This page began quite some time ago, but never went beyond its very beginning
stages; it remains to be seen whether I'll just remove it or perhaps change
it to something a bit different -- perhaps a list of present and past Peace
Church Biblical Studies scholars, such as Paul Anderson, Millard Lind, and Willard
Swartley. Feedback would be most
welcome. If I decide to continue building this page, I plan to add hyperlinks
to words found in the Glossary and vice versa.
- [A]
- Albrecht Alt
- Robert Alter
- Author of The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) and The Art of Biblical Poetry; he also edited The Literary Guide to the Bible with Frank Kermode. There's a profile of him, with photo, at http://wupa.wustl.edu/asmbly/bio/Alter.
- Erich Auerbach (1892-1957)
- American philologist and literary critic. His most famous book is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946).
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- [B]
- Mieke (Maria Gertrudis) Bal(1946- )
- Cultural theorist, literary critic and Old Testament scholar; professor at the University of Amsterdam.
- Roland Barthes(1915-1980)
- French literary critic; known for his development of the use of structuralism and semiotics (the “science of signs”) to literary study.
- Harold Bloom(1930- )
- English professor, Old Testament scholar, and author of the controversial book The Western Canon (1994). In biblical studies he is probably most famous for his Book of J (1990), in which he discusses the so-called “J” (Yahwistic) source of the Pentateuch, whom he (re)constructs as a female genius.
- John Bright(1908- )
- Wrote History of Israel (1960). In The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, John Barton (p. 14) cites Bright as an example of “what biblical critics did until thirty or so years ago,” excelling at literary analysis, but “when they turned to write history in the normal sense of the term their efforts were usually far less sophisticated....”
- Rudolf Bultmann(1884-1976)
- German New Testament scholar. One of the originators of form criticism in
New Testament studies, Bultmann was also famous for his efforts to "demythologize"
the New Testament.
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- [C]
- Brevard Springs Childs (1923- )
- American biblical scholar who, with James Sanders, is best known for his work in canonical criticism. He retired from Yale in 1999. An article at http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/jul1993/v50-2-criticscorner.htm gives a good overview of Childs’ thought.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
- English romantic poet, philosopher and literary critic. Two of his works important for biblical criticism are Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit and Aids to Reflection.
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- [D]
- Mary Daly
- Outspoken and controversial feminist scholar. Her books include Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973) and Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978).
- Jacques Derrida (1930- )
- French literary critic and philosopher who first articulated the theory
of deconstruction.
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- [E]
- Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827)
- German biblical scholar; compared biblical texts to other writings of the Ancient Near East and was an early practitioner of what has come to be known as biblical criticism. He was the first to distinguish between “lower criticism,” which aims to determine the most accurate text (“textual criticism”) and “higher criticism,” which deals with such questions as date, authorship, composition and the like. His Einleitung ins Alte Testament (“Introduction to the Old Testament”) was an early example of the genre of “introduction” meaning a comprehensive overview and “leading in” to understanding the Bible.
- Thomas Stearns (T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
- Poet, playwright and literary critic. Eliot was born in St. Louis but lived most of his adult life in Britain. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Eliot wrote: “The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.” One of many interesting Eliot web sites is at http://www.deathclock.com/thunder/
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- [F]
- Austin Marsden Farrer (1904-1968)
- British theologian and New Testament scholar; he challenged the dominant theory of the origin of the synoptic gospels in his essay “On Dispensing With Q” which you can read at http://www.ntgateway.com/Q/farrer.htm.
- Stanley Fish (1938- )
- American scholar; early proponent of reader-response criticism; famous for his book Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980). Someone at University of Helsinki has put together a very comprehensive “Stanley Fish Resources Center” with lots of links, at http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/kniemela/fish.htm.
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- [G]
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- [H]
- Geoffrey H. Hartman (1929- )
- Literary critic; bibliography, photo, and other information at http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/Wellek/hartman/.
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
- Influential German philosopher. Hegel is famous for his concept of dialectic, in which one idea or entity, the thesis, gives rise to its opposite, the antithesis; the two conflict and out comes a higher or at least new idea or entity, the synthesis, which then becomes the thesis of the next round.
- Thomas Rice Henn (1901-1974)
- Professor of English at Cambridge. Wrote books about Shakespeare, Yeats, and, most importantly here, The Bible as Literature (1970).
- Siegfried Herrmann (1926-)
- German Old Testament scholar, best known for A History of Israel in Old Testament Times (English edition, 1975). Herrmann was a student of Albrecht Alt.
- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
- English philosopher and political theorist. Best known for his political treatise Leviathan; or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651). “Rejection of theological supernaturalism stands out as the most conspicuous characteristic in Hobbes’s philosophical writings,... which were inspired by the teachings of the new mathematical and natural sciences” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/d/deismeng.htm).
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- [I]
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- [J]
- Gabriel David Josipovici(1940- )
- French-born British novelist, short-story writer and literary theorist. Known for his “experimental” novels.
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- [K]
- Nikos Kazantzakis {1883-1957)
- ) Greek poet, philosopher and writer. Famous for his novels Zorba the Greek (1946) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1955), both of which were translated into English and made into major films. For more on Kazantzakis, see http://www.interkriti.org/culture/kazantzakis/kazantz2.htm.
- Frank Kermode (1919- )
- British literary critic, known for his studies of D.H. Lawrence and Shakespeare, and, in biblical studies, for The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987), which he and Robert Alter edited.
- Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
- Danish theologian and philosopher. Known as the “father of existentialism” and for his critiques of Hegel and German romanticism. More information at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/.
- J. Knox
- Wrote Chapters in a Life of Paul (1950, correlating the epistles and Acts.
- Julia Kristeva (1941- )
- Born in Bulgaria, living in France, frequent lecturer at Columbia University; practicing psychoanalyst, linguistics professor and literary critic. There’s a nice picture of her at http://www.msu.edu/user/chrenkal/980/JKRIST.HTM. She coined the term "intertextuality," although it is now used far more broadly than she intended.
- James L. Kugel (1945- )
- American biblical and literary scholar; some of his more important works include The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (1981, 1998); In Potiphar's House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts (1990), and Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era (1998).
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- [L]
- Claude Levi-Strauss (1908- )
- French anthropologist, philosopher and social theorist. Known for his pioneering work in the use of structuralism as a methodology in the humanities and social sciences; he tried to identify the “structures of thought,” universal principles reflected culturally and in linguistic codes.
- Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis (1898-1963)
- British literature scholar and Christian apologist, known for his Narnia books and the Christian classic Mere Christianity. There’s a lot about Lewis on the web. One such website is http://cslewis.drzeus.net/.
- Robert Lowth (1710-1787)
- English scholar whose studies of Hebrew poetry, particularly parallelism, are still used today. He was a grammarian as well as a Bible student, best known for his Short Introduction to English Grammar, which articulated many of the “rules” still taught today, such as avoiding double negatives, split infinitives, and prepositions at the end of sentences. Nowadays his views are out of style, in that his grammar was “prescriptive” rather than “descriptive” (he told people what they ought to say rather than describing what they do say); similarly in biblical studies, today scholars are more attuned to the continuity between Hebrew prose and poetry, and the flexibility within each, rather than articulating clear rules and distinct categories as Lowth did. Lowth’s most important two books for present-day Biblical Studies are Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews) in 1753 and his Isaiah: A New Translation with a Preliminary Dissertation and Notes Critical, Philological, and Explanatory in 1778, both long out of print but available in some academic libraries.
- Martin Luther (1483-1546)
- German theologian and leader of the Protestant Reformation.
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- [M]
- Karl Marx (1818-1883)
- German philosopher and economist best known as the theorist behind socialism and communism. Marxism has also influenced literary studies, including biblical studies, by way of its understanding of how art, literature, and social change are related.
- Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903)
- German historian of ancient Rome; wrote books about Roman history and law.
- Stephen D. Moore
- Irish poststructuralist scholar. His web page: http://www.users.drew.edu/~smoore/.
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- [N]
- Dennis Eric Nineham (1921- )
- British New Testament scholar known for his work on the Gospel of Mark and his 1976 book The Use and Abuse of the Bible: A Study of the Bible in an Age of Rapid Cultural Change.
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- [O]
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- [P]
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- [Q]
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- [R]
- Gerhard von Rad (1901-1971)
- German Old Testament scholar; exponent of “biblical theology” whose Old Testament Theology (2 vols., 1962-65) continues to represent a watershed in the field.
- Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)
- German historian and philologist; pioneer in critical textual analysis of historical documents; wrote history as well as methodological works. Known for his claim that historians need to find out about the past "as it actually was" (wie es eigentlich gewesen).
- Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768)
- German theologian and Enlightenment philosopher; among the founders of German “higher criticism” although it was not so called until Eichhorn. Reimarus (re)constructed an “historical Jesus” who was quite different from what his disciples later claimed in the Bible and in the church. Reimarus’ “Jesus of history” was quite different from the “Christ of faith.” There’s a very readable account of the development of “historical Jesus” studies at http://www.bible.org/docs/theology/christ/jesus.htm.
- Ernest Renan (1823-1892)
- French scholar whose Life of Jesus ("La Vie de Jesus," 1863) was controversial for its portrayal of Jesus in human terms.
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- [S]
- E.P. Sanders
- British New Testament scholar. There’s a short biography on Duke University’s web page, at http://www.duke.edu/religion/home/EP/sanders.html
, as well as pdf files with what appear to be lecture notes on topics such as the "historical Jesus" and the gospels.
- James A. Sanders (1927- )
- With Brevard Childs, a well-known proponent of canonical criticism; Childs is more interested in the “final form” of the biblical text, whereas Sanders focuses on the process of canonicity. Wrote Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism (1984). Sanders is also known as an early and important Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, and president of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, California.
- Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)
- Influential German theologian, sometimes regarded as the founder of modern theology; he is known as a defender of Christianity against Enlightenment thought, and wrote of a religious consciousness universal among humans. His two most important books are On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) and The Christian Faith (1820-21). Schleiermacher regarded religion as more a matter of feeling than of beliefs or actions.
- Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
- German theologian, missionary, philosopher and musician. His most famous book was The Quest of the Historical Jesus (the German title was “Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung,” 1906), which launched what is sometimes called the “First Quest” or the “Old Quest,” in contrast to the “Jesus research” being conducted today. Later in life Schweitzer was an articulate spokesman for peace in the Atomic Age; he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)
- American activist in the movements for women’s rights, abolition of slavery, and temperance. Author of The Woman’s Bible (1898).
- D. F. Strauss (1808-1874)
- German theologian and biblical critic, controversial in his time for writing the two-volume Life of Jesus (1835-36) which rejected as mythological the supernatural parts of the Gospels. He coined the phrase “The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History,” which was the title of another of his works (1865). Strauss was a student of Schleiermacher, but rejected his views as well as Christianity itself.
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- [T]
- Phyllis Trible
- Feminist biblical scholar and rhetorical critic; professor at Wake Forest University Divinity School. Her books include God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (1978), Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narrative (1984), and Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah (1994).
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- [U]
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- [V]
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- [W]
- Francis Watson
- Author of Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective, in which he advocates for "the primacy of theology within biblical interpretation" (p. vii).
- Johannes Weiss (1863-1914)
- German theologian and New Testament scholar. His Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (“Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God,” 1892) put forth the view that Jesus’ key teachings were eschatological. Weiss also gave the name “Q” (short for “Quelle,” German for “Source”) to the hypothesized “sayings” source of the gospels of Matthew and Luke.
- Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918)
- German biblical scholar most famous for his work on the origins of the Pentateuch; wrote the Prolegomena to the History of Israel. Wellhausen often seems to be used as a symbol of “old-fashioned” biblical criticism.
- Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780-1849)
- German biblical scholar; one of the founders of historical criticism of the Bible. If you can find a copy of the Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters, ed. Donald K. McKim (InterVarsity Press, 1998), there’s a very interesting profile of him on pp.298-302.
- William Wrede
- Author of The Messianic Secret (1901), which claimed that Jesus'
desire (in the Gospel of Mark) to keep his identity as Messiah a secret was
more a reflection of the interests of the early church than a true description
of what Jesus actually said and did.
- Roger Norman Whybray (1923- )
- British Old Testament scholar. There’s a review of Whybray’s Reading the Psalms as a Book (1996) at http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/2475_1563.pdf, and quite a long essay about his life and work at http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/biblst/DJACcurrres/Whybray.html.
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- [X]
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- [Y]
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- [Z]
