Scripture as Social Discourse: Social-Scientific Perspectives on Early Jewish and Christian Writings

Description

Throughout the last several decades professional biblical scholars have adapted concepts and theories from the social sciences - particularly social and cultural anthropology - in order to cast new light on ancient biblical writings, early Jewish and Christian texts that circulated with the Scriptures, and the various contexts in which these literatures were produced and first received. The present volume of essays draws much of its inspiration from that same development in the history of biblical research, while also offering insights from other, newer approaches to interpretation. The contributors to this volume explore a wide range of broadly social-scientific disciplines and discourses - cultural anthropology, sociology, archaeology, political science, the New Historicism, forced migration studies, gender studies - and provide multiple examples of the ways in which these diverse methods and theories can shed new and often fascinating light on the ancient texts. The fruit of scholarly work that is both international in flavour and truly collaborative, this volume provides fresh perspectives not only on familiar portions of Jewish and Christian Scripture but also on select passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library and previously untranslated French texts.

Jessica M. Keady is Lecturer in Biblical Studies and Gender at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK. Todd Klutz is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies and Early Christian Literature at the University of Manchester, UK. C. A. Strine is Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern History and Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Scripture as Social Discourse brings together an array of experts in the literature of the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, the New Testament and Nag Hammadi who are all committed both to the use of social-scientific perspectives and to philological precision in their investigations. The reader is treated to an exciting array of fresh ideas that will foster new thinking and applications in research into biblical and extra-biblical texts. The book is an impressive addition to the expanding library of social-scientific interpretation. * Philip Esler, University of Gloucestershire, UK * This is a landmark volume from European scholarship, on the engagement of various social-scientific methodologies in interpretation of diverse Jewish and early Christian texts (including the Dead Sea Scrolls and non-canonical Christian Gospels). Sensitivities to methodological issues within the interpretative task, coupled with close textual analysis and attention to historical/contextual dynamics, are the hallmark of all the contributions herein. * Louise Laurence, University of Exeter, UK *