Poststructuralism is a convenient umbrella term for a wide range of different and differing theoretical approaches to architecture; the arts, literature, philosophy, cultural and textual studies characterized, among other things, by its dissent from the search for binary forms and its opposition to criticism and Enlightenment values. If structuralism had sought to overcome the text by the use of tightly structured analyses which forced texts to yield up all their secrets to a mathematically inscribed scrutiny, in biblical studies structural analysis quickly gave way to poststructuralist approaches to the text. A new generation of theory-driven scholars emerged after the 1960s determined to read themselves into the text and to construct reading strategies in the discipline of biblical studies which would reflect the points of view of their own reader-response approaches to the biblical text. Rejecting structuralism's obsession with discovering binary oppositions everywhere in the text, poststructuralism emphasized the instability of the signifier, especially in its deconstructive mode.

Linguistics as the 'science of language' is concerned not just with the description of individual languages in and for themselves (though these provide essential data) but with abstract and general questions that arise from language as a universal human phenomenon. The theoretical issues involved in the study of language and of the processes in the mind and in the environment which enable learning and communication have many ramifications; psychological, sociological and philosophical.

The Bible, as a library of literary works written in three original languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and translated in whole or in part into some 2,000 'receptor' languages, inevitably raises questions posed by linguistics at both the practical and the theoretical levels. Most biblical interpreters approach these questions pragmatically. They are concerned with a range of practical tasks and it is through the effort to discharge these tasks that they are most likely to encounter the underlying theoretical issues. For example, the problems involved in translation, one of the most challenging areas of linguistic theory and practice, are inescapable already in New Testament interpretation, for the version of the Hebrew Scriptures largely presupposed in the New Testament is already a translation, the Greek Septuagint from the second century BCE. And, since no-one is a native speaker of classical Hebrew, imperial Aramaic or koine Greek, the problems of translation from 'source' to 'receptor' language confront the interpreter of the Bible at every turn as the attempt is made to transpose words and content out of the original language into the idioms of the interpreter's everyday speech. Formally or informally, on paper or just in the mind, the anglophone has to convey in English what the text of the original says and it is that process which marks the definitive stage in the decision about the meaning of what is written in the ancient language.

The Bible contains two books that are usually called apocalypses: Daniel (especially chapters 2, 7-12) and Revelation. There are also several sections of books that some scholars label apocalypses; examples are Isaiah 24-7, the visions in Zechariah i-8; and the Synoptic Apocalypse (Mark 13 with parallels in Matthew 24 and Luke 21). The nature of these literary units as divine disclosures of what is destined to take place sets them off from other scriptural books and has gained for them a certain popular and scholarly fascination. Their concern with the future has led more literal readers to mine the texts for clues to when the end will be and what signs will mark its approach; modern apocalyptic groups have joined a series of predecessors in this effort. The potential dangers of a literal reading have caused some uneasiness, especially about the book of Revelation in Christian history. So much has this been the case that its place in the New Testament was denied by some already in antiquity. In recent times scholars have devoted large amounts of time to clarifying obscure points in Daniel and Revelation and to studying them in connection with other, extra-biblical works that appear to belong to the same literary category.

INTRODUCTION

As is often the case with such invitations, John Barton's request to me for a contribution to this volume represented a challenge to think seriously about how each of us was viewing the topic, and about how best to tackle it in the present context. In the original letter inviting me to submit a chapter, the editor explained that the volume would attempt to cover the principal approaches to the Bible in the modern 'critical' era. Conscious as he was of the continuation of older methods and approaches, 'whether naive in the sense of simply untouched by criticism, or anti-critical and conscientiously opposed to criticism', he was anxious that Jewish and Christian conservatism, including fundamentalist interpretations, should receive attention. Given that Christian conservatism was likely to be discussed in other chapters, he thought it would be good if the chapter I was being invited to write could be 'preponderantly Jewish in its concerns'. He was hoping for an article that not only covered the field but represented personal opinions, not just 'bland consensus'.

Hermeneutics entails critical reflection on the basis, nature and goals of reading, interpreting and understanding communicative acts and processes. This characteristically concerns the understanding of texts, especially biblical or literary texts, or those of another era or culture. However, it also includes reflection on the nature of understanding human actions, signsystems, visual data, institutions, artefacts or other aspects of life. In biblical studies it applies traditionally to the interpretation of texts, but also the interweaving of language and life both within the horizon of the text and within the horizons of traditions and the modern reader.

It remains helpful to distinguish hermeneutics as critical and theoretical reflection on these processes from the actual work of interpreting and understanding as a first-order activity. Often writers speak loosely of someone's 'hermeneutic' when they discuss only how they go about the task rather than their reasons for doing so and their reflection on what is at issue in the process. The decisive foundation of theoretical hermeneutics as a modern discipline occurred with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher over the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. All the same, scattered building blocks for modern theory emerge at regular intervals from the ancient world to the post-Reformation period up to Schleiermacher. These might be regarded as constituting the prehistory of theoretical hermeneutics, in the modern sense of the term.

Historical criticism, also known as the historical-critical method, was the dominant approach in the academic study of the Bible from the midnineteenth century until a generation ago. In the English-speaking world it is now under a cloud. There is much talk of a 'paradigm shift' away from historical methods and towards 'text-immanent' interpretation which is not concerned with the historical context and meaning of texts; it is widely felt that historical criticism is now itself of largely historical (or 'academic'!) interest (see Barton, The Future of Old Testament Study; Keck, 'Will the Historical- Critical Method Survive?'; Watson, Text, Church and World). It is still practised, however, by a large number of scholars even in the English-speaking world, and by many more in areas where German is the main language of scholarship.

What is historical criticism? Unfortunately its definition is almost as controversial as its desirability. It may be helpful to begin by identifying the features which many students of the Bible now find objectionable in the historical-critical method, before trying to refine our definition by seeing what can be said in its defence. We shall outline four features normally said to be central to historical-critical study of the Bible.

The character and contents of the Bible have shaped the ways in which it has been interpreted. They have not, however, exercised total control. The different aims and interests of its readers have also been influential, and this chapter will consider the most far-reaching of these. The terms of our title could be reversed to 'Christian theology and the Bible', indicating that the primary focus will be on the subjects who read, not the object that is read. The Bible has never of itself given birth to theology. Even its most heavily theological parts contribute to the ongoing task of Christian theology only by being interpreted in quite particular ways. Christians seek to understand their faith in part through their thoughtful engagement with the biblical texts. What they are doing needs explanation as much as the texts that they are reading. This Companion introduces to a wider audience not only the Bible but some of those who interpret it.

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, a more or less coherent account of the formation of the Pentateuch had emerged and was widely accepted by Hebrew Bible scholars. The main tenet of this newer documentary hypothesis, as it was called, was that the Pentateuch reached its present form incrementally, by way of an accumulation and editing together of sources over a period of about half a millennium, from the first century of the monarchy to around the time of Ezra in the fifth or early fourth century BC. With its emphasis on origins, sources and development, the hypothesis was a typical product of academic research in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century. A century before the appearance of Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena to the History of Israel in 1883, which laid out the documentary hypothesis in its classic form, Friedrich August Wolf published his Prolegomena to Homer which argued along much the same lines for the composite nature of the two epic poems.

Any discussion of the Bible in relation to the arts carries its own not-so-hidden agenda. As the extensive range of biblical stories in Islamic painting reminds us, not all biblical art is Christian, or even Judaeo-Christian. Just as it is impossible to speak of the Bible as a 'neutral' piece of writing free from a particular hermeneutic context, so it is impossible even to begin to speak of its artistic interpretations without realizing that these have always constituted a two-way exchange. What may look at first sight like the Bible casting a wide cultural penumbra was, in fact, a dynamic interpretative relationship through which the perception of the text was itself transformed. If the Bible helped to create a particular aesthetic, what was understood by the Bible was, equally, a creation of that aesthetic - indeed, it is my thesis here that biblical interpretation has historically followed, rather than created, aesthetic interpretation.

Paul is undoubtedly the most important Christian thinker of all time. His letters are the only Christian writings we can confidently date to the first generation of Christianity; they define the first distinctives of Christian faith as do no other New Testament documents. They reflect and document the most crucial period in Christian history - the expansion of a Jewish messianic sect into the non-Jewish world, the emergence of Christianity as a (soon to be) predominantly Gentile religion. And their theology has been a primary formative influence in most of the great theological confessions and statements of the Christian churches to the present day. Their interpretation has therefore always been at the heart of attempts to understand Christian beginnings and to reformulate Christian faith and life.

THE EXTENT OF THE PAULINE CORPUS

The initial task in the study of the Pauline Letters has traditionally been the introductory issues of authenticity, date and circumstances, and these remain basic to sound interpretation. Fortunately the areas of disagreement have been relatively few. The letters were written in the course of Paul's work as a Christian missionary. That work extended from the mid-3os AD (soon after his conversion) to the early 60s, when he was executed, according to popular tradition, in Rome. The period of the letter-writing was much briefer, covering only the last ten to fifteen years of his life. This means, among other things, that the letters come from Paul's most mature period; none of them is the work of a young Christian or inexperienced missionary; they all reflect considerable experience and developed reflection on the Christian gospel. We may not deduce from this that there is no development in Paul's thought from letter to letter; but we should be cautious about assuming that such development was inevitable.

Is there a writer in the history of English letters who more completely defines an age than John Dryden? His writing life coincides exactly with the second half of the seventeenth century: he was eighteen in 1649 when he published his first poem; his last work was finished a few weeks before his death in May 1700. Between the elegy for Lord Hastings and The Secular Masque, Dryden created what we have come to know as Restoration literature. He wrote in every mode and genre that thrived in these years; in most cases, Dryden's contributions outgo all rivals. The creation of the poetry and drama, the translations and literary criticism, what we have come to know as The Works of John Dryden, is an incomparable achievement from a writer whose early verse gave little indication of incomparability and whose career was variously driven by partisanship and faction, by professional alliance and literary rivalry, and by the incursion of something like a modern commercial market into the aristocratic precincts of literary patronage.

A poor Northern English gentlewoman, Mary Astell was born in 1666 of a mother from an old Newcastle Catholic gentry family, and of a father who had barely completed his apprenticeship with the company of Hostman of Newcastle upon Tyne, before he died leaving the family debt-ridden when Mary was twelve. With customary spiritedness Mary Astell moved to London when she was twenty, making her literary debut by presenting to the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, a collection of her girlhood poems, dedicated to him, accompanied by a request for financial assistance. Whether or not the Archbishop, who numbered among the prominent members of the clergy who had refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary, became Astell's patron in fact, we do not know. But Astell entered a circle of High Church prelates and intellectual and aristocratic women, including Lady Anne Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Lady Catherine Jones. To Lady Catherine Jones Astell dedicated the Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695) and her magnum opus, The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church (1705).

In what respects is Andrew Marvell's “Horatian Ode” an Horatian ode? Marvell and his contemporaries gathered their ideas of Horace and of Horatian odes from a variety of sources. They would have read the Latin text of Horace's poetry in editions which surrounded it with glosses, notes, parallel passages, and perhaps a prose paraphrase; they would have practiced translating and imitating Horace's poetry at school; they would have read English translations and imitations of Horace by writers such as Jonson or Milton. Horace, therefore, was already a complex text for readers of Marvell's poem, a text which they fashioned for themselves out of all these interpretative materials. Horace's odes spoke of private and domestic experiences - love and desire, both homosexual and heterosexual; friendship and the pleasures of conviviality; the passage of time and the poignant delight which may attend an awareness of life's passing.

The personal lyric, conceived as the expression of a highly individualized voice and subjective feeling, was not a major form between the early seventeenth-century flowering of the “metaphysical” lyric and the lyric resurgence of the late eighteenth century and Romanticism. From 1650 to 1740, England witnessed great social and political change, from the successive upheavals and reactions of the Interregnum, Restoration, and Glorious Revolution to the stabilizing consolidation of Whig constitutionalism, oligarchy, and bureaucracy. Profound economic and cultural transformations also occurred: a financial revolution, a growing commercial empire, and the increasing hegemony of a middle-class culture commercial in background and “polite” in aspiration. Traditional martial values (still crucial for England's foreign relations but tarnished by associations with civil war) clashed with aristocratic libertinism and middle-class ideals of civility. Men and women renegotiated their relations within the context of an increasingly prosperous, pacific, “feminized” domestic culture. Aggressively modern scientific and philosophical trends challenged the classics' still potent authority.