Nowadays, the studies on the Bible deal with very different aspects: religion history, philology and literature, history and archaeology of the ancient world, anthropology and sociology, philosophy and theology. These studies are essentially interdisciplinary and all the thought trends, daughters of Modernity and adopted by Post-modernity, affect them. It is not possible to deal with all these studies, but it is important to find a place from which we can scan them and focus our eyes on one direction.
However, this “History of the Bible”, jointly published by the Universidad de Granada and the Trotta Publishing House, has revolutionized the traditional approach of an «Introduction to the la Bible», which has consisted, according to the authors, of presenting “the formation, structure, literary genre and content of all the biblical books, by canonical or historical order. This work goes back to the moment in which the Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible became a book, the Book of Books, with a rich and complex history of transmission, translation and interpretation of its inexhaustible sense throughout two thousand years.
Miguel Pérez and Julio Trebolle’s book, with about 350 pages, has been structures in 21 chapters in which they deal with the languages of the Bible, the scriptures, their written and oral transmission, the scribes, Alexandrine philosophy and the Bible, the Holy Book, the Biblical Canon, the literary and social History of the Canon, the canon of the New Testament, the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Greek version of the LXX, the Aramean versions of the Old and the New Testaments, old versions of the Bible, textual critics of the Old and the New Testaments; as well as a four-chapter section devoted to interpretation: the Bible, interpreter of itself, history of the Jewish and Christian hermeneutics, and history of the Bible in Spain.
The volume, which includes a CD, is according to the authors, “a course practised and matured with university students through different subjects.”
According to the authors of this book, “the Bible has not been written by an only author, by an only geographical and social scene nor a reduced period of time. The passing from one language to another involves the passing from one culture to another, from certain interests to another, from certain authors and readers to another. Anyone who takes a Bible will notice that it is not a unitary book, but a collection of very different writings, joined in one book: religious narrations of Jesus of Nazareth”.
Reference:
Professor Miguel Pérez Fernández. Department of Semitic Studies. Universidad de Granada.
Phone number. 968 182 041; Mobile: 686 218 414. E-mail: miperfer@telefonica.net
