Band 12, Heft 1

The reception of Luke 16:19–31 is ancient and variegated. It is ancient in that commentary for this pericope appears as early as the patristic era – mostly in the form of homilies – and variegated in that its interpretation has been hotly debated throughout church history. One recurring point of departure is the question of genre. Currently, most scholars assume the label “parable” despite the complex debate surrounding this slippery term. However, the reception history reveals that – prior to the Protestant Reformation – most viewed Luke 16:19–31 as historic narrative and not as parabolic. Thus, the question arises: “What caused this radical interpretational shift?” While some held to the fictive view of Luke 16:19–31 prior to the modern period (so Cyril of Alexandria et al.), this was a minority position until the Reformation – during which there was a surge of discovery/rediscovery of biblical manuscripts and exposure to variant readings within the sundry Greek New Testaments being published. Consequently, a paradigmatic shift of interpretation appears to have gained momentum after the rediscovery of Codex Bezae in 1562 by Theodore Beza, which contained the variant reading in Luke 16:19a – ειπεν δε και ετεραν παραβολην. This paper advances the fields of reception history and biblical studies by challenging the long-standing assumptions within the commentary tradition and textual criticism that Beza “ignored” Codex Bezae’s variants in publishing his Greek New Testament editions – as argued by Kurt and Barbara Aland et al. – and that “parable” is the best descriptor for Luke 16:19–31.

Translations of the New Testament have historically rendered the word δοῦλος as servant instead of slave, even if δοῦλος is not an ambiguous term. In more recent translations, δοῦλος is increasingly, but still not consistently, translated as slave. The effect of these translations has been to obscure slavery in early Christianity and to overlook the political and colonial legacy of the Bible in legitimising (colonial) slavery. This article provides an overview of translations in English, German, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian from the Middle Ages to contemporary Bible editions. It shows that the way δοῦλος is translated extends beyond philological analyses of the Greek term or historical reconstructions of slavery in early Christianity, but ties in with the political discourses of slavery, for instance debates about colonial slavery and abolition. In the article, we argue that translating δοῦλος as slave could encourage a much-needed discussion about NT slavery and its legacy.

Scholars have long written about the development of biblical criticism and its reception in elite circles in the transatlantic world of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. This has caused us to assume that non-elites were unaware of the developments in biblical studies. Anglophone readers of the Bible were increasingly accepting the work of biblical scholars and, as Paul Gutjahr has shown, came to view their copies of the Bible as fallible representations of what scripture would have been in its original. The example of one non-elite, Joseph Smith Jr., might help us to rethink our assumptions and reframe the questions we ask about the reception history of biblical criticism because he engaged with biblical scholarship in a creative way as he tried to restore the text of Isaiah 2–14, 29, and 48–54 in The Book of Mormon (1830). Smith likely used Adam Clarke’s commentary on the Bible as he dictated these lengthy chapters of Isaiah into the narrative framing of the book. While the source text is clearly the KJV there are several variants throughout that deviate from it, but they are in Clarke’s commentary. Smith did not slavishly copy Clarke but engaged critically with his notes and paratext, incorporating what he saw as useful so that he could revise and attempt to restore Isaiah.

This article investigates the relationship between translation and reception by focusing on Bible translators as “agents of reception.” Translators exercise their agency in relation to the previous effective history ( Wirkungsgeschichte ) of the biblical texts, which they can either affirm or resist. The outcome of their work is a specific textual representation of the biblical texts, thereby guiding the way most readers receive ‘the Bible.’ In this sense, translators have a large potential power when it comes to affirming or altering existing patterns of reception. As a case study I focus on two contemporary Swedish translations of the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). The first one, Bibel 2000 , was carried out by a team of translators working from the assumptions of ‘secular’ academic biblical criticism, whereas the other, Svenska Folkbibeln , was initiated as a ‘protest’ bible targeted against the methodological atheism or agnosticism of the first translation. These outsets impacted how the two teams related to interpretations associated with Christian (and to a lesser extent Jewish) effective history of the biblical texts. I investigate how this played out in how the translators rendered certain passages in Genesis – both with respect to the main text (the translated text) and to various paratextual materials produced by the two translator teams. I argue that both teams resisted the effective history of the biblical texts, but in two quite different ways: the team of the conservative ‘protest’ translation resisted effective history on a discursive level, arguing that interpretations associated with Christian effective history were an inherent feature of the biblical texts themselves; while the translators of Bibel 2000 resisted it on a practical level, refusing to let specific effective-historical interpretations play out in their translated texts.

In this article, I explore interpretations and depictions of the Hebrew Bible in Swedish daily press between 1987 and 2017. As a point of departure, I examine three debates concerning three different aspects of the Hebrew Bible (in the debates understood as the “Old Testament”): its depictions of women, God, and homosexuality. The analysis shows that the Hebrew Bible tends to be portrayed as a problem, as the origin of patriarchy, as violent, and legalistic. I argue that several of the dominant discourses on the Hebrew Bible have connections to, and reproduce, anti-Jewish notions as expressed in the Christian history of ideas. Media actors reinforce what I call an antithetical ideology , that is, the idea that the “Old Testament” is the antithesis to the New, in the debates often reduced to the character of Jesus. The latter is always portrayed in a positive way, although there is a hegemonic struggle over the meaning of “Jesus.” At the end of the period, there is a shift in the object of comparison from the previous constructed binary contrast between “the Old” versus “the New” Testament to a comparison between “the Bible” and “the Quran.” Since media has become an important source of knowledge about religion, it is vital for biblical scholars to critically examine media representations of the bible. I argue that the type of bible that the debates co-structure could be termed a mediatized bible . By exploring media representations of the Hebrew Bible, the article also illustrates broader issues regarding the continuing presence of religion in so-called secular societies, persistent currents of anti-Judaism in (post)Christian biblical reception, and the benefit of using critical discourse analysis in reception critical studies.

A group of perhaps 2,000 Māori, whose main representative is Monica Matāmua, claim that they are not Māori or Polynesian but descendants of a White race they call the Hotu. They claim that they were the first to settle in Aotearoa New Zealand, more than a thousand years before Māori, so that they are the true Indigenous inhabitants of the land. Further, they hold to a conspiracy theory that claims evidence for White Hotu has been covered up by Māori and elites. This article examines the epistemic modes by which modern Hotu defend their contentions. A key foundation is their employment of the biblical motif of Paradise, by which they identify as an originally Edenic people, in contrast to Māori. The Hotu combine the authoritative biblical motif of Paradise with parallel epistemic foundations, including Māori traditions of original peoples, the colonial myth of a Pacific Paradise, and modern DNA testing. This article demonstrates how the Hotu generate epistemic authority not only via each epistemic mode, but via a hermetic-like combination of epistemic modes. The piling up of superficially similar epistemic claims provides a seemingly profound yet spurious basis for asserting White pre-Polynesian identity and origins. It also provides Hotu with a sense of agency that encourages their ongoing fight to reverse the damaging effects of colonization. Yet the Hotu contention to be descendants of a White pre-Polynesian people comes at the significant cost of demonizing Māori, absolving European colonizers, and emboldening many New Zealanders to deny Māori their Indigenous status.