Producing the text: production and distribution of popular editions of the Bible

Liberationist hermeneutics is primarily a way of reading which is the product of late twentieth-century political theology. Liberation theology is known from scholarly books and articles but has its roots in the Basic Christian Communities. The community setting means an avoidance of a narrowly individualist religious reading. Theology is not just a matter of abstract reflection, but reflection on understandings which are based on an active involvement. Christianity lives by the norm of the reign of God in the still unrealized future of creation, not by a fixed, completed past. Radford Ruether's hermeneutical model has many affinities with Clodovis Bof's correspondence of relationships model. Historical study enables the reader to explore hitherto neglected corners of the Bible using a method which reflects all that is best in what Hans-Georg Gadamer has illuminated about the hermeneutical basis of research in the humanities.

Reception of the Bible: the Bible in Africa

This chapter first traces the history of Bible in North America, and then the issue of publishing of the Scripture. The strongly Protestant cast of American history is indicated no better than in the intense personal application to Scripture undertaken by countless individuals in every generation from the early seventeenth century to the present. Americans also have sustained an enormous rate of bible publication and an even more astonishing appetite for literature about the Bible. The Scripture has been a vital element in American popular life, and has also provided powerful themes for Americans to define themselves politically, both as a people and as a nation. The chapter discusses the experiences of two minority groups in North America, Jews and the African Americans, for whom the Bible has been central. It ends with discussions on the Biblical scholarship, and the history of the Scripture in Canada.

The New Cambridge History of the Bible

From the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries the chronology of production and distribution of the Bible, especially in popular editions, combines two narratives. The first traces a remarkable story of technological development in the printing and related industries, while the second follows the growth of cultural infrastructures that supported evangelical enthusiasm. Once printed, bibles had to be distributed. In the decades before the introduction of bible societies, religious authorities undertook this task directly. Within the Roman Catholic communion, distribution was generally limited to those copies required by members of the clergy. The laws and structure of the new organisation, called the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), responded to the social and religious tensions within English society. American Bible Society (ABS) incursions were facilitated by an 1860 agreement permitting either society to print editions financed by the other, provided that no changes were made to the text.

George M. Soares-Prabhu

Papers

Two Mission Commands