Introduction

violence and the canon

pp. 1-13

in: David Jasper, Readings in the canon of scripture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1995

Abstract

Hans Frei in his monumental study The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative charts the development of what we would now call the historical critical study of the Bible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the price which was paid for the rise of this technical discipline. Not that it did — and does — not repay us with undoubted benefits and a rich harvest. But what was lost was the sense of the Bible as writing, as text; history replaced story. The pendulum has now, to a certain extent, swung the other way with the fashion of literary approaches to the Bible, introducing a language and terminology from modern literary criticism which still tends to arouse suspicion and even hatred in the hearts and minds of well-bred biblical critics. From a sometimes crude notion of history and an unquestioned faith in the biblical authors and their theological intentions, attention has begun to shift to the text itself, with a nod towards the thinking of Russian Formalism, New Criticism and various brands of structuralism, and finally to the reader or listener.