Corrigenda to McDonald, Biblical Criticism in Early Modern Europe (2016) (original) (raw)
J. K. Elliott, Review of Grantley McDonald, Biblical Criticism in Early Modern Europe: Erasmus, the Johannine Comma and Trinitarian Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), Reformation, 22:1 (2017), 58–60.
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2018
marketplace, dock, shop, palazzo and private home, however, Esch makes no reference to Brentano and his ground-breaking work. This is especially noteworthy as Esch very often deploys the same impressionistic, paratactic style to tease out the details of daily life and common belief from the same type of materials. Like Brentano, he cautions (pp. -) that these records are incomplete and therefore less statistical than representational sources, an intellectual debt to Brentano that anglophone scholars of Rome must both continuously acknowledge and attempt to escape.
In 1516, Desiderius Erasmus published the first Greek New Testament. Almost immediately, it became embroiled in controversy and Erasmus was accused of heresy because of critical decisions he made about the text. The most controversial was his decision to not include 1John 5.7, the so-called Comma Johanneum, which was used as a defense of the Trinity. This essay examines the ways in which Erasmus attempted to protect himself and his New Testament from heresy charges as he revised it for its second edition. Then, it offers a further contextualization for why those attempts failed. Erasmus reinserted 1John 5.7 in his third edition.
The Bible in Modern European Thought
Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (eds. Adams, Pattison, Ward, OUP, 2013), 2013
"The period from 1800 to 1945 saw some of the most turbulent changes to approaches to the Bible in modern European thought. It is a period of dramatic contrasts and unresolved contradictions. The contrasts arise because of the increasing divergence between experts and lay persons: the historical and philological studies of Biblical scholars contrasted more and more strongly with performative and traditional figural reading of the Bible in Christian worship. Contradictions arise as a consequence of this. The question of whether and to what extent the Bible is like other books invites new, distinctively modern, attempts to account for the Bible’s status – and these attempts appeal to a broad range of criteria which are not necessarily in harmony with each other, such as the quality of the text, the use of the text in communities, and understandings of divine revelation. There is one repeated failed attempt to resolve the contradictions thrown up by competing criteria: the quest for a single framework within which to place the practices of expert Biblical scholarship and the practices of worshippers in churches – the most famous of these attempts being the quest for the historical Jesus. This essay approaches these issues by engaging with a series of classic texts, taking them chronologically, in three sections. The first section considers the work of Hegel and Schleiermacher, and connects aspects of their philosophies to issues in Biblical interpretation. Hegel’s contribution to a range of topics is vast: here one small part will be treated, namely, the relation between ‘representation’ and ‘conceptual thinking’. Schleiermacher’s development of hermeneutics deserves its own essay as a contribution to theology and modern European thought. The remarks here will be restricted to the relation between the rule-bound nature of language and the spontaneous nature of the language-user, which come together in style and interpretation. The second section considers three classic essays on the Bible (one German, one French and one English) by Strauss, Renan and Jowett. These essays articulate significant nineteenth-century cultural contradictions vis-à-vis the Bible, many of which persist in our own time. These include the increasing specialisation and professional expertise that is brought to bear on the Bible by scholars, and the increasing distance between scholars and laypersons that is a consequence of this; it also includes various failed attempts to find a single intellectual framework within which to place historical-critical inquiries into the plain sense of scripture, on the one hand, and into habitable narratives for worship, on the other, usually with the consequence that narrative is eclipsed (to echo Hans Frei’s felicitous phrase) in favour of the plain sense. The third section considers two contrasting influential twentieth century approaches to the Bible: Barth’s expressionist commentary on Romans and Bultmann’s existentialist programme of ‘demythologization’."
Religious Studies Review, 2006
extensive critical apparatus, while the French translation has two sets of notes, brief notes at the bottom of the page and longer notes (numbered consecutively with the brief notes) gathered in "Notes complémentaires." These notes are almost a commentary on the text, crammed with useful information. A Greek Index Nominum, an Index Verborum, an Index of French proper names, and a list of citations complete the volume. Everyone working with classical rhetoric will want this edition at hand, whether in university or seminary library, or on one's own shelves. It is a major editorial achievement and deserves wide use.