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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
When Krister Stendahl's article “Biblical Theology” appeared in the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible in 1962, it caused no little consternation in some circles. He insisted that the primary intellectual task of the biblical scholar was to make a clear distinction between what the text meant in its original setting and what it means. That ran directly counter to the practical aims of the dominant interpretive schools of the day, which wanted, as Karl Barth had once said, to dissolve “the differences between then and now.” Today the distinction for which Stendahl argued so lucidly is taken for granted in most biblical scholarship, and the question is whether there can be any significant connection between “then” and “now.” New Testament studies threatens to divide into two contrary ways of reading texts. One is a rigorously historical quest, in which all the early Christian documents alike, canonical and extracanonical, are treated as sources for reconstructing the diverse and curious varieties of the early Christian movement. The other way of reading cares not at all where the texts came from or what they originally meant; by purely literary analysis it wishes to help text and reader to confront one another continually anew.
1 Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Romans (trans. Hoskyns, Edwyn C.; London:Oxford University Press, 1968) 1.Google Scholar
2 Krister Stendahl, “Biblical Theology, Contemporary,” IDB 1. 418–32; see the remarks by James Barr in his article on the same topic, IDBSup 104–11.
3 Lindbeck, George A., The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984).Google Scholar
4 See ibid., 27 n. 10.
5 Gager, John G., Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1975).Google Scholar
6 Meeks, Wayne A., The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven/London:Yale University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Aune, David E., Prophecy in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983)Google Scholar; idem, “The Social Matrix of the Apocalypse of John,” BR 26 (1981) 16–32.Google Scholar
7 A good introduction to Theissen's work is the collection of essays, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), with an important introduction by John H. Schütz.Google Scholar
8 Riches, John, Jesus and the Transformation of Judaism (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1980), and his interesting new work on the parables, so far unpublished.Google Scholar
9 Frei, Hans W., The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven/London:Yale University Press, 1974).Google Scholar
10 Wood, Charles M., The Formation of Christian Understanding: An Essay in Theological Hermeneutics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981) chap. 4. Quotations from pp. 90, 93.Google Scholar
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12 Wood, Formation, 18.
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