A concise companion to Ellis Brotzman's Old Testament Textual Criticism. Introduces students to the process of comparing Greek texts and seeking the original wording.
New Testament textual criticism is an important but often overlooked field of study. Results drawn from textual studies bear important consequences for interpreting the New Testament and cannot be ignored by serious students of Scripture. This book introduces current issues in New Testament textual criticism and surveys the various methods used to determine the original text among variant readings. These essays from Eldon Jay Epp, Michael Holmes, J. K. Elliott, Maurice Robinson, and Moisés Silva provide readers with an excellent introduction to the field of New Testament textual criticism.
A renewed interest in textual criticism has created an unfortunate proliferation of myths, mistakes, and misinformation about this technical area of biblical studies. Elijah Hixson and Peter Gurry, along with a team of New Testament textual critics, offer up-to-date, accurate information on the history and current state of the New Testament text that will serve apologists and offer a self-corrective to evangelical excesses.
One unfortunate consequence of the bitter fundamentalist-modernist controversy which raged in the early twenties has been the strongly negative attitude toward Biblical criticism assumed by some of the successors to the fundamentalists of the 1920s. Such people, according to the author, insist that the critical method is basically hostile to the evangelical faith, and they have continued to oppose any use of it. Others, however, claiming the same heritage, believe that the orthodox interpretation of the Gospel can be defended positively and constructively only with the aid of a sound critical method and the results of critical scholarship. The author believes that an evangelical Biblical criticism is not only possible but necessary. The central thesis of his book is that "the Bible is the Word of God given in the words of men in history", and as such its historical origins must be reconstructed as far as possible. In this way a richer understanding of the Scriptures can be achieved.
This is a print on demand book and is therefore non- returnable. Although many conservative scholars have had reservations about biblical criticism since its rise a century ago, Carl Armerding contends that critical rationalism need not be antithetical to belief in a divinely inspired Word of God. Indeed, says Armerding, the evangelical scholar -- mediating the traditional conservative view and the rational critical view of Scripture -- is able to use all the tools of historical, philological, and literary study, while still retaining biblical categories of revelation, inspiration, and history. Armerding applies this synthesis of approaches -- the traditional and the critical -- to four major branches of criticism: literary (or source) criticism, form criticism, structural analysis, and textual criticism. Cautioning against misuse of these critical methods, he demonstrates how each method can be conscientiously used by faithful scholars to enrich their understanding of the Old Testament text. Of great value to scholars, students, and pastors, Armerding's work promises to enrich study of the Old Testament much as George Eldon Ladd's book (The New Testament and Criticism) has enriched study of the New.
New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism provides readers of the Bible with an important tool for understanding the Scriptures. Based on the theory and practice of Greek rhetoric in the New Testament, George Kennedy's approach acknowledges that New Testament writers wrote to persuade an audience of the truth of their messages. These writers employed rhetorical conventions that were widely known and imitated in the society of the times. Sometimes confirming but often challenging common interpretations of texts, this is the first systematic study of the rhetorical composition of the New Testament. As a complement to form criticism, historical criticism, and other methods of biblical analysis, rhetorical criticism focuses on the text as we have it and seeks to discover the basis of its powerful appeal and the intent of its authors. Kennedy shows that biblical writers employed both "external" modes of persuasion, such as scriptural authority, the evidence of miracles, and the testimony of witnesses, and "internal" methods, such as ethos (authority and character of the speaker), pathos (emotional appeal to the audience), and logos (deductive and inductive argument in the text). In the opening chapter Kennedy presents a survey of how rhetoric was taught in the New Testament period and outlines a rigorous method of rhetorical criticism that involves a series of steps. He provides in succeeding chapters examples of rhetorical analysis, looking closely at the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus' farewell to the disciples in John's Gospel, the distinctive rhetoric of Jesus, the speeches in Acts, and the approach of Saint Paul in Second Corinthians, Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans.
Narrative criticism is a relatively recent development that applies literary methods to the study of Scripture. James Resseguie suggests that this approach to reading the Bible treats the text as a self-contained unit and avoids complications raised by other critical methods of interpretation. Resseguie begins with an introductory chapter that surveys the methods of narrative criticism and how they can be used to discover important nuances of meaning through what he describes as a "close reading" of the text. He then devotes chapters to the principal rhetorical devices: setting, point of view, character, rhetoric, plot, and reader. Readers will find here an accessible introduction to the subject of narrative criticism and a richly rewarding approach to reading the Bible.
The seventeen studies in this volume provide a presentation and assessment of past and current methods applied to the New Testament text. Coauthors Epp and Fee offer an introductory survey of the whole field of New Testament textual criticism, followed by sections of essays on these topics: definitions of key terms; critiques of current theory and method; methods of establishing textual relationships; studies of the papyri with respect to text-critical method; and guidelines for the use of patristic evidence. --From publisher's description.
This book comprises a general survey of the study of New Testament manuscripts, and outlines for students of the New Testament the basic tools and skills involved in studying those manuscripts. The present edition is a thoroughly revised and updated version of Leon Vaganay's Initiation á la critique du Nouveau Testament, published in 1933, and each section of that original work has been brought up to date in light of the latest research in the field. In its aim to provide a solid foundation to study of New Testament textual criticism, this comprehensive survey will be of great value to those who are looking for basic information about the subject; while the documentary information it contains about the extant manuscripts, and its original theoretical sections, will ensure that the book has much of value to offer the more advanced student of the New Testament.