Brennan Breed | Columbia Theological Seminary (original) (raw)

Books by Brennan Breed

The Era of Empires: Four Kingdoms Motifs in Ancient Historiographies, ed. A. Perrin and L. Stuckenbruck, 2021

A study of the chronosophy of the Four Kingdoms Schema from Daniel 2 and Daniel 7.

Scholars generally understand reception history to refer to the study of the use, influence and m... more Scholars generally understand reception history to refer to the study of the use, influence and meaning of a text or artifact after it leaves its original context of production. Over the past decade, the demand for scholarly work addressing the reception history of texts and artifacts has steadily increased. The most conspicuous index of the growth in reception historical studies is the recent explosion of reference works in the field of biblical studies. Though scholars have responded by investing a great deal of energy into reception historical studies, a dearth of theoretical reflection limits this emerging field’s rigor and potential contribution. I have written Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History to meet this need. In Nomadic Text, I offer a solid theoretical foundation for textual reception history and show a practical example of this new approach as it applies to a particular biblical text. While this book focuses on the reception of the biblical text, it would be applicable to other texts and artifacts, and thus may be of interest to any scholar of religion, art, literature or critical theory.

Most biblical scholars assume that reception history constitutes a field of inquiry separate from biblical criticism itself. That is, historical criticism puts the text into its original context, while reception history investigates what happens when biblical texts escape that context. Yet in light of recent discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now know that texts already existed in multiple forms before the turn of the common era, and they continued to change throughout the supposedly original period of biblical composition. As a result, the common understanding of what a biblical text is–and concurrently the common understanding of the scholarly task of biblical criticism–must change. I propose that the biblical text should now be understood as a dynamic process, not a static product. Using resources provided by the thought of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, I construct a theory of reception history that replaces an essentialist view of literature with a focus on emergent processes.

Alongside the textual critic's quest for the original text and the historical critic's quest for reconstructing the original context, biblical scholars should also aim to map the multiple, irreducible developments of biblical textual forms and meanings throughout history. In my estimation, reception history is not primarily an interpretative practice (i.e., What does this text mean?). Rather, reception history creates a model of a text's capacities by means of repeated textual experimentation throughout history (i.e., What can this text do?). With this approach, one may integrate traditional methods of biblical criticism with reception history. As an illustration of this theory, the last two chapters survey the reception of Job 19:25-27 by tracking several broad trajectories of the text’s inscription, interpretation, and use from antiquity to the present day.

Papers by Brennan Breed

Apocalypses in Contexts: Apocalyptic Currents through History, 2016

Twice in the book of Daniel (chs. 2 and 7), a fourfold pattern summarizes the history of the worl... more Twice in the book of Daniel (chs. 2 and 7), a fourfold pattern summarizes the history of the world as a succession of gentile kingdoms that derive their sovereignty from Yhwh. This "four-kingdom schema " has proven to be one of the most influential time structuring devices of the past three millennia. This article uses schema theory, a tool developed in the modern discipline of psychology, to analyze the four-kingdoms schema. An overview of the reception history of this schema provides evidence for how and why it continues to function even in contemporary political discourse.

Søren Kierkegaard offers two different readings of the book of Job, one in his book Repetition an... more Søren Kierkegaard offers two different readings of the book of Job, one in his book Repetition and the other in one of his " upbuilding discourses " published during the same year. This essay contextualizes Kierkegaard's authorship and argues that he presents Job as a maieutic text designed not to teach certain content, but rather to force the reading subject to wrestle with contradiction and criticize a number of viewpoints, including the reader's own presuppositions. In the end, the maueitic text does not offer any answers: It merely encourages the birth of the critical subject. Exegetical examples focusing on the prologue and Job's speeches explore the potential for more thoroughgoing maieutic readings of the book of Job.

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 40 (2015), pp. 113-130

Reception History and Biblical Studies: Theory and Practice, ed. WJ Lyons and E England, 2015

This essay uses "ethology," the study of an animal's behavior, as a metaphor for the study of the... more This essay uses "ethology," the study of an animal's behavior, as a metaphor for the study of the reception history of a biblical text. Using the thought of Gilles Deleuze, I offer thoughts on the practice of studying what texts do (ethology) instead of what texts should look like (etiology), or should mean (morality). I end with a brief look at the reception history of Daniel 7, starting with its ancient Near Eastern context, to serve as an example.

Biblical Reception , 2012

This essay offers a theoretical concept of biblical reception and suggestions concerning the scho... more This essay offers a theoretical concept of biblical reception and suggestions concerning the scholarly practice of reception history. Most biblical scholars would define biblical reception as anything having to do with the Bible other than the original biblical text, the biblical context and its original meaning(s). Likewise, biblical scholars often conceive of the practice of reception history as a study of texts, contexts and meanings and the traditional practices of historical-critical biblical scholarship. Yet scholars have been unable to locate precisely what divides these two domains ("reception" and the "original") in either textual or contextual terms. From an analysis of the concepts of the original text and original context, I conclude that there are no such things as original biblical texts or contexts that are justifiably different in kind from earlier "backgrounds" or later "receptions." Instead of thinking of the Bible as a static object imperfectly represented by countless inferior versions and constantly read out of its proper context, I propose that the biblical text is more like a continuous process than a fixed product. What is required for reception history, then, is a way of thinking about biblical texts that respects both (1) their ability to exceed and move beyond any given context, and (2) their ability to manifest striking different, even mutually exclusive, meanings and uses. I rely upon Gilles Deleuze's concept of the virtual to re-imagine a processual ontology of biblical texts, and I also borrow his concept of nomadic distribution as a guide for scholarly practice.

Very few books have impacted the broad array of human cultures as deeply and profoundly as the bo... more Very few books have impacted the broad array of human cultures as deeply and profoundly as the book of Psalms. From liturgy to architecture, poetry to politics, and medicine to music, the book of Psalms has proven a rich resource for almost every avenue of human life. Reception history is the scholarly activity that attempts to chart and analyze the diverse trajectories of the uses and influences of texts such as the book of Psalms throughout history. Instead of attempting to summarize the reception history of the entire Psalter, this essay offers a sketch of the reception of one particular psalmnamely, Psalm 91 (90 LXX)in hopes that readers may catch a glimpse of both the vast depths of biblical reception that remain to be explored and the interpretive upshot of such exploration.

In Ut Pictura Meditatio: Meditative Image in Northern Art 1500-1700. Edited by Walter Melion. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, several Northern European as well as Italian... more In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, several Northern European as well as Italian illuminators developed a genre of illusionistic and spatially complex historiated borders surrounding framed central scenes. 2 The Master of James IV of Scotland, the Vienna Master, and other, mainly Netherlandish book painters built upon the innovations of earlier illuminators such as Jean Fouquet, who integrated border, text and central scene into a continuous space. 3 While these feats of technical skill have been interpreted in diachronic terms as the "death knell" of book illumination, a thorough semiotic analysis of the play between border and center in these books remains to be written. 4 As a small contribution to this task, the present essay will examine one particular manuscript whose complex images both depict and interact with late medieval meditative practices. 5 The phenomenon of play between border and center in Pierpont Morgan MS M. 1001, a book of Hours executed in the last quarter of the fifteenth century in Poitiers, appears uniquely attuned to devotional image theory and practice. 6 In particular, the 1 This essay was prepared originally for Dr. Walter Melion's Ph.D. course in Meditative Images at Emory University in Fall 2006. I thank him warmly for his close reading, brilliant suggestions and kind help. image of Job and Lazarus that prefaces the Office of the Dead explores the rich possibilities offered by the structure of the image-within-the-image (fig. 1). Such interaction between distinctly framed diegetic worlds, or what one might call "unified narrative spaces," allows for an exploration of the thematics of devotional sight, and especially the potential power of sight to invert the assumed relationship of the outside to the inside. To this effect, M. 1001 creates a series of mis-en-abymes: the liminal gaze of the devotee, mirrored through the interactions between images inhabiting distinct narrative spaces -that is, their interdiegetic gazes -becomes the locus of intersection of sacred image and the phenomenal world. Meanwhile, the clever use of typological relationships within certain border-and-miniature images reveals the complex relationship between ostensibly separate diegetic worlds. Within M. 1001, sight that traverses from one narrative world into another moves beyond mere juxtaposition to fashion a powerful figure of sight as a means of devotion and transformation. 7

Journal of African Christian Thought

“Job, Book of.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible. , 2012

Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception

Marginalia Review of Books, Jan 2013

The Theological Dictionary of the Qumran Manuscripts / Theologisches Wörterbuch zu den Qumrantexten (ThWQ). Edited by Heinz–Josef Fabry and Ulrich Dahmen., 2013

Lit. DCH 378-79; NIDOTTE 3941; TDOT 7:104-21; TLOT 606-612; TWOT 1:435-36; M.A. Klopfenstein, Die... more Lit. DCH 378-79; NIDOTTE 3941; TDOT 7:104-21; TLOT 606-612; TWOT 1:435-36; M.A. Klopfenstein, Die Lüge nach dem Alten Testament (Zurich, 1964), 179-253.

Other Academic Writing by Brennan Breed

Interpretation , 2023

A Review of John Collins' recent monograph, "What Are Biblical Values?"

All reading is an encounter with someone else, an attempt to engage with another who does not sha... more All reading is an encounter with someone else, an attempt to engage with another who does not share one’s own perspective, experiences or identity. Since these perceptions are inherently subjective and variable, this inevitably creates ambiguities and conflicts when an author’s perceptions of their audience differ from how any particular, actual audiences perceive themselves. Such tensions are especially acute when texts are granted religious authority and continue to be read by communities other than those for which they were originally composed. In these new contexts, not only the meaning of the language, but also the texts’ claims of authority, identity, and social relation must be negotiated anew. This chapter offers conceptual and methodological reflections on the formative links between interpretation and identity, particularly how perceptions of identity and difference (often in the form of a distinction between “us” and “the Other”) shape the reading of religiously authoritative texts, and how such texts themselves are appealed to in order to justify, support or challenge such perceptions of identity and difference.

Talks by Brennan Breed

This is the text of a public lecture delivered at Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Septem... more This is the text of a public lecture delivered at Vanderbilt University Divinity School in September 2017 in response to the "Nashville Statement."

Drafts by Brennan Breed

Journal for Preachers, 2020