Perspectives on the Passion: Encountering the Bible through the Arts

(Hardback)

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There is a growing recognition of the importance of investigating the reception history (or afterlives') of biblical texts. How people have interpreted and been influenced by the Bible is often as interesting and historically important as what the text may have originally meant. Reception history is interdisciplinary by nature, examining material from a wide variety of contexts and media, and incorporating readings outside the academy, from both church and culture. This is a distinctive feature, broadening the horizons of material traditionally classed as biblical interpretation'. So artists, writers and composers are included as biblical interpreters alongside the academic and the religious believer. The present volume aims to contribute to this broad field of interest by focusing on the theme of the reception history of the passion narratives. The contributors highlight the varying cultural contexts of differing biblical interpretations of the Passion narratives, ranging from Christian Cannibalism and Human(e) Sacrifice: The Passion and the Conversion of the Aztecs' (Prof. Lara, Yale University) to Emblem and Irony: Passion Narrative in Post-Reformation Hymnody' (Prof. Watson, Durham University) to The Passion in Early Christian Art (Prof. Robin Jensen, Vanderbilt University). Significant hermeneutical questions are thereby raised about interpretation of the passion narratives.

Reviews

Mention -Book News, February 2009
"An enormously worthwhile volume" - The Glass
Review in International Review of Biblical Studies, vol. 54:2007/08
Reviewed in International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, Vol. 9, No. 1, Feb 2009, 57-72 -- David Brown
"This volume is well organised and introduced, and each of the essays nicely describes a moment in the passion's ecclesial and artistic reception." -Richard Walsh, The Bible and Critical Theory, Vol. 6
Reviewed by John Court, 12 September 2008 * Church Times *

Author Bio

Christine Joynes is Associate Director of the Centre for Reception History of the Bible at Oxford University, UK. She is currently writing the Blackwell Bible Commentary, Mark's Gospel Through the Centuries, and co-ordinating a project entitled Biblical Women and their Afterlives.