What are They Saying about the Bible?

“What are they saying about…?” is the leading question for an older series of books that introduced readers and students (and those who didn’t have time to read all the major books and scholars) to a discipline. Reliable summaries of scholarship are a gold mine for the student, but no better gold mine is deeper than what I mention today:

Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, fashion-designers of the journal Currents in Biblical Research (and which I co-edited with Alan for a decade or so), have now co-edited a book that introduces readers to what was said about the Bible during the Enlightenment and the 19th Century: A History of Biblical Interpretation: 3: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century.

Alongside this book are volumes 1 and 2:

1: The Ancient Period.

2: The Medieval through the Reformation Periods.

Read one at a time and when done you’ve got a great grip on the history of interpretation. I highly recommend these volumes.

This new third volume, which I endorsed, covers:

What enlightenment means.
Historical criticism.
Spinoza
Schleiermacher
FC Baur
Strauss and Feuerbach
Textual criticism
De Wette
Graf and Wellhausen
Text and lexicography
Quest for the historical Jesus
Pietism
North American interpretation of the 19th Century

Each chp written by a specialist.