Volume 10, Issue 1

In the mid-sixth century, Cassiodorus wrote his Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum to instruct the monks at Vivarium in their scribal work of collecting, codifying, and copying the Christian Scriptures, along with a vast array of Latin Christian literature. His text remained an essential handbook for monks and nuns working as scribes for centuries. Within it, he includes three authoritative canon lists which he takes from Jerome, Augustine, and the Septuagint. To modern scholars these lists often read as nonsense: he seems entirely ambivalent towards which books are “in” or “out” of the canon, he appears unfaithful to his source material, and none of these lists reflects his own system for listing or grouping the Scriptures. What then is the point of them? The answer lies in the importance that Cassiodorus, and other late antique authors, place on numbers as sources of allegorical interpretation in the search for higher meaning. Through a process of “holy arithmetic”, Cassiodorus presents what he claims is an inner logic of these authoritative canon lists, bringing to light three different hermeneutical lenses for understanding what the Scriptures are. As allegories, those lenses can coexist in a complementary fashion, aiding Cassiodorus in his larger mission to codify a Latin Christian tradition. Examining Cassiodorus’s approach to listing the canon and comparing it to modern scholarship on the subject bring into focus some of the key ways in which our own assumptions and methods differ from those of our late antique sources. It also opens up new possibilities for interrogating these sources.

This article examines the visual interpretations of the Spirit in the Beatus illuminated manuscripts. This study will follow methods emerging in the discipline of visual criticism where visual art of biblical texts function like commentaries by offering visual interpretations. This study will investigate the visual interpretations of “John being in the Spirit” (Rev 1:10; 4:2; 17:3; 21:10) and the seven Spirits who are identified as the seven torches, the seven eyes, and the seven horns of the Lamb (Rev 1:4; 3:1; 4:5; 5:6) in the Beatus illuminated manuscripts.

This article traces out the receptions of the Gospel accounts of the removal of Jesus from the cross (which has been variously titled the “deposition of Christ” or the “descent from the cross”). This scene is narrated only very briefly in the four canonical Gospels and receives very little attention in the commentary tradition. However, it does receive attention in creative retellings of the Gospel narratives in antiquity and the middle ages; whereas receptions of this scene are less frequent in antiquity, they explode in the high middle ages. Focusing on the Gospel of Peter , Nonnus of Panopolis’ poetic Paraphrase of John , and the Pseudo-Bonaventuran work Meditationes Vitae Christi , this article explores what might have interested these authors in Jesus’ descent from the cross, and then what these receptions teach us anew about the scene as narrated in the canonical Gospels.

In the context of the Bible, reception history is about the inter-play of text and context. It is also about the capacity of stories to continue to be told, the practice of ongoing interpretation and about creativity and meaning making, often in ways that challenge the text/context divide. In exploring this challenge, I ask how a roughly drawn picture of Jesus as Ecce Homo from John’s trial scene (John 19:5), a piece of devotional art from 1940s Europe, might demonstrate the capacity of texts—John 19:5 and others—to act across a range of (loosely connected) contexts. How might diverse narratives—artistic, historical, ideological, biographical—engage with thought on reception theory and trouble the distinction between text and context, so as to demonstrate the surprising expansiveness of texts and textuality? When viewed via this picture, the words on the pages of canonical text are revealed to be dynamic, travelling through the cultural and devotional history of varying locations, times and epochs. These words are in a state of flux, continually being re-written, embellished upon and otherwise shaped and changed. Following their trails in connection with this picture of Jesus, I explore the complex qualities of story and textuality. These qualities have parallel implications for John’s Gospel, as an ongoing and increasingly tangled story of Empire, irony and ambivalence, a story that continues to play out in multiple, messy and often conflicting ways. Ultimately, to gather a number of narratives and to bind them within the frames of this picture becomes a way of demonstrating the slipperiness and even arbitrariness of historical reception. It elucidates the competing interests of context, scholarship and tradition, not to mention the ever-widening scope of possibilities for biblical textuality.

A reception-oriented approach to genre will challenge the “objective” genre categories applied to the Bible by analyzing their culturally contingent place in the history of interpretation. It then gathers alternative genre groupings for the biblical texts from that history in order to comprehend the features of the texts more fully through the multiple ways readers have responded to their various capacities. This article incorporates conceptual blending and network theory with a growing reception-consciousness in biblical studies to develop a new three-dimensional version of the common comparison of genres to constellations. This new version communicates the value of a reception-oriented approach for appreciating the complexity of texts, biblical and otherwise, along with their readers’ cultural perspectives. The new multidimensional approach to genre that results is applied to the “Wisdom Literature” genre category as an example.

This article explores the figure of Jesus as teacher in Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament by analysing Luther’s translation of the word “rabbi.” In three of the four Gospels, several interlocutors call Jesus “rabbi.” In his earliest translation (1522), Luther rendered the word as “master” in almost all the verses where the word appeared. However, in the editions of the New Testament that appeared in 1526–30, Luther revised the translation and reinstated “rabbi” as a valid title of Jesus. In order to understand Luther’s meaningful reconsideration of one of the main biblical titles of Jesus, the article discusses Luther’s translation practice, his general view on biblical titles and his employment of the term “rabbi” in polemics. The article suggests that rather than anti- or pro-Jewish sentiments, Luther’s view on the figure of Jesus as teacher enabled the revision in the translation. For Luther, the word “rabbi” was a locus where the Jewish and the Christian met, where the historical Jesus could by glimpsed and the unique qualities of Jesus as a teacher, as the only teacher, could be expressed.