My Odyssey in New Testament Interpretation

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Karl Marx, when he was living in Highgate, London, was once asked to address a group of theologians. On his arrival, the meeting place was full of tobacco smoke, and Marx remarked, “Theologians always cloud the issues.” When I remind theologians of this, they invariably reply, “Yes, and you in biblical studies always simplify them.” If this be the case, the object we study, the Bible, is certainly not simple. The first Bibles I ever saw were bound in black covers—Bible black as a poet called it. They stood out, unattractive and somehow odd and strange. They evoked the […]

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Footnotes

Eschatology is the doctrine of the “last things” (eschata in Greek); it relates either to humans (concerning death, resurrection, judgment and afterlife) or to the world.

Apocalypticism is the doctrine that concerns the end of the temporal world and the literature dealing with the “last things.”

Endnotes

See on this question my article “Reflections on Thirty Years of Biblical Study,” The Scottish Journal of Theology, Festschrift for Hugh Anderson, vol. 39, 1986, pp. 43–64.

His best-known work is James W. Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Anti-Semitism (1934; reprinted New York: Atheneum, 1969).

Stephen Westerholm, “The British Connection: Dodd, Daube and Davies,” paper given at “Torah/Nomos Seminar,” annual meeting of The Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, 1983.

See my Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, Cambridge University Press, 1966, pp. 216–315.

On this question. see W. D. Davies, The Territorial Dimension in Judaism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982 and Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.