The Authority of Antiquity: England and the Protestant Latin Bible

Author(s):  
Bruce Gordon

This chapter provides a complex narrative of biblical translation in Protestant scholarship. It draws attention to Protestant efforts to produce a universal Latin translation as an intermediary between the original languages of Scripture and the vernacular. Despite the tendency to associate Protestantism with personal reading of Scripture, the multiple levels involved in biblical interpretation complicate any straightforward relationship between reformation, text, and individual reader. The Latin Bible translation also held the potential of unifying Protestants by becoming the basis of all vernacular translations. The attempt to harmonise Protestant theology through a single Latin translation, however, ultimately exposed deep divisions in Protestant biblical scholarship. The chapter also notes that Archbishop Cranmer not only extended hospitality to continental scholars fleeing from the restoration of Catholic worship under the Augsburg Interim, but solicited their work on the Latin Bible translation and laboured to bridge divisions between them.

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-84
Author(s):  
Dries De Crom

AbstractAlfonso de Castro (1495–1558) is known as a staunch opponent of vernacular Bible translation, who intervened on the matter at the Council of Trent. This article offers a fresh appreciation of Castro’s polemics against vernacular bibles, in light of a less well-known treatise in which Castro defends the right of the indigenous Spanish colonial population to be educated in the liberal arts and theology. It is argued that at the root of Castro’s misgivings about Bible translation is a concern for preserving traditional education as a necessary prerequisite for biblical interpretation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ntozakhe Cezula

The aim of this article is to examine Bible reading in the African context and the willingness and enthusiasm to embrace prosperity gospel in Africa. To achieve this objective, a discussion on the developments in biblical interpretation in Africa will first be presented. This will be done by examining three historical periods: colonial, independence and democratisation periods. This will be followed by an outline of migrations that have taken place from traditional religions to different versions of Christianity in different times in Africa. These migrations will be examined in connection with Bible translation. The relationship between prosperity gospel and African people in Africa will be discussed by considering the tools prosperity gospel uses to appeal to African people, namely the religio-cultural and socio-economic factors. The article will then provide its assessment of contextual reading in the prosperity gospel and a conclusion will follow.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-110
Author(s):  
Callie Callon

This afterword draws several conclusions about the implications of the essays in this special issue individually as well as discusses the merits of utilizing an interdisciplinary method more generally. The first encourages critical biblical scholarship to engage classical studies in light of the shared geographical, temporal, and cultural context of their ancient subjects. The second proposes that biblical studies embrace a fuller range of evidence by removing the unfortunate interpretative divide often separating “canonical,” “patristic,” and “apocryphal” material into different disciplinary fields.



2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald West

AbstractThis article argues that context is an important fourth factor, alongside the more familiar three, in understanding Anglicanism in (Southern) Africa. As imperialism was an important part of the early context of the Bible’s presence within Southern African Anglicanism, the bulk of the present article charts the contours of imperial Southern African Anglicanism. Having mapped this territory, the article then probes what a postcolonial analysis of Southern African Anglican biblical interpretation might look like, outlining two related components: a descriptive component and an interventionist component. The descriptive task asks how Southern African Anglicans have read the Scriptures, and the interventionist task asks how Southern African Anglicans should read the Scriptures. The former requires a careful Foucault-like ‘archaeological’ analysis and the latter a recognition of the contextually-related resources of African biblical scholarship.


1999 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Archie C.C. Lee

AbstractThe paper aims to construct a new framework for biblical studies from the context of postcolonial Hong Kong. While present biblical scholarship has largely depended on historical-critical exegesis, biblical scholars of Asia have begun to conceive a different approach to the Bible, because of not only a new context of reading, but also a radically different cultural-political location of the reader. This location, as it is now being formulated, is a reading between East and West, between the dominant interpretation and scholarship of the formerly colonial and Western cultures and the newly arising consciousness of emerging postcolonial identities in the histories and cultures of Asia. After about some 150 years of British colonial rule, the identity of being a people of Hong Kong is highly hybridised. It is a hybrid identity of being cultural Chinese and yet pragmatically British, both a strong sense of identification with China and an unexplainable fear of being national Chinese. Such location of a reader transforms one's understanding of a biblical text such as Isaiah 56-66 and sheds a new light on the meaning of the return in some of its major passages.


2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lovemore Togarasei

The entry of women into religious and theological studies has revolutionised the modus operandi of these disciplines. Especially with the formation of the Circle of Concerned Women Theologians, the study of these disciplines has never been the same. In this article, an attempt is made to consider the legacy of women theologians in the area of biblical interpretation. Specifically, the article looks at how members of the Circle have interpreted the Bible in their quest for a theology that responds to African women�s experiences. The article discusses Circle biblical scholars� methods of interpreting the Bible, what they have managed to achieve, as well as pointing out areas that still call for attention. It concludes that Circle biblical scholars, like all African Biblical Interpretation, are engaged scholars who serve both the need for intellectual growth as well as solving the pressing needs of their societies.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article primarily focuses on how members of the Circle of Concerned Women Theologians have interpreted the Bible in their quest for justice. It therefore engages several disciplines: biblical interpretation, theology, gender, politics, health, and so on.Keywords: African Biblical interpretation; Women theologians; Bible; legacy;engaged Biblical Scholarship


Scriptura ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Louis Jonker

Intercultural biblical hermeneutics is a fairly recent development in biblical scholarship in general. It emphasises that biblical interpretation almost always takes place in contexts where an array of cultural values and beliefs determine the outcome of the interpretative process. Although this branch of biblical hermeneutics emerged from the need to reflect theoretically on how Christians from different socio-cultural and socio-economic contexts engage the biblical texts, and one another on account of those texts, this approach may also be widened to include the interpretation of the Bible in non-Christian contexts (including the contexts of other religions and secular contexts) or even to engage in discourse on the interpretation of authoritative texts of different traditions (such as the Qur’an in Islam, in addition to the Tenakh of Judaism, and the Old and New Testament of Christianity). In research on intercultural biblical hermeneutics, it has been noticed that intercultural interpretation holds enormous transformative potential. My paper will examine how this could be of use in engagements between religious, secular and post-secular contexts.


2001 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 352-365
Author(s):  
A. Negrov

for an understanding of biblical interpretation within the Russian Orthodox Church. Its purpose is not to advocate pro or contra Russian biblical scholarship, but to place the emphasis on the history of biblical interpretation in the Russian Orthodox Church and on Orthodox biblical hermeneutics. Two considerations are specifically pertinent to the study of this topic. First, the history of biblical interpretation is surveyed from a sole and specific perspective - from within a· historico-dogmatic development of the Russian Orthodox Church from the Kiev period of its history (9_13th century) till the Synodal period (1721-1917). Second, it is true that once originated, the Biblical Study in Russian Orthodoxy went its own way and developed its own fundamental principles of interpretation. Although many principles correlated and corresponded with general principles of biblical interpretation, in essence they form "Russian Orthodox Hermeneutics". This paper seeks to establish an outline of the essential elements of Orthodox biblical hermeneutics as they developed in the history of interpretation.


Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson

This chapter looks at Scriptures, whose ambiguity is seen both as a difficulty to shake people out of exegetical complacency and as an inspired involution of multiple meanings on the page. These meanings are not only allegorical, mystical, or typological, but also literal, according to a widespread Catholic idea neglected by previous historians of biblical scholarship. The doctrine of multiple literal senses marked yet another battleground between the company of two armies, Protestant and Catholic—barring two or three defections—in the early seventeenth century. It encapsulated a profound distinction between two views of Scripture: the one a river to be cleansed and traced to the source, the other an ocean in which to swim, even to abandon oneself. Why, then, has this controversy been entirely ignored by scholarship? As modernity encroached, the doctrine became an embarrassment to Catholics, and in 1845 a professor of theology at Louvain, Jan-Theodor Beelen, wrote a treatise against it. But there are deeper reasons for the neglect. The history of biblical hermeneutics as written to date is more than usually Whiggish, seeking the precursors to Schleiermacher and Gadamer; the German and Lutheran backstory has therefore seemed inevitable, and from this perspective Catholic hermeneutics since Luther and Erasmus has been an irrelevance. Subsequently, the occlusion of the Catholic voice was attended by a narrowing of the possibilities of what biblical interpretation could be.


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