John Goldingay closes chp 9 of Israel’s Gospel (OT Theology) with this statement, a summing up insight into how First Testament writers understood history and how we might understand our own:

If this letter becomes as controversial as the letter on Monday then I’ll have to rethink my strategies!

Attending the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego isn’t the worst of gigs, but it was surely no vacation. A brief rundown and then some thoughts on the books.

In the 1980s, alongside the rise of narrative and literary studies of the Bible — which it so happens made people readers of the Bible again and not just archaeologists digging behind the texts, was the rise of the multi-disciplinary approaches to the Bible. Suddenly, people were studying the Bible from so many angles it [...]

In the 80s the methods of Gospel Criticism were pushed off the table in academic circles to make room for the surge and flowering of a bundle of disciplines that reshaped Gospels studies into texts that needed to be studied as works of literature.

Today we look at Gospel Criticism, the methods used in studies of the Gospel from the beginning of the 20th Century until the hey-day of redaction criticism in the 70s and 80s.

If you were to attend the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and either wander through the bookstalls or spend an hour or so with the book that lists sessions, times, and locations, one thing would surely strike you. As Tony LaRussa once told famed baseball writer George Will, “There’s a lot goes [...]