The field of New Testament studies often appears splintered into widely different specializations and narrowly defined research projects. Nevertheless, some of the most important insights have come about when curious men and women have defied disciplinary boundaries and drawn on other fields of knowledge in order to gain a more adequate view of history. The essays in Bridges in New Testament Interpretation offer surveys of the current scholarly discussion in areas of New Testament and Chri...

As form criticism arose, the French anthropologist Marcel Jousse developed a hermeneutical paradigm, global in scope and prescient in its vision but opposed to the philological paradigm of biblical studies. While the philological methodology came to define modernity's biblical hermeneutics, Jousse's rhythmically energized paradigm was marginalized and largely forgotten. Although Jousse has left relatively few traces in writing, many of his more than one thousand lectures, delivered at four...

Oral and Manuscript Culture in the Bible is the fruit of Professor Loubser's confrontation with how Scripture is read, understood, and used in the Third World situation, which is closer than modern European societies to the social dynamics of the original milieu in which the texts were produced.

In April 2008 a conference was convened at Rice University that brought together experts in the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The papers discussed at the conference are presented here, revised and updated. The thirteen contributions comprise the keynote address by John Miles Foley; three essays on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible; three on the New Testament; three on the Qur'an; and two summarizing pieces, by the Africanist Ruth Finnegan and the Islamicist W...

Marcel Jousse's anthropology of mimism is a plea for a change of civilization. Our present-day Western civilization has decomposed the human being into a mind-soul-spirit and a body, put writing as the apex of this human's expression, and set this human as the conqueror of his world. Jousse pleads for a threefold re-composition: a human compound, expressing himself as a whole, and in exchange with a cosmos that he mimes and infuses with consciousness. What is needed is an evolution, neithe...