

What New Visions lacks is a coherent theme; what it provides is a horizon of issues more or less connected with ecumenical dialogue. For a more organically sustained look at the dialogue between Christians and Jews I would recommend, as a first reading, two other anthologies, from the same publisher: Overcoming Fear between Jews and Christians (1993) edited by James Charlesworth, and the collection of essays by Eugene Fisher: Faith without Prejudice (1993).