Since the modern period, the field of biblical studies has relied upon libraries, museums, and archives for its evidentiary and credentialing needs. Yet, absent in biblical scholarship is a thorough and critical examination of the instrumentality of the discipline’s master archives for elite power structures. Addressing this gap in biblical scholarship lies central to this book. Interrogated here is a premier repository or master archive of the discipline: the British Museum. Using an assemblage of critical theories from archival discourse to postcolonial studies, space theory to governmentality studies, the focal point of this book is at the intersections of the Museum’s rise to scientific prominence, the British Empire, and the conferring of scientific authority to modern biblical critics in the nineteenth century. Gregory L. Cuéllar initiates a season of historicization of the master archives of biblical studies and archival criticism.
A celebration of 25 years of the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar that features contributions from a diverse lineup of today's most respected scholars. For twenty-five years, the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar has produced a steady stream of influential, global, diverse, ecumenical and world-class research and publications that have impacted a generation of scholars now in mid-career, teaching or ministering at various universities, seminaries, divinity schools, or churches around the globe. The volumes of the seminar have resourced countless classrooms and have been cited thousands of times in scholarly research and in the pulpits and Bible studies worldwide. In celebration of the 25th year of the seminar (1997-2022), this compendium reflects on its work and impact. It offers new essays that chart the value of the seminar for biblical interpretation and the needs of biblical interpretation in the future, and includes stories from the formative SAHS community. This volume distills the work of the seminar for a new generation of students, opening to them a gateway to the community and to the resources developed over the past two decades. Tightly organized, carefully arranged and cross-referenced, this volume: Highlights the work of a significant movement in biblical interpretation in the academy Charts a path of biblical interpretation from the past to the future Helps readers understand the philosophical and theological commitments that undergird biblical interpretation Helps readers construct a theological hermeneutics that yields a deeper, richer reading of Scripture Introduces readers to stories of the seminar from scholars and ministers impacted by it This celebratory volume not only gives a unique perspective on the architecture of biblical interpretation in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, but it is offered in hope of preparing fertile soil for the next generation of women and men to cultivate biblical interpretation for years to come. The volume features essays by Craig Bartholomew, David Beldman, Amber L. Bowen, Susan Bubbers, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Havilah Dharamraj, Bo Lim, Murray Rae, J. Aaron Simmons, Anthony Thiselton, and John Wyatt.
Life and Death: Social Perspectives on Biblical Bodies explores some of the social, material, and ideological dynamics shaping life and death in both the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel and Judah. Analysing topics ranging from the bodily realities of gestation, subsistence, and death, and embodied performances of gender, power, and status, to the imagined realities of post-mortem and divine existence, the essays in this volume offer exciting new trajectories in our understanding of the ways in which embodiment played out in the societies in which the texts of the Hebrew Bible emerged.
The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism is a comprehensive treatment of a relatively new form of scholarship-one of the most compelling and contested theories to emerge in recent times, and a topic that actively seeks to expand the ways in which the Bible can be studied, interpreted, and applied. Generally speaking, postcolonialism aims to critique and dismantle hegemonic worldviews and power structures, while giving voice to previously marginalized peoples and systems of thought. This approach, often varied in form, has inevitably engaged with the text and reception of the Bible, a scripture that Western colonizers introduced to-and often imposed upon-their colonial subjects. With a globally diverse list of contributors, the Handbook aims to cover the perspective and context of the authors of the Bible, as well as the modern experiences of imperialism, resistance, decolonization, and nationalism. Moreover, the volume includes both a theoretical overview and an exploration of how the field intersects with related areas, such as gender studies, race, postmodernism, and liberation theology.
Is the Bible the unembellished Word of God or the product of human agency? There are different answers to that question. And they lie at the heart of this book's powerful exploration of the fraught ways in which money, race and power shape the story of Christianity in American public life. The authors' subject is the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC: arguably the latest example of a long line of white evangelical institutions aiming to amplify and promote a religious, political, and moral agenda of their own. In their careful and compelling investigation, Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon disclose the ways in which the Museum's exhibits reinforce a particularized and partial interpretation of the Bible's meaning. Bringing to light the Museum's implicit messaging about scriptural provenance and audience, the authors reveal how the MOTB produces a version of the Bible that in essence authorizes a certain sort of white evangelical privilege; promotes a view of history aligned with that same evangelical aspiration; and above all protects a cohort of white evangelicals from critique. They show too how the Museum collapses vital conceptual distinctions between its own conservative vision of the Bible and 'The Bible' as a cultural icon. This revelatory volume above all confirms that scripture – for all the claims made for it that it speaks only divine truth – can in the end never be separated from human politics.
Challenging Contextuality: Bibles and Biblical Scholarship in Context provides a new and innovative contribution to the study of biblical texts by bringing together current approaches to biblical interpretation. The volume sets the agenda for the future of the field and provides a synthesis of approaches to date. In doing so, it aligns itself with the broadly shared hermeneutical conviction that contextuality is a catalyst for interpretation. This applies in equal measure to approaches and methods that are often framed as 'traditional' or 'mainstream' (e.g. the methodological canon of the historical critical approach as the offspring of the European Enlightenment) and those that are often dubbed 'contextual' (e.g. forms of feminist or 'indigenous' interpretation). The volume grounds contextual biblical interpretation within the broader landscape of biblical studies, and the chapters are all interested in the contexts in which bibles are read. Rather than a series of examples of contextual biblical interpretation, this book is concerned with what it means to do contextual biblical interpretation, how contextual biblical interpretation challenges biblical scholarship, and what chances there are for this mode of inquiry. What contexts are engaged and elucidated when it comes to bible-use? What contexts are made visible and invisible? How can different contexts be theorized and understood? The volume argues that it is not context that matters, rather, contemporary contexts should be a challenge and a chance for biblical scholarship, its present and its future.
"This book engages the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, one of the most important collections of early manuscripts of Jewish scripture and the New Testament, by placing them within larger conversations relating to ancient literature and its interpretation, papyrology, and the ethics of collecting and scholarship. Ninety years after Beatty acquired these manuscripts, their value for scholarship and culture remains largely unexplored"--
Good Book?interrogates how white evangelical Christians in the US make the Bible the "Good Book." An inanimate object with a contested table of contents ripe for multiple meanings and uses, the Bible cannot be a moral agent on its own. People must make it so, as indeed they have. As prevailing social norms change, evangelical Christians confront intellectual and interpretive challenges as they quest to make an ancient book newly relevant and ever benevolent, especially for historically oppressed populations. While histories show us that white Christians in the US have frequently appealed to their Bibles in support of issues now judged to be on the wrong side of history, including racism, sexism, and colonialism, contemporary white evangelical figures have in recent years worked steadfastly to defend the Bible against charges of complicity in harm. This is especially the case when it comes to patriarchy and the place of women, as evangelicals conscript the Bible into arguments for and against patriarchal normativity in response to changing conceptions of what is good. The Bible's historical origins in the hierarchical, patriarchal contexts of the ancient world create challenges for any Christian seeking to interpret their Bible as fundamentally liberative.?Good Book?shows the creative negotiations that Bible-benevolence projects demand, as evangelicals wrestle both Jesus and Paul into advocates for women. The quest to maintain the Bible's goodness is ultimately a respectability project for evangelical Christians in the US who seek to maintain moral authority in an increasingly diverse religious landscape. Whether they rebrand patriarchy or seek to untangle the Bible from sexism, white evangelical Bible-benevolence projects perpetuate misogyny.
In Latina/o/x Studies and Biblical Studies Jacqueline M. Hidalgo introduces Latina/o/x studies for a biblical studies audience. She examines crucial themes that bridge the two fields, themes such as identity and difference with special attention to ethnicity and race; migration with attention to homing, diaspora, transnationalism, and citizenship. She discusses the place of Latina/o/x studies in relevant Hebrew Bible and New Testament scholarship on these topics. Ultimately this essay argues that Latina/o/x studies’ epistemological commitments to complexity, relationality, particularity, and collaborative knowledge-making can help ground critical interpretive approaches in biblical studies. She also imagines a way in which biblical studies—capaciously encompassing the study of Jewish and Christian literature in the ancient world as well as Jewish and Christian biblical reception and rejection histories, and the very category of scriptures more broadly—could deepen Latina/o/x studies' own thinking about canon formation and history.
