Overview

The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies examines the creation of the academic Bible. Beginning with the fragmentation of biblical interpretation in the centuries after the Reformation, Michael Legaspi shows how the weakening of scriptural authority in the Western churches altered the role of biblical interpretation. Focusing on renowned German scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791), Legaspi explores the ways in which critics reconceived the role of the Bible. This book offers a new account of the origins of biblical studies, illuminating the relation of the Bible to churchly readers, theological interpreters, academic critics, and people in between. It explains why, in an age of religious resurgence, modern biblical criticism may no longer be in a position to serve as the Bible's disciplinary gatekeeper.

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9780199845880

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<br> Theologians should thank [Legaspi] for initiating what one hopes will be a long and fruitful, if not irenic, conversation. --Theological Studies<p><br>

This fascinating study, arising out of a PhD dissertation, focuses ostensibly on obscure German critic Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791), but tells the wider story of the changes in academic perspectives on the Bible over the last few centuries very well. * Dr Lee Gatiss, Churchman *

Theologians should thank [Legaspi] for initiating what one hopes will be a long and fruitful, if not irenic, conversation. --Theological Studies The primary value of this volume, and it is considerable, is for those interested in the particulars of German university culture in the eighteenth century. --Lutheran Quarterly

<br> This spellbinding narrative reveals the deep intellectual roots of the modernist enterprise of historical critical exegesis. No one will be able to engage this craft in the same fashion after grappling with the narrative this book so profoundly explores. <br>-- Gary Anderson, Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, Notre Dame. <br> Michael Legaspi's wonderfully readable revisionist essay displays precisely the fundamental reconceptualizations necessary to displace historical whiggishness. Widely-read and consistently sure-footed in the complexities of the history of ideas in their cultural contexts, Legaspi shows how the origins of modern biblical studies, especially as focussed in the eighteenth-century figure of Johann Michaelis, has left the enduring legacy of an academic Bible which tends to displace rather than illumine the scriptural Bible of Jews and Christians. Legaspi here begins to do for biblical study something of what Michael Buckley's At the Origins of Modern A

Author Information

Michael Legaspi is an Instructor in Philosophy and Religious Studies at Philips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

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