A script is merely an artifact until a performer brings it to life; a text is a starting point, despite the fact that its finality suggests a destination. With works that were meant to be performed in some fashion (however generously understood “performance” may be), the dynamic relationship between performer and audience shapes and even defines their reception; such works, fully expressed, are visual, auditory, and kinetic. The written word may mediate this relationship, shaping the arc of the narrative and the words of the characters, but it is performance that gives the narrative life and the characters voices and bodies.

Jerome translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin over a decade and a half beginning in about 390 c.e. With each translation he included a preface dedicating (in most cases) the translation to a friend or patron and defending his reliance on what he called the hebraica veritas (Hebrew truth) against his many detractors. This last feature of the prefaces proved necessary because by choosing the Hebrew text of the Old Testament as his base text, Jerome directly challenged the traditional position of the Septuagint within the church. The unpopularity of this move in some circles compelled Jerome repeatedly to justify his adherence to the Hebrew text. Similarly, in his Preface to Samuel and Kings (the “Helmeted Preface” or Prologus galeatus) he famously advocated the Hebrew canon as the Christian Old Testament and relegated all other books to the apocrypha. As part of this latter category, Jerome named six books outside the Jewish canon that were finding acceptance as fully canonical in some quarters and would much later receive the label “deuterocanonical,” these books being Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. In multiple ways Jerome sought to restore the Christian Old Testament to what he considered the original Hebrew text and canon.

Does biblical criticism have anything to contribute to a theologically engaged study of Scripture? The answer implicitly provided by many scholars, both within the guild of modern biblical scholarship and outside it, is clear: The biblical critic's findings are irrelevant to constructive projects. These findings may be the product of intensive philological, comparative, and historical work, but they are no more connected to the tasks of the modern thinker than artifacts dug up by an archaeologist. Indeed (some theologically and literarily minded readers assume), biblical critics often produce work that impedes an interpreter who is oriented towards larger ideas. Those ideas, after all, emerge from textual wholes that are subtle, creative, and innovative, while biblical critics (these readers believe) have a penchant for dismembering texts or reducing them to hackneyed representatives of types of thinking or textual genres found elsewhere in the ancient Near East. As a result, not a few theologians and philosophers who attend to the Bible shun the work of biblical critics.

This paper argues that the Renaissance philosopher Lorenzo Valla's De libero arbitrio (1439) appears to anticipate Luther's De servo arbitrio (1525) on several key issues. This thesis was defended in the 1940s by the well-known Renaissance scholar Charles Trinkaus, who expressed regret over the fact that modern interpreters of Valla's dialogue had “failed to see its connection with the Reformation.” As we shall see further on, however, Trinkaus's position does not seem to have had much impact on the subsequent literature.

Like so much of early Jewish literature, the strange Dead Sea scroll known as the Copper Scroll (3Q15) remains suspended somewhere between reality and fantasy. Even before scholars had fully unrolled its copper plates in 1956, they were able to discern that it recorded a list of treasures, but there soon broke out a dispute over whether this treasure was real or not. Some scholars felt that the treasure was too large to be real and that it was a figment of its author's imagination. They sought the origins of the scroll in ancient Jewish legend. Others believed the treasure to be quite plausible, probably connected to the Temple in some way. The scroll itself, however, revealed nothing that might settle the issue in one direction or the other. In what follows, I wish to explore a way beyond this impasse, not resolving whether the treasure was real or not, but suggesting how it could be both at the same time. Such a claim will seem contradictory, but it is my hope over the course of this essay not just to establish the possibility of such a position but to demonstrate that such a reading is actually more consistent with the evidence we have than any reading that imposes an either/or choice between reading the treasure as fictional or genuine.

Commentators have long noted that God's commandment to Noah to bring all animals onto the ark exists in two intertwined versions in the biblical text. In the first version, Noah is told to bring two of every species: “And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female” (Gen 6:19 nrsv). In the second version, however, the animal kingdom is divided into pure and impure species: “Take with you seven pairs of all pure animals, the male and its mate; and a pair of the animals that are not pure, the male and its mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth” (Gen 7:2–3). Noah then sacrifices some of the pure animals and birds after the flood (Gen 8:20).

Writing a biography challenges us in fundamental ways as scholars of religion, as historians, and as human beings. We are forced to reckon with the implicit and explicit theological commitments of religious persons, the ways they inhabited the world, the sometimes “strange country” that is the past, and the varied ways in which our subjects took for granted things by which we find ourselves and our age so troubled. While we may eschew “taking sides” in our attempts to be good scholars and under the noble goal of not wanting simplistically and reflexively to impose our contemporary moral judgments upon figures from the past, we cannot avoid discussing the moral choices historical actors made, assessing their prominence in their time, their influence on their broader surroundings, and their legacy beyond their times. All of these factors have great bearing on how we narrate the lives of historical figures and how we represent them in the present. James Baldwin's impassioned claim that it is with “great pain and terror [that] one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one's point of view” might sound a bit overly deterministic, but it is worth remembering when thinking self-consciously about how we critically assess and evaluate those about whom we write. Grant Wacker's new biography of Billy Graham, America's Pastor, invites the reader along to grasp more fully what this looks like as Wacker, a self-described “partisan of the same evangelical tradition Graham represented,” masterfully evokes and unfolds Graham as a shaper of public consciousness and a spokesperson for millions of “ordinary Americans.” This work possesses the virtues of the careful and considered reflections of a seasoned historian's analysis of the life of a famous religious leader who is deeply admired by many Americans. It is about the closest we will get to a full appreciation of Graham the man and Graham the icon.