What Then Does This Text Mean? offers a comprehensive survey of the most common methods and approaches used in contemporary biblical scholarship to help students navigate both foundational and newer critical lenses being used in biblical interpretation today.
Organized into five sections, this textbook brings together twenty-two essays by accomplished Bible scholars, each written in an accessible style and including detailed explanations of a particular approach along with an example of it...
A critical preaching commentary that serves as a single, reliable resource for engaging the Gospel of Mark.This comprehensive commentary on the Gospel of Mark is designed for preachers seeking a single, reliable resource that brings together rigorous exegesis and practical homiletical insight. Drawing on a literary approach, O. Wesley Allen, Jr., interprets Mark as a unified narrative that rewards careful attention not only to individual passages but also to the broader movement of the Gospel as...
Trans Biblical provides some of the most exciting new scholarly work in trans biblical interpretation to help us better understand our Bibles, our bodies, and one another in a fraught and fractious world.
Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture offers a collection of wide-ranging essays exploring key issues animating trans biblical interpretation from a variety of angles and emphases. Contributors, who themselves represent a range of gender identities, answer...
For years, Douglas Stuart’s Old Testament Exegesis has been one of the most popular ways to learn how to perform exegesis—the science and art of interpreting biblical texts properly for understanding as well as proclamation. This new edition includes a major revision and expansion of online and other resources for doing biblical research and updates past editions by including a helpful configuration of the format for the exegesis process. Stuart provides guidance for full exegesis as well as for...
Designed for both Hebrew and non-Hebrew students, A Handbook to Old Testament Exegesis offers a fresh, hands-on introduction to exegesis of the Old Testament. William P. Brown begins not with the biblical text itself but with the reader, helping students to identify their own interpretive lenses before engaging the biblical text. Brown guides the student through a wide variety of interpretive approaches, including modern methodologies—feminist, womanist, Latino/a, queer, post...
Exegeting a text—burrowing deep into its history, language, and literary structure—is an indispensable skill for any serious student of the Bible. Given their theological richness and poetic power, the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible would seem to be prime candidates for exegetical examination, but they often pose difficulty.In this book, James Nogalski offers solid, practical guidance on how to read and exegete a prophetic text in its literary, historical, and con...
"As . . . newer approaches [to biblical criticism] become more established and influential, it is essential that students and other serious readers of the Bible be exposed to them and become familiar with them. That is the main impetus behind the present volume, which is offered as a textbook for those who wish to go further than the approaches covered in To Each Its Own Meaning by exploring more recent or experimental ways of reading." —from the introductionThis book is a ...
This best-selling textbook, now in its fourth edition, continues to be a valuable resource for the beginning student in the critical study of the Bible. Thoroughly revised to include the newest methods, discoveries, and developments in the field of biblical criticism over the past decade, the Handbook of Biblical Criticism is designed to be a starting point for understanding the vast array of methods, approaches and technical terms employed in this field. Updates in this edition als...
This second edition of Bauckham's wonderful work is essential reading for understanding the relationship between the Bible and politics. The enduring value of The Bible in Politics is that it teaches the reader how to read the Bible politically and to gain an understanding of the social relevance of the Bible that is more disciplined, more informed, more imaginative, and more politically fruitful than many interpreters--past and present--have achieved.
How did the Bible's sixty-six books become sacred Scripture? How have they been understood and interpreted over the last two thousand years? What was it that led to our acceptance of the Bible as the true word of God? For two millennia, Christians have accepted the importance of the Bible as sacred Scripture, and for as many years they have struggled to comprehend its meaning. Over the centuries the church has expressed the centrality of Scripture in numerous ways, and Christians ha...
The Old Testament's stories are intriguing, mesmerizing, and provocative not only due to their ancient literary craft but also because of their ongoing relevance. In this volume, well suited to college and seminary use, Jerome Walsh explains how to interpret these narrative passages of Scripture based on standard literary elements such as plot, characterization, setting, pace, point of view, and patterns of repetition. What makes this book an exceptional resource is an appendix t...
For generations, most seminary teaching of the Bible has focused on the historical-critical method. While this method has been the standard in almost every seminary curriculum, the effects of this approach to Scripture have hardly been examined. From examining the biblical studies courses at ten different seminaries and divinity schools, Dale Martin learned what faculties were doing and what students were hearing. This book presents his discoveries, offering the best-ever inside loo...
Is the Bible infallible as some churches claim? Is it a historical document or a piece of literature, as scholars suggest? This helpful new book offers a brief introduction to the question of biblical authority, using essays by sixteen scholars who use the Bible as the word of God in their own religious tradition and scholarship. After William Brown introduces the basic issues of biblical authority, each scholar presents a different, but sympathetic, view from his or her own perspec...
Biblical criticism faces increasing hostility on two fronts: from biblical conservatives, who claim it is inherently positivistic and religiously skeptical, and from postmodernists, who see it as driven by the falsities of objectivity and neutrality. In this magisterial overview of the key factors and developments in biblical studies, John Barton demonstrates that these evaluations of biblical criticism fail to do justice to the work that has been done by critical scholars over many ...
In this introductory textbook, some of the most widely respected scholars in the field introduce students to the methods, issues, and theoretical frameworks central to feminist biblical interpretation. In highly accessible essays, the book covers the history, achievements, and cutting-edge questions in the area of gender and biblical scholarship, including violence and the Bible, female biblical God imagery, and sexuality. The contributors--women and men--are feminist, womanist, a...
Probing into numerous questions about gender and sexuality, Dale Martin delves into the biblical texts anew and unearths surprising findings. Avoiding preconceptions about ancient sexuality, he explores the ethics of desire and marriage and pays careful attention to the original meanings of words, especially those used as evidence of Paul's opposition to homosexuality. For example, after a remarkably faithful reading of the scriptural texts, Martin concludes that our contemporary ob...
Exploring the challenges that both the churched and the unchurched have faced regarding giving and receiving the word of God, Bob Ekblad encourages us all to learn to read the Bible together as a whole. In this compelling book, he reflects on how Christians have often found it difficult to proclaim God's good news to every realm of society, while those who have needed it most have frequently deemed themselves unworthy due to social circumstances or sinfulness. In Reading the Bible wi...
Hermeneutics defines the rules used to search out the meaning of Scripture. Throughout church history, interpreters have approached biblical interpretation in different ways, using different tools and methods. This book conveniently and accessibly surveys major biblical interpreters and approaches to hermeneutics from the patristic period to the present days. It provides a theoretical basis for understanding the processes of hermeneutics in different faith traditions.
Are Paul's letters undergirded and informed by key narratives, and does a heightened awareness of those narratives help us to gain a richer and more rounded understanding of Paul's theology? The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed an increasing interest in the narrative features of Paul's thought. A variety of studies since that period have advanced "story" as an integral and generative ingredient in Paul's theological formulations. In this book, a team of leading Pa...
Challen ging the traditional meaning of Scripture is not easy, even in the face of issues that call into question those traditional interpretations. In these reflections, Walter Brueggemann says that the Bible, as the live word of the living God, will not submit to the accounts we prefer to give it. The Bible's inherent, central evangelical proclamation has greater and more permanent authority than our inescapably provisional interpretations. William Placher notes that taking the B...
Building on the belief that the task of exegesis is to understand the divine-human intention locked within the biblical text, Gordon Fee provides a lucid step-by-step analysis of exegetical procedures that has made New Testament Exegesis a standard textbook for nearly two decades. Now more than ever, with an updated, newly integrated bibliography and an appendix directly addressing reader-response criticism, this essential, classic guide will assist students, scholars, and clergy in...
A companion to Reading Biblical Narrative, this volume provides an authoritative introduction and overview to biblical poetry. Fokkelman describes in step-by-step fashion how the poets produced their poetry. Full of examples, Reading Biblical Poetry makes available a holistic and integrative approach to understanding poetry found nowhere else.
All of our attempts to find the historical backgrounds to texts have led us to believe that we have "figured out" the Bible. Steering a course between modernity's obsession with historical readings and fundamentalism's compulsion for ahistorical readings, Christopher Seitz recovers a figural/typological approach to both the Old and New Testament that shapes a theological understanding of Scripture. Figured Out examines the loss of figural assumptions and models another way forward.
Emphasizing meaning as "effect" rather than merely "message," Mark Allan Powell shows how biblical texts may legitimately take on multiple meanings in a variety of contexts. The first part of the book uses examples drawn from popular literature and culture to engage in a practical way the kinds of questions that scholars bring to their study of the Bible. The second part is devoted to approaching the Gospel of Matthew as a work of literature that readers may enter--and be affected b...
Narrator, characters, action, hero, quest, plot, time and space, entrances and exits--these are the essential components of all narrative literature. This authoritative and engaging introduction to the literary features of biblical narrative and poetry will help the reader grasp the full significance of these components, allowing them to enter more perceptively into the narrative worlds created by the great writers of the Bible.
The Gospel of Mark
Author(s):O. Allen, Jr.
Read More....