The aura surrounding Galileo as founder of modern science disposes many of those writing about him to start in medias res with an account of his discoveries with the telescope, or with his dialogues on the world systems and the two new sciences, or with the trial and the tragic events surrounding it. Frequently implicit in such beginnings is the attitude that Galileo had no forebears and stands apart from history, this despite the fact that he was forty-six years of age when he wrote his Sidereus Nuncius and then in his late sixties and early seventies when he composed his two other masterpieces.

Attempts have recently been made by scholars to dispel this myth by giving closer scrutiny to the historical record – closer, that is, than one gets from perusing the National Edition of Galileo's works. This was a masterful collection, but begun as it was in the last decade of the nineteenth century and completed in the first decade of the twentieth, it perforce could not benefit from the historiographical techniques developed in our century. During the past twenty years, in particular, much research has been done on Galileo's manuscripts, and it sheds unexpected light on what has come to be known as Galileo's "early period" – that covering the first forty-five years of his life.

Galileo died on January 8, 1642, in the unpleasant predicament of a man who had been condemned and then forced to abjure, as “vehemently suspected of heresy.” His will indicated that his remains should be placed beside those of his father Vincenzo and of his ancestors, in the Basilica of Santa Croce, where the family tomb can still be seen.

The death of such a remarkable person was not marked by solemn ceremonies or orations attesting either to his virtues as a man or to his sensational discoveries as a scientist and astronomer. On the day after his death, Galileo's body was removed to the Basilica of Santa Croce without the slightest hint of pomp or ceremony, accompanied by his son Vincenzo, by the Curate of S. Matteo in Arcetri, by Vincenzo Viviani, by Evangelista Torricelli, and by a few members of his family. The Grand Duke remained in Pisa, and no other important igures of Florentine public life made an appearance.

Galileo's researches in astronomy were more than original, they were unprecedented. He was not an astronomer in the sense of Copernicus, Tycho, and Kepler, making observations, devising models, and deriving parameters in order to compute tables and ephemerides for finding the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets. Nor did he search for the physical principles governing the motions of the heavens as Kepler and later Newton did. Most of his work was concerned with two issues, the refutation of the Aristotelian and the defense of the Copernican “System of the World”, and his originality lies not so much in what he found as in how he interpreted his discoveries. Even his discoveries with the telescope, as interesting as they are in themselves - and it is hard to think of more surprising discoveries in the entire history of science - are of still greater interest for the conclusions that he drew from them, for nearly all of them could be turned to the criticism of Aristotle and the defense of Copernicus, and in his Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the World that is just what Galileo did. Our concern here, however, is with his initial discoveries and his initial interpretations, which, although not as far-reaching as the conclusions he reached in the Dialogue, were upsetting enough to anyone who was not already a friend of Copernicus.

In his theological writings, Galileo maintained what might be called the “independence principle” – science and religion belong to, and are competent on, two distinct and different domains: the factual domain of natural phenomena and the domain of faith of supernatural phenomena. As he put it, a distinction is to be drawn between “purely physical propositions which are matters of faith [and] supernatural propositions which are articles of faith.” Accordingly, Galileo held the view that all factual statements about natural phenomena contained in the Scriptures have no value for salvation and, therefore, can be revised or dismissed on scientific grounds.

Bellarmine adopted a different principle, which can be called the "limitation principle." According to it, certain factual statements contained in the Scriptures are necessary for their salvation value and, therefore, cannot be revised in the light of any contrary scientific theories. This has the consequence that, if such theories are advanced, they cannot be held to be true and, at the most, have to be treated as "hypotheses," in the technical sense of devices for calculating or systematizing phenomena, deprived of truth and epistemic value.

In this essay, I will examine the relationship between Galileo's physics and his theology, focusing primarily on the latter. It is not my intention to minimize his commitment to physics - quite the contrary. But Galileo's interest in theology might seem remote given the secular status held by science today and, as a result, it would be tempting to dismiss theology as a textual relic corresponding to a fideistic atavism that is no longer present. However, it is precisely this secular perception of history that forces us to consider cultural relics of this sort.

Several recent studies of Galileo have tended to present his religious beliefs in one of two ways: as reflecting "genuine piety and devotion to the Church" or else as grounded in Baroque-court rhetoric and compliance with the Church's position. Otherwise, because of his Copernican campaign and trial, Galileo has also been included in the group of other theologically minded scientists such as Descartes, Boyle, and Newton – not to mention Pascal or Leibniz. Compared to these figures, Galileo's theological concerns appear as self-defense in the struggle between Copernican astronomy and biblical exegesis and completely separate from his physics.

Galileo's conflict with the Roman Catholic Church has long held a very special fascination. The prime reason for this, of course, is that the Galileo affair has come to be seen as the paradigm case of the troubled interaction between science and religion.

Another reason is the sheer dramatic power of the events involved, which continue to attract the attention of the scholar, the novelist, and the playwright. Images easily multiply of the flawed tragic hero, of the struggle for intellectual freedom, of the unprotected individual pitted against a powerful institution committed to its selfpreservation, and of plots and subplots and counterplots worthy of the best mystery writer.

At yet another level, the Galileo case has, unfortunately, long provided many with an ideal arena for ideological posturing for and against both the scientific and the religious world views.

Galileo is one of the larger than life heroes of history. This status was conferred during his lifetime and grew with each succeeding century. Not only was he the hero of the Scientific Revolution, but after his troubles with the Catholic Church he became the hero of science. Today, only the names of Newton and Einstein rival that of Galileo in popularity and imagination. But yet we must ask, to what is his popularity due? What did Galileo actually do that made his image so great and so long-standing?

Certainly, he was impressive with his telescope. The discoveries, in 1609-1610, of the mountains on the Moon, the numerous stars in the Milky Way, and, of course, the four satellites of Jupiter (which he called the Medician stars) caught the imagination of the time. His book was much remarked about, but its first edition was limited to 550 copies, and the later Frankfurt edition printing probably included not more than 1,000 or so. Mario Biagioli has commented that Galileo's control of the distribution of his book was impressive, making sure it got to the right important people. Clearly, too, the invocation of the name of the Medici caused it to be looked at in court circles. Surely, too, books were even more shared and passed around then than in our own time, and, even more, the oral tradition of fame and status was still alive and accounted for a good bit of his popularity. Still, it is hard to fathom through the distance of centuries what caused such a ready reception of Galileo and his work.

The biblical books to be considered in this chapter are Joshua, Judges and Ruth; 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings and 1-2 Chronicles; Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther. Together they tell the story of Israel from the point at which the people entered Canaan down to the Persian period, when some Jews had returned to their homeland and others still remained in foreign lands. The state of current research on these books may perhaps best be summarized in the following way. There is a lively debate among interpreters as to whether they are indeed best considered as 'historical books' at all, and in which sense they might be best considered so. There is a further debate about the proper or primary task of interpreters in relation to these books. In what follows we shall join these two debates and reflect upon the various issues that arise from them. In this way we shall form a rounded, if somewhat generalized, view of the ways in which our literature is currently being approached.

Any critical interpretation of the poetic books of the Hebrew Bible is dependent, or certainly should be dependent, on an understanding of the distinctive character of biblical poetry. On this question there has been less of a consensus than one might have expected at this late date in modern biblical studies. Broadly speaking, I would say that the investigation of biblical poetry since the beginning of the 1980s has made some real if uneven advances, against an unfortunately persistent background of confusions, misperceptions and aridly academic overcomplications.

The notion that biblical poetry is organized on a parallelism of meaning and structures between the two - sometimes three - parts of a line was first systematically articulated by Robert Lowth in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, originally published in Latin in 1753. Though the first two of his three categories of parallelism - synonymous and antithetical - are demonstrably operative in thousands of lines of biblical verse, his third category, 'synthetic parallelism', would come to seem in the eyes of many critics no parallelism at all, leading to some uneasiness with the theory as a whole. In the course of time, scholars would propose the most intricate varieties of sub-categories of parallelism in order to save the system, and, in the opposite direction, especially beginning in the 1970s, counter-systems would be put forth that relegated parallelism to a purely secondary role. Thus, syllable-count, sentence-types, syntax, musical quantity, thought-unit were each in turn promoted by various scholars as being the real organizing principle of biblical poetry. None of these theories has won general acceptance, and each, I believe, can be shown to be compromised by either internal contradictions or some basic misunderstanding of how poetry works.

It is often suggested that 'political readings' of Scripture are a recent invention, more especially of Marxist or leftist thought. That Scripture did not bear on human life together, on the 'polis', would however have sounded very strange to most Christians before the end of the eighteenth century, as a moment's reflection on the political involvement of the Byzantine and medieval Church will show. Martin Luther's two-kingdom doctrine, which taught that the Church and the state occupied two quite different spheres of responsibility, and which was very much a response to his own political situation, paved the way for the privatization of religion, especially in pietism. Luther himself, however, did not hesitate to draw the most brutal political consequences from Scripture. Where sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestantism read the whole Bible as the word of God, pietism focused on the New Testament, and the soul's relation to Jesus. The political context of the Old Testament was thereby lost to view. By 1790, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke is telling us that politics and the pulpit 'have little agreement', a foretaste of countless angry protests when church leaders have criticized political policies.

Critical study of the Gospels has sought the human Jesus behind the mythic and theological symbols of Christianity. Analysis of material common to Matthew, Mark and Luke and of sayings common to Matthew and Luke (designated 'Q', German Quelle, 'source') has provided an explanation of the sources of the synoptics (Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke (I-IX), pp. 63-106). Mark was the earliest narrative account of Jesus. References to war in Judea (Mark 13:5-8, 14-19) as well as to persecution (8:34-8; 13:9-13) suggested that it was written during Nero's persecution of Christians in Rome or the Jewish revolt in Judea (c. 66-70 CE; see Donahue, 'Windows and Mirrors'). Independently of each other, Matthew and Luke expanded Mark. Their sayings material (Q) came to each evangelist in different forms (cf. Matthew 5:3-10 and Luke 6:20-6; see Betz, The Sermon on the Mount, pp. 22-44,105-10)- Matthew and Luke sometimes substituted the Q version of an episode for Mark's (cf. Mark 1:12-13; Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13). In other cases, oral tradition underlies the agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark (e.g. Mark 14:65; Matthew 26:68; Luke 22:64).

The quest for the social world of the Bible has been one of the major goals of biblical scholarship since the early nineteenth century. Travellers' reports from the Middle East of a culture radically different from that of the West; along with the increasing excitement of reports in the national press of archaeological discoveries in Palestine; captivated audiences across Europe and the USA. Such developments offered the prospect of revealing the world from which the Bible had emerged in the ancient past. Monumental works such as George Adam Smith's historical geography of Palestine brought alive an ancient landscape on which the biblical events were played out. At the same time; biblical scholars were trying to reconstruct the history and social contexts out of which the Bible arose in order to understand a foundational text for Western culture. The critical methods which emerged were designed to date and locate the biblical texts, or their constituent parts; in specific historical contexts in order to reveal their meaning.

'It might be interesting to speculate upon the probable length of a “depatriarchalized Bible”. Perhaps there would be enough salvageable material to comprise an interesting pamphlet.' Thus Mary Daly in 1973, sharply engaged with feminist interpretation in its early stages. Roughly twenty-five years later, feminist interpretation flourishes whether inside or outside the academic community where there are feminists qualified and interested enough to engage in it, with some of it undertaken by Jewish and Christian writers together, focusing on women and the gender symbolism of the Hebrew Bible. This chapter, however, engages with feminist Christian interpretation of the Bible as a whole (with some reference to the Apocrypha). Feminist interpretation is here understood as presupposing that the Bible is still read and heard and preached as an authoritative text in communities of belief and worship. And 'authoritative' here means that by using reason, imagination, historical insight, reflection on human experience and whatever other resources we can muster, the Bible somehow mediates to us a God who enables human beings to be most fully themselves. And there's the rub, for feminists at least. Mary Daly's sharp comment has its point.

Throughout the history of biblical interpretation, readers have understood the prophetic books in a variety of different ways and have employed a variety of different tools to interpret them. This plurality of understandings and interpretations has been due largely to the fact that the books themselves are highly diverse and complex. Although all of them except Jonah are primarily collections of prophetic oracles interspersed with a few narratives about their prophetic authors, each book has a distinctive literary style and history and reflects its own particular set of concerns. This diversity has historically provided readers with support for a wide range of interpretative options and has caused many contemporary biblical scholars to exhibit extreme reluctance to generalize about how the prophetic books are to be understood. Even when such generalizations are made, there is little scholarly agreement about the nature and interests of the prophetic books or about the proper way to interpret them. Contemporary scholarship on this literature provides examples of most of the approaches traditionally taken by general readers and then augments these approaches with a number of others that have not yet reached the non-specialist.

INTRODUCTION

Of all the writings of the Bible none is more obviously an integrated whole than the Gospel of John. The first-time reader lionized by reader-response critics is sure to find it, as David Friedrich Strauss famously did, a 'seamless garment'. Its themes (judgement, mission, revelation, truth) and symbols (light, water, bread, healing, life) are skilfully interwoven into the familiar gospel story of Jesus' brief career as a teacher and wonder-worker, with its dramatic ending of death and resurrection. In this, the fourth version of the story, the parts are more than usually representative of the whole. Besides the sustained self-allusiveness consequential upon the evangelist's interpenetrative technique, the reason for this is that once under way the story is dominated throughout by the powerful presence of Jesus, who keeps introducing fresh variations on the single theme of life-giving revelation. This is what justifies the synecdochic approach of the present chapter. In John 4 the Samaritan woman, passing from incredulity to belief, invites a similar response from the readers of the Gospel. Those acquainted with the whole Gospel know that the same invitation is issued on almost every page: any episode of comparable length could be used, as this one is here, to illustrate models of interpretation.

The non-Pauline Letters - what do we mean by that description? The negative suggests that we are dealing with somewhat marginalized texts compared with Paul. Many of our texts have indeed become cinderellas, though one comes from a theologian worthy to rank alongside Paul and 'John'; and the rest are increasingly seen as intriguing, for they enable access to the development of diverse traditions within early Christianity. Comparing and contrasting these makes study of these apparent 'oddments' rewarding. For this reason we shall keep them all in play alongside one another. But first to identify them.

Associated with the Pauline tradition, but definitely to be distinguished from Paul's work, is the Epistle to the Hebrews. Even if ascribed to Paul in the process of canonization, this work does not bear his name, and the Church of the third century CE knew not whence it came: one suggested Barnabas (Tertullian), one supposed Paul had written it in Hebrew and Luke translated it (Clement of Alexandria), one knew that Clement of Rome had been suggested but concluded that only God knows the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Origen).

The twentieth century has seen a growing fascination with the Bible 'as literature', with an accompanying persistent sense of theological unease, apart from the obvious recognition that it is a collection of literary' texts having, in common with other literature, narratives, poems, epistles and so on. In 1935 T. S. Eliot suggested that when the Bible is discussed as 'literature' then its 'literary' influence is at an end, for it is far more than that. For T. R. Henn more recently, however, the phrase 'the Bible as literature' suggests a manner of approach to the reading of Scripture, and therefore also a means of assessment, one lightened of theology. As C. S. Lewis earlier wrote of the Authorized Version, 'it is very generally implied that those who have rejected its theological pretensions nevertheless continue to enjoy it as a treasurehouse of English prose'.