A Brief (Meta)Commentary on Biblical Commentary

Scottish Journal of Theology, 1997

The Bible and Critical Theory, 2006

Derrida and Religion. However, as the title suggests, the chapters that constitute Derrida's Bible are less about religion than about biblical text(s). These chapters are well served by Sherwood's introduction, which, with admirable clarity and good humour, expands on the concerns of their authors. These concerns are richly articulated in close, questioning and in some cases, I would suggest, potentially world changing readings of moments in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures that haunt and are interpretively haunted by (the binary logic of) western consciousness. The readings are facilitated by the late Jacques Derrida's meditations on language, writing, letters, the human and the role of death in the human experience, as well as on ethics, responsibility, Marxism and the 'Bible-as-confronted-by-biblical', i.e., as capable of disrupting from within its theologically and philosophically ascribed Truths (2). Sherwood writes, '[F]aithfulness-rupture could be taken as the linking theme of… this collection' (3). Eighteen chapters follow the introduction, subsumed under and / but often exceeding seven section headings. These are 'beginnings'; 'writing, positing, erasing'; 'specters and messiahs'; 'boundaries / hyphens/identity-markers'; 'responsibilities, secrets, gifts'; 'endings'; and 'postscripts'. The faithfulness-rupture theme is introduced early in Lee Danes' Chapter One. Here Danes argues that in keeping with what he, like Derrida, sees as a Hebrew biblical tradition that establishes origins and hence original authority in 'negation and reconstitution', or, the 'repetition of absolute beginning', the Gospel of Mark locates the authority of Jesus in a gap. This gap is a 'secret' that Danes' close reading discovers in the tension between Jesus' negated paternal Jewish genealogy and his birth from the divine impregnation of a human, virgin woman (26).

Although the doctrine of scripture is central to systematic theology, one aspect of Christian scripture is rarely engaged, namely, the ongoing presence of textual variants. And although the reconstruction of the earliest form of Christian scripture is the primary object of textual criticism, text critics have rarely given a theological rationale for their discipline. Across the disciplinary divide, this essay attempts a rapprochement. For systematic theology, the essay underscores the challenges of the variable, fluid text that is Christian scripture. For textual criticism, it calls attention to two useful theological concepts and retrieves the bivalent reading strategies of two premodern scholars, Origen and Augustine, who artfully blended theology and nascent textual criticism.

Religio, 2001

The text gives a basic overview of existing and forthcoming critical and other editions of the Hebrew Bible. Before introducing them, it goes through the basic issues of the Urtext and continuous textual transmission. The editions that are reviewed include the BHS and BHQ, as well as The Hebrew Bible University Project, The Oxford Hebrew Bible, The Qumran Bible, and The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible. The study concludes with questions reaching beyond textual criticism and related perspectives on textual criticism itself.

Theology Today, 1995

Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 3 (2014), pp. 392-423

This paper addresses the religious notion of “textualism” – the formalistic assumption that a text is meaningful only when it is understood in itself and solely from itself. In the present paper, I will implicitly refer to this legal notion of “textualism” but I will be more generic with respect to the interpretation of the text and more specific with respect of the nature of the text itself. On the one hand, I will refer to “textualism” as to the hermeneutical assumption that the meaning of a text is inherently autonomous and does not require extra-textual sources; on the other hand, I will specifically refer here to religious texts and assume that they shall not be understood outside from their inherent cultural perimeter.