Using Tenney's New Testament Survey in Practice
I picked up New Testament Survey Merrill C Tenney back in my undergrad days because it was on the required reading list for an intro course. It still sits on my shelf. The thing about this book is that it is not flashy. It is a straightforward walkthrough of every book in the New Testament, arranged roughly in canonical order, and it does exactly what the title says without padding. Tenney was dean of the divine school at Wheaton College for many years. He wrote this as a textbook, and that is what it reads like. Each chapter covers one or more books, gives authorship notes, dates, outlines, and a brief summary of major themes. There are maps, timelines, and the occasional side note on textual issues. It is designed for someone who needs a reliable first pass through the entire corpus before diving deeper. Here is what actually works when you use it. Read each chapter once straight through to get the lay of the land. Then go back and highlight the structural outline Tenney provides for each book. The outlines are where most people find the real value. They force you to see how a book is put together instead of treating it like a collection of isolated passages. After that, take the suggested readings at the end of each chapter and follow one of them for a book you plan to study more closely. That second source will confirm or challenge what Tenney wrote, and you will learn faster that way.
The one problem I ran into repeatedly was that Tenney sometimes moves too quickly over the Pauline epistles while spending more space on Acts and the Gospels. If you are taking a course focused on Paul, you will need to supplement with something like Peter Oakes or N.T. Wright. I kept a separate notebook where I wrote down the Pauline passages I needed more help with, then came back to them after finishing the Tenney chapters. That workaround saved me from falling behind in exams. Another thing people miss: Tenney's treatment of the Johannine literature assumes a fairly traditional dating for most of the material. Modern scholarship has shifted on several points, especially around the Fourth Gospel and the epistles. You do not need to reject his framework, but you should know that his dates are on the earlier side of the debate. Pairing Tenney with a more recent commentary like the NIGTC series will give you the counterpoint you need. The book is available through several academic publishers and used copies circulate frequently on sites like AbeBooks and ThriftBooks. The original edition came out in the early nineteen fifties, so don't expect the latest textual discoveries to be represented. The core content remains solid for a survey course. If you want the most current edition, check the publisher's website or your institution's bookstore.
I also found that the study questions at the end of each chapter are worth actually answering, even if no one is grading them. Writing out a two sentence summary of what Tenney says about the purpose of Hebrews forces you to process the material in a way that skimming never will. That habit alone made the difference between passing and actually retaining information in my senior year.
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