Journal of the Bible and its Reception
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | De Gruyter (DE) |
| ISSN | 2329-440X / 2329-4434 |
| Wikidata | Q96724148 |
| OpenAlex | S4210184490 |
| MAG | 4210184490 |
| Website | http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jbr |
| Total publications | 80 |
| Coverage period | 2014 - 2026 |
| Country | DE |
| Language | EN |
| Impact factor | 0.066 |
This journal focuses on biblical studies and the reception history of the Bible. While religious studies is a related area, its emphasis appears to be on textual and historical analysis rather than the ethnographic or sociological study of religion
American Constitutional Law and Politics · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Byzantine Studies and History · Christian Theology and Mission · Classical Antiquity Studies · Development, Ethics, and Society · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies
Oh, How the Philosophers Have Fallen! Origen and Augustine on the Referent of Rom 1
To what extent was Paul familiar with competing philosophical alternatives? And to what extent were his writings offered as a response to and critique of such competitors? Although contemporary biblical scholars have called for a reexamination of the apostle Paul within his broader philosophical context, their efforts have differed widely in their methods of analysis and assessments of the evidence. By contrast, when questions about Paul’s philos…
Legislating the Lord’s Day
This essay explores the reception of the biblical Sabbath in early New England. It challenges the revisionist historiography of Puritan Sabbatarianism by identifying a unique emphasis on judicial enforcement through civil law. Despite some elements of continuity between medieval and early modern Sabbatarianism, as evidenced by documents such as the pseudepigraphic “Sunday Letter,” Puritan doctrines of the Sabbath drastically departed from earlier…
Church Fathers and Mother Hen
In his lament over Jerusalem, Jesus compares himself to a chicken: “How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings! But you were unwilling.” (Matt 23:37/Luke 13:34). Early church commentators drew on this text in a number of ways. Some remove the motif of failure and have Christ gather Christian believers instead of Jews. Others even have God explicitly rejecting the Jews because of their supp…
Early Christian Interpretations of Joshua 5
Josh 5:13–14 describes Joshua seeing and worshipping a man who calls himself “the captain of the army of the Lord.” The reception of this biblical passage among early Christian authors has received little attention due to a greater focus on other Old Testament theophanies. This article, therefore, investigates the theological and exegetical ideas that emerge in the explanations put forward by Greek- and Latin-speaking Christians. Beginning with t…
Denigration of the Shulamite Bride in Origen’s and Bernard of Clairvaux’s Commentary on Song of Songs 1
The self-description of the Shulamite bride in Song 1:5-6, “black but beautiful,” enjoys enduring attention in Christian allegorical interpretation. The exegetical challenges which accompany translation of the conjunction “but,” have drawn much ink through the history of reception. The present-day task of interpretation is further troubled where one attempts to navigate both the premodern and contemporary sociocultural implications of the term “b…
Disobediently Biblical
The biblical figure of Cain has inspired a long and complex history of reception. While his negative portrayal has been perpetuated and intensified over the centuries, a modern trend has emerged that celebrates Cain – the first murderer in biblical history – as a superior and heroic figure. This portrayal frames his rebellion against God as emblematic of the modern struggle with tradition and religion. In his novel Cain (2009), Portuguese writer …
The Imprecatory Psalms and “Modern Sensibilities”
In the 20th-century, a number of Christian denominations removed imprecatory psalms from their liturgies. These decisions were often informed by contemporary biblical scholarship, which often treated these psalms as relics of an archaic and sub-Christian worldview. More recently, many biblical scholars have tried to rehabilitate the imprecatory psalms. These rehabilitations often assert, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that it is m…
Canonizing Paul’s Epistle to the Laodiceans Paratextual Negotiations of Authorship and Authority in the Latin Bible
Paul’s Epistle to the Laodiceans, says Jerome, was “rejected by everyone.” The putative authorities of early Christian history – bishops, councils, and scholars – denounced the letter as spurious. According to conventional histories of the Christian canon, therefore, the pseudonymous Laodiceans was almost always, already excluded. But the manuscripts of the Latin Bible tell a different story. Laodiceans is unique among Christian apocrypha for its…
Tim 4
Almost all contemporary commentaries claim that in 1 Timothy 4:13 Paul urges Timothy to read from Scripture and teach during worship services. This essay traces how this interpretation arose in the early modern period and became established in the 19th century. From antiquity to the Reformation, however, 1 Tim 4:13 was understood without exception to mean that Paul was urging Timothy to read Scripture for himself and to teach on that basis. This …
Purposeful Play
Ludus Danielis is a famous piece of medieval drama that was composed in the late twelfth century by the clerics and students connected to the Beauvais Cathedral in northern France and committed to writing in the early thirteenth century. The musical drama retells the story of Daniel in the courts of Balthasar and Darius, including his experience in the lion’s den (Dan 5–6). The long-standing Christian tradition of interpreting Daniel as a prophet…
What is Qohelet’s Problem
This essay distinguishes various interpretations of Ecclesiastes using heuristic categories that effectively map their divergent readings on the basis of how they primarily construe the central problem posed by the book. We suggest that there are roughly five broad conceptual models used by readers to answer the question, “What is Qohelet’s problem?” namely: as an epistemological, theological/ethical, political/economic, existential, and/or ontol…
Jean de Gaigny and the First Early Modern Discovery of Marius Victorinus’s Commentary on Galatians
Scholars have maintained that the first early modern discovery of Marius Victorinus’s Pauline commentaries took place somewhere around 1630. That year, Jacques Sirmond announced his discovery of various commentaries on the Pauline corpus attributed to Victorinus (ca. 280/290–365), the elderly scholar and convert to Christianity mentioned by Augustine in his Confessions . This study, however, invites scholars to go beyond the traditional view abou…
Reception, Rediscovery, and Reimagination
The reception of Luke 16:19–31 is ancient and variegated. It is ancient in that commentary for this pericope appears as early as the patristic era – mostly in the form of homilies – and variegated in that its interpretation has been hotly debated throughout church history. One recurring point of departure is the question of genre. Currently, most scholars assume the label “parable” despite the complex debate surrounding this slippery term. Howeve…
Early Nineteenth-Century Biblical Scholarship and the Production of The Book of Mormon
Scholars have long written about the development of biblical criticism and its reception in elite circles in the transatlantic world of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. This has caused us to assume that non-elites were unaware of the developments in biblical studies. Anglophone readers of the Bible were increasingly accepting the work of biblical scholars and, as Paul Gutjahr has shown, came to view their copies of the Bible as f…
Obscuring New Testament Slavery
Translations of the New Testament have historically rendered the word δοῦλος as servant instead of slave, even if δοῦλος is not an ambiguous term. In more recent translations, δοῦλος is increasingly, but still not consistently, translated as slave. The effect of these translations has been to obscure slavery in early Christianity and to overlook the political and colonial legacy of the Bible in legitimising (colonial) slavery. This article provid…
Resisting Wirkungsgeschichte
This article investigates the relationship between translation and reception by focusing on Bible translators as “agents of reception.” Translators exercise their agency in relation to the previous effective history ( Wirkungsgeschichte ) of the biblical texts, which they can either affirm or resist. The outcome of their work is a specific textual representation of the biblical texts, thereby guiding the way most readers receive ‘the Bible.’ In t…
A Mediatized Bible
In this article, I explore interpretations and depictions of the Hebrew Bible in Swedish daily press between 1987 and 2017. As a point of departure, I examine three debates concerning three different aspects of the Hebrew Bible (in the debates understood as the “Old Testament”): its depictions of women, God, and homosexuality. The analysis shows that the Hebrew Bible tends to be portrayed as a problem, as the origin of patriarchy, as violent, and…
Ngāti Hotu in Paradise
A group of perhaps 2,000 Māori, whose main representative is Monica Matāmua, claim that they are not Māori or Polynesian but descendants of a White race they call the Hotu. They claim that they were the first to settle in Aotearoa New Zealand, more than a thousand years before Māori, so that they are the true Indigenous inhabitants of the land. Further, they hold to a conspiracy theory that claims evidence for White Hotu has been covered up by Mā…
Biblical Drama and Politically Incorrect Ideas in the Dutch Reformation Era
Chambers of Rhetoric in Flanders, Brabant, Holland and Zeeland opened themselves up to the new religious ideas, especially in the 1530s. These were discussed among their members and the Scriptures were read and conversed upon. The results of their reflections were written down and performed in allegorical plays ( spelen van sinne ), biblical plays, refrains and songs. In this essay particular attention will be paid to how the staging of biblical …
Ruins of Empire or Tears of Joy? An Intersection of History and the Bible in Lope de Vega’s Religious Comedias
This article studies a way in which Lope de Vega used biblical theatre as a vehicle for historiographical interpretation. The article does so by situating elements from a number of Lope’s religious comedias in the context of what has recently been described as Golden Age Spain’s “aesthetic-historical culture.” The study begins with an analysis of intersections of history and the Bible in Lope’s La hermosa Ester . The second half comprises a recon…
The Biblical History Play
This article examines the shift in popularity from religious to historical and political drama from the late sixteenth century onward, particularly focusing on plays about the patriarch Joseph. The study explores how new historiographical approaches influenced the portrayal of biblical narratives, transforming them to reflect contemporary interests in politics and court life. By analyzing a selection of primarily Jesuit plays, the article demonst…
The Feathered Man
The imagery of Nebuchadnezzar’s divine affliction in Daniel 4 is as complex as it is fantastic. A variety of literary images interweave to present the king’s affliction in explicitly animalising terms. Despite this complexity, most visual depictions of the text focus on a largely similar image – that of Nebuchadnezzar eating grass or living naked in the wild. However, in a 17th-century English tapestry series associated with Thomas Poyntz, an alt…
Cotton Mather’s Biblical Enlightenment
While there exists a robust scholarship on the cultural influences and public uses of the Bible in early American history, the historical development of biblical scholarship in America remains relatively understudied. The prevalent view suggests that biblical scholarship in America had its critical awakening with the importation of German Higher Criticism to northeastern divinity schools in the nineteenth century. This essay makes a corrective in…
Snakes on a Page
Visual receptions of the Eden serpent throughout the history of Western art have reflected various interpretive attempts to understand the nature of this creature. In the investigation of these receptions, five iconographic categories emerge: the female-headed serpent, the demonic serpent, the dragon-like serpent, the etiological serpent, and the zoological serpent. Of these categories, all but the female-headed serpent survives in modern childre…
Mainstreaming and Defamiliarizing the Rapture
The popular Left Behind series has been credited with mainstreaming dispensational premillennialism, or fragments of that ideology, in U.S. popular culture. The less popular, but critically acclaimed HBO series The Leftovers , based on the novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta, attests to the ideology’s popularity while defamiliarizing its notions of Rapture and Messiah/Antichrist. While Left Behind apologizes for the ideology and strives to mak…
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From the Middle Ages Back to Antiquity
This article studies Albert the Great’s conception of reciprocal interiority in the exposition of John 14:10: “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works” (Bible quotes from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)). Firstly, the article explores how Albert the Great understands reciprocal interiority as an element of the d…
Dynamic Unity in the Gospel of John
The aim of this collection of essays, entitled “Dynamic Unity in the Gospel of John”, is to offer the reader another path through the tradition of interpretations. First, it explores some authors who are often neglected in studies of the history of this dogma: Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215), Origen of Alexandria (c. 184–c. 253), Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329–390), Evagrius Ponticus (345–399), Albert the Great (c. 1200–1280), and Meister Eck…
The Father in the Son, the Son in the Father in the Gospel of John
This article will investigate the context – in terms of both sources (by means of influence, transformation, or contrast) and ancient reception – of the concept of the ‘dynamic unity’ of the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father (expressed in John 10:38, 14:10, and 17:21) in both ‘pagan’ and Christian Middle-Platonic and Neoplatonic thinkers. The Christians include Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, as well as Evagrius Pon…
Experiencing a Biblical Self-Consuming Artifact
Matt 1:17 indicates that Jesus’ genealogy is formed by three series of fourteen generations; however, this total number of generations does not match the preceding list in Matt 1:2-16. Interpreters have proposed multiple ways to understand this inconsistency which have yet to be collected and evaluated. A double literature review displays the limitations of this seemingly insoluble biblical conundrum. This article presents the tension between ver…
The Inaugural Bible
This article examines the reception of Scripture in presidential inaugurations, considering both the Bible as a material object within the oath of office ceremony and the Bible as a source of rhetoric within the inaugural address. Data from select presidential archives are also included in this study, especially letters from citizens, which offer a useful glimpse into the public impact of scriptural rhetoric. The broad chronological parameters of…
Jewish National Decline and Biblical Figures as Classical Exempla
The fourth century of the Common Era was a period significant for witnessing the effective birth of Christian historiography and the (putatively) definitive separation of ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian’ as distinctive identities. A text emerged, known as Pseudo-Hegesippus or De Excidio Hierosolymitano ( On the Destruction of Jerusalem ). This text illustrates how Christian historiography and Christian anti-Jewish ideology at that time could engage with the…
The Most Significant Book of the Netherlands — And Its Ordinary Readers
Although the Netherlands has become one of the most secular countries in the world, the Bible still plays an important role for many people as a source of cultural and spiritual inspiration. Despite extant empirical research, there remains a pressing gap of knowledge concerning the actual use of the Bible by “ordinary readers.” This makes it more difficult for organizations such as the Dutch Bible Society to engage the public with the distributio…
Lisa M. Bowens
It would be hard to overstate the timeliness of this book and its importance for the study of the reception of the Bible.Bowens here gathers a broad range of materials, dating from the early 18th to the mid-20th century (from the era of slavery to the civil rights movement), and the breadth is important.Here are slave petitions, conversion stories, tracts, sermons, political speeches, and autobiographies from African Americans in various conditio…
Lot’s Wife is Still Standing
This article explores how readers search for Lot’s wife at the shore of the Dead Sea and how they use the pillar of salt as a destination, as a symbol, and as a lasting memorial. Whether Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt that travelers to the Dead Sea can visit today is not relevant for this analysis. Spanning many centuries, this reception history of Lot’s wife argues that readers use her for their own interests to address their own cultur…
Receiving the Word in Image
The Annunciation Broadcast by Prophets (1565) was an altarpiece created by Federico Zuccaro (1541–1609) for the Church of the Annunciation, Rome. It was the first image commissioned by the Order of the Jesuits, a movement involved in propagating the objectives of the Counter-Reformation Church. Altarpieces were particularly effective points of communication between the Catholic Church and the lay beholder, and used visual exegesis as a means to c…
The Recovery of the Nazirite in Carolingian Discourse
Carolingian exegetes Hrabanus Maurus and Paschasius Radbertus encountered a paradox in the sources available to them regarding the prophecy of Dan and its representative Samson, the archetypal Nazirite, “Let Dan be a snake in the way, a serpent in the path, that biteth the horse’s heels that his rider may fall backward. I will look for thy salvation, O Lord” (Gen 49:17–8). While in some sources, the blessing given to Dan in Genesis 49:17 is inter…
Exemplarity, Exegesis, & Ethnography
Exemplarity, ethnography, and exegesis are three forms of cultural practice well known to the ancient Mediterranean world. The use of role models, the ‘writing’ of peoples, and the interpretation of authoritative writings (i.e. “Scriptures”) were ways in which many authors of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian antiquity situated themselves and others within history. Here I argue that the biblical patriarch Abraham, as received within the late antiqu…
The “Jew,” the Nation and Assimilation
This article discusses a reorientation of supersessionist postures in German and Dutch Protestant reflection on emerging nation states in the nineteenth-century. Historically, Christian thought often othered “the Jew” as the “nascent Christian.” Since the seventeenth-century, Protestant theologians also entertained the possibility of theological othering on the basis of the legalism of the Mosaic covenant, of which ancient biblical Israel and its…
“We the People of Israel”
As an originally political term, study of the concept of “covenant” has long demonstrated the intersection of biblical studies and political theory. In recent decades, the association between covenant and constitution has come to the forefront of modern political thought in attempts to find the origins of certain democratic ideals in the descriptions of biblical Israel, in order to garner either religious or cultural authority. This is exemplifie…
Creation, Fall and Political Order — Prussian Conservatism and the Old Testament
This article examines differences within the theological basis of early nineteenth-century Prussian conservatism. By exploring the usage of the Old Testament in the writings of conservative thought leaders Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, and Friedrich Julius Stahl, this article contributes to scholarship of both traditions of biblical interpretation and that of the relation of theology and political theory. The focus of this…
Old Testament Imaginaries of the Nation in German, Dutch, and Anglo-American Protestant Political Thought
This issue draws attention to the importance of Old Testament scholarship to conceptions of nationhood in Protestant political thought. Inclusive of biblical studies, history, theology, and political thought, this issue discusses hermeneutical as well as political tensions that are inherent to the reception of the Old Testament within political theology. These tensions primarily concerned the role of covenant, reason and the natural order, spilli…
Old Testament and Nationalism
This article discusses the co-evolution of nationalism and Protestantism in the course of the sixteenth century in England; the influence of the Hebrew Bible’s concept of “the people of Israel” as a community of fundamentally equal members on the emerging English national consciousness (the first national consciousness to develop, in turn influencing all subsequent nationalisms); and the reinterpretation of the core passages of the Hebrew Bible, …
Reverse-Engineering the Covenant
This article examines the famous “city on a hill” sermon delivered by John Winthrop at the start of colonial Massachusetts Bay. It focuses on belief-formation, looking at how Winthrop reverse-engineered the covenant in two senses. First, he found a blueprint for a godly society in the Pentateuch. Moreover, scholars have missed Winthrop’s reversal of the covenant-formation process. In the Pentateuch, God approached Israel with a covenant offer—set…
The Old and the New Israel
Understandings of the new American nation as a “Second Israel,” and a prevalent political discourse devoted to the narratives of the Old Testament, were a distinct trait of the early United States. Indeed, the images and narratives of the Old Testament were as common in the formative decades of the United States, in the words of the great historian Perry Miller, as “the air that the people breathed.” This attachment to the Old Testament, and the …
Abraham Kuyper and the Instrumental Use of Biblical Israel
This article explores the Israelology of the prolific Dutch pastor, politician, and prime minister Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), the architect of the nineteenth-century Neo-Calvinist movement. His thought still reverberates in Neo-Calvinist circles in North America, Europe, and beyond, providing inspiration to those seeking to articulate how contemporary churches can be both authentically confessional and also socially and politically engaged. Less…
On the Banks of Muddy Waters
This article explores Ayako Miura’s Deiryū Chitai [“Mudflow Zone”] as a case study of the reception of the story of Job in Japanese literature. Despite the absence of righteous suffering as a theme, and its structural dissimilarity from the biblical book, this work should be read as a Joban adaptation where personal suffering is replaced by systemic suffering, and personal righteousness by social justice. Miura’s Job is the patient Job of the New…
Reinhart Ceulemans and Barbara Crostini
Article Reinhart Ceulemans and Barbara Crostini: Receptions of the Bible in Byzantium: Texts, Manuscripts, and their Readers was published on April 8, 2022 in the journal Journal of the Bible and its Reception (volume 0, issue 0)
Pentateuchal Women Portrayed in Tannaitic Midrash
The Tannaitic Midrashim offer a unique and ancient view of the reception of the bible by the earliest generations of rabbis. This study describes how the close readings and textual analyses in these midrashim resulted in a fuller picture of biblical ideas and characters; in this case, the women of the Pentateuch. The tannaitic midrashic texts that describe Zipporah, Miriam, the Daughters of Zelophehad and Serah bat Asher are isolated and analyzed…
As Sweet as Their Original Utterance
This article analyzes the reception of the Bible in a group of midrashim called amoraic midrash , or aggadic midrash , which reveal the centrality of Scripture in the world of the rabbis. Each midrash is organized around a particular biblical book and its verses, bringing a collection of interpretations taught by different rabbis in the land of Israel in the first five centuries of the Common Era. These compositions were redacted towards the end …
The Reception of the Bible in Geonic Literature
This article surveys the reception of the Bible in rabbinic literature during the period from the close of the Talmud until the rise of Rashi and the medieval commentators who followed him – from approximately 650 to 1050 CE. It considers works of midrash and mysticism, as well as works of individual Geonim. The article charts the eclipse of biblical authority in the period, and its reemergence in Europe at the end of the Geonic era