Exegesis

About: Exegesis is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3017 publications have been published within this topic receiving 25212 citations. The topic is also known as: Bible interpretation.

Patristic Rhetoric on Allegory: Origen and Eustathius Put 1 Samuel 28 on Trial

Abstract: The standard textbook diagram of early Christian exegesis as characterized by a basic dichotomy between Alexandrine allegory and Antiochene literalism has eroded considerably in the past decades. Earlier scholars were not unaware that there were problems with an absolutely neat polarization of exegetical camps, but now even a guarded reaffirmation of the older consensus model (i.e., one that acknowledged “border concepts” mediating between the two, such as Antiochene typology or θeωρ α) would find far fewer adherents than two decades ago. Recent research has significantly altered the map of patristic exegesis by emphasizing the broad array of reading strategies employed by early Christian biblical interpreters and shifted the approach from a systematic investigation of biblical interpretation as solely rooted in philo-

John the Baptist in Life and Death: Audience-Oriented Criticism of Matthew's Narrative

Abstract: John the Baptist in Life and Death: Audience-Oriented Criticism of Matthew's Narrative, by Gary Yamasaki. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Pp. 176. 35.00/ $57.50. In this book, Yamasaki reexamines John the Baptist and introduces audience-- oriented criticism, a revision of reader-response criticism. After an abbreviated overview of two centuries of research on John the Baptist, Yamasaki turns to the issue of methodology, examining reader-response criticism, the foundation of his own methodology. Here Yamasaki discovers that some analysts still privilege a supposed inherent meaning in the text (perhaps generated by prior interpretations) over that generated by reading. He says this is because modern and ancient peoples encounter a text differently. While readers today have constant access to a written text, ancient peoples had limited contact with a text-often only via the spoken word. Yamasaki refers to these encounters as "static" and "dynamic," respectively. Audienceoriented criticism is, he argues, a way of recovering the dynamic, first-time encounter between ancient people and their texts. This method, he says, shows how the encounter of text and listener "naturally" (re)generates a basic structure formed by the text's words, and how, upon this scaffold of words and their meanings, listening creates the full meaning of the story. Following a brief critique of various theories accounting for the structure of Matthew's Gospel, Yamasaki applies his method to Matthew's story of the Baptist. First, he shows how the birth narrative "primed" the listener for the importance of Jesus. Then, after discussing John as the listener first "sees" him, Yamasaki shows how the baptism scene presents the encounter between Jesus and John and introduces the narrator's ideology. Yamasaki further examines Jesus and the narrator's ideology, through John, even though John is "off stage," in prison. The last chapter concludes this work, reiterating the relationship of John, Jesus, and the narrator's ideology, even though John is now dead. The nice thing Yamasaki's method does is to take exegesis back to basics, to what the words mean and how these meanings are (re)generated in the act of reading, According to Yamasaki, references to John throughout the Gospel form the kernel of a message-containing the narrator's ideology of Jesus-which is "fleshed out" by the audience. In this way, audience-oriented criticism could be a new tool in the scholar's kit-interdisciplinary, it could recover meanings otherwise missed by other methods and stitch them into our collective understanding of the formative era of Christianity. Unfortunately, Yamasaki has forgotten one step: although this work attempts to bypass the ideology inherent in scholarship to discover the original meaning of the text, it also fails to take that scholarship into account. This is especially glaring in the case of the relationship between Yamasaki's audience-oriented criticism and reader response, the very method from which he derived it. …

Messianic Exegesis and the Call of Nathanael (John 1.45-51)

Abstract: Jesus’ supernatural knowledge, perhaps utilizing a legal convention in which witnesses were asked under what sort of tree an alleged offense took place.2 The difficulty is that this view does not provide a connection between Jesus’ comment and the royal titles Nathanael immediately bestowed on him. Interpreters have more commonly connected the reference to the fig tree with the study or fulfillment of the law and the prophets, which were mentioned in 1.45. Rabbinic sources say that the sages sometimes studied the Torah under a fig tree, suggesting that Nathanael was under the fig tree perusing scripture and its messianic prophecies.3 Alternatively, Nathanael may have been confessing his sins under the tree so that Jesus assured him of forgiveness with an allusion to Ps. 32.2 (Jn 1.47). The difficulty is that these interpretations

The Text of the Targum of Job : an introduction and critical edition

Abstract: The centrepiece of this book is a critical edition of the Targum of Job which notes all variants from a total of 14 manuscripts and 2 printed editions. In the introductory section the first two chapters give a description of the principal printed editions and the manuscripts. A chapter on "The Stemma" considers how the various strands of textual tradition relate to each other. There is also a chapter on "Multiple Translation", a phenomenon particularly associated with the Targum of Job whereby more than one translation is often given to whole verses or to individual words and phrases. A final chapter describes in detail the methods underlying the critical edition. This book will provide a useful tool for those working on the textual criticism of the Old Testament and for those interested in the history of Jewish biblical exegesis.