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© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156851511X595530 Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 brill.nl/bi Biblical Interpretation orn Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures Timothy Beal Case Western Reserve University Abstract After highlighting the substantial gains made by the reception historical approach, this article proceeds to point out some of its inherent limitations, particularly when applied to biblical texts. In attending to the material-aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts, media, and ideas of the Bible, especially in dialogue with anthropological, material- historical, and media-historical approaches, these limitations become acute and call for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly reception-historical approach. is article proposes to move beyond reception history to cultural history, from research into how biblical texts and the Bible itself are received to how they are cultur- ally produced as discursive objects. Such a move would involve a double turn in the focus of biblical scholarship and interpretation: from hermeneutical reception to cul- tural production, and from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture, especially religious culture, via its productions of scripture. As such, it would bring biblical research into fuller and more significant dialogue with other fields of com- parative scriptural studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities and social sciences in general. Keywords reception history, cultural history, hermeneutics, media history, material scripture, Jauss, Gadamer, Foucault, Wilfred Canwell Smith, Jonathan Z. Smith Four decades ago, Qurʾanic scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith called atten- tion to the new vistas that were opening for biblical scholarship thanks to the emergence of departments of religious studies within institutions of “the liberal arts,” that is, colleges of humanities and social sciences.1 1) W.C. Smith, “e Study of Religion and the Study of the Bible,” JAAR 39 (1971), pp. 131-40; see also What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: For- 358 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 Such contexts, he suggested, require a shift from teaching religion to studying it as a human phenomenon. In that context, he called for a course of study focused on “the Bible as scripture,” with scripture as a “generic phenomenon,” allowing comparison of the concepts and roles of “scripture as a religious form” in different traditions and communi- ties throughout history.2 Framed this way, biblical research and teach- ing would involve “investigation into the history of the Bible over the past twenty centuries,” treating it “not merely as a set of ancient docu- ments or even as a first- and second-century product but as a third- century and twelfth-century and nineteenth-century and contemporary agent.”3 Smith’s articulation of the goals of Qurʾanic historical research would apply as well to biblical research: “… to understand how it has fired the imagination, and inspired the poetry, and formulated the inhibitions, and guided the ecstasies, and teased the intellects, and ordered the family relations and the legal chicaneries, and nurtured the piety, of hundreds of millions of people in widely diverse climes and over a series of radically divergent centuries.”4 In this light, research into what produced the Bible and other scriptures would continue to be an important field of inquiry, but it would be secondary to research into what they have produced. In his recent lecture to the Society of Biblical Literature on “Reli- gion and the Bible,” Jonathan Z. Smith, recalls and reiterates Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s often disregarded challenge to biblical scholars to carry out research within the context of academic religious studies.5 Offering several late nineteenth-century examples of comparative reli- gionists whose research focused substantially on biblical and ancient Near Eastern languages and literatures, including Max Müller, Morris Jastrow, Jr., and Cornelius P. Tiele, Smith sees the best hope for a pro- ductive future for biblical studies qua religious studies to be in the emerging field of the reception history of the Bible. tress, 1993). 2) W.C. Smith, pp. 132-33. 3) W.C. Smith, pp. 133-34. 4) W.C. Smith, p. 133; italics added. 5) J.Z. Smith, “Religion and the Bible,” Journal of Biblical Literature 128 (2009), pp. 5-27. T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 359 e reception history of the Bible is concerned, most basically, with the history of the reception of biblical texts, stories, images, and char- acters through the centuries in the form of citation, interpretation, read- ing, revision, adaptation, and influence.6 As such, it goes well beyond the previous generation of research into the history of biblical interpre- tation, embracing the broadest possible definition of “interpretation” to include not only academic and theological readings but also biblical appearances in visual art, literature, music, politics, and other works of culture, from “high” to “low.” At its best, it also focuses on the histor- ically and culturally particular hermeneutical rules that shape and gov- ern the creation of meaning from biblical texts in particular contexts. Many reception-historical studies are longitudinal, exploring a partic- ular biblical book, character, or image through the ages (e.g., a recep- tion history of the book of Ruth or the character of Naomi from the earliest to the most recent post-biblical appearances in as many social and cultural works and contexts as can be found).7 Others are literary- historical, examining the use of biblical texts in particular cultural con- texts (e.g., a study of the reception history of biblical passages about slavery in the context of debates over Frederick Douglass’s autobio- graphical Narrative).8 e impact of reception history upon biblical studies is proving to be profound, comparable to the influence of source criticism and form 6) J.F.A. Sawyer, who has been a leading influence on its development over the past two decades, defines it simply as “the history of how a text has influenced communities and cultures down the centuries,” in Sacred Language and Sacred Texts (London: Rout- ledge, 1999), p. 2. 7) Prime examples of reception-historical studies of biblical books are the Blackwell Bible Commentaries: rough the Centuries; abundant examples of reception-histor- ical studies of biblical characters across the centuries are available in H.-J. Klauck, B. McGinn, P. Mendes-Flohr, C.-L. Seow, and H. Spieckermann (eds.), e Encyclo- pedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 1, Aaron-Aniconism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009). 8) I refer to the excellent example by S. Mailloux, “Ideological Rhetoric and Bible Politics: Fuller Reads Douglass,” in Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), which examines Margaret Fuller’s 1845 review of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative in relation to concur- rent conflicting interpretations of particular biblical texts, slave narratives, secular and religious newspapers, and philosophical and political treatises concerning slavery. 360 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 criticism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to the influence of rhetorical and literary criticism over the past several decades.9 Indeed, its influence shows no sign of waning. Every year sees increasing numbers of reception-historical articles, monographs, books, and dissertations in biblical studies; there is an active Centre for Recep- tion History of the Bible at Oxford University; the Blackwell Bible Commentaries series is well on its way to producing receptionhisto- ries of every biblical book; Walter de Gruyter has published the first two volumes of its Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (EBR), and a host of biblical scholars around the world are working on entries for the estimated thirty volumes yet to come; the Oxford University Press will soon publish e Oxford Handbook of Reception History of the Bible; academic journals in biblical studies such as Postscripts and Bib- lical Interpretation are publishing increasing numbers of articles on bib- lical reception history; and David J.A. Clines and Cheryl Exum are launching a new journal devoted exclusively to this reception-histori- cal research on biblical literature.10 In what follows, I should like first to highlight the substantial gains made by biblical reception history, but then proceed to point out some of its limitations. When we attend to the material-aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts, media, and ideas of the Bible and the biblical, espe- cially in dialogue with anthropological, material-historical, and media- historical approaches, these limitations become particularly clear, and call for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly recep- tion historical approach. Such a turn will put biblical scholarship into fuller and more meaningful dialogue with other fields of scriptural 9) Cf. J. Muilenberg, “Form Criticism and Beyond,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 88 (1969), pp. 1-18. Echoes of that essay are intentional. 10) See also the books in the series, Afterlives of the Bible, co-edited by Tod Linafelt and myself, and published by the University of Chicago Press from 2004 to 2009. Most of its titles, including our co-edited Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and e Passion of the Christ, could justifiably be included in the growing bibliogra- phy of reception-historical biblical research. In fact, J.Z. Smith, p. 23, specifically mentions this series as an example of biblical reception history, quoting the following from our original prospectus to the press: “Books in the series will not simply read the Bible ‘backward’ toward its hypothetical origins but read it ‘forward,’ invigorating the study of biblical literature by opening it towards issues, approaches, and literatures lying outside the current disciplinary confines of biblical scholarship.” T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 361 studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities in general. I hasten to add that this emerging perspective would not be conceivable without the foundation that has been laid by biblical reception history in recent years. eoretical Roots of the Reception History of the Bible e thickest and healthiest theoretical roots of biblical reception history are found primarily in Hans Robert Jauss’s “aesthetics of reception,” which he developed in a series of essays in the late 1960s and early 70s.11 Jauss argued that the meaning of a text is located neither in the text itself nor in the experience of the reader, but in the relationship between the two. Literature, he argued, does not exist independent of the history of its reception by readers; it is, rather, a dynamic, historically situated relationship between production and reception: … the relationship of work to work must now be brought into this interaction between work and mankind, and the historical coherence of works among themselves must be seen in the interrelations of production and reception. Put another way: literature and art only obtain a history that has the character of a process when the succession of works is mediated not only through the producing subject but also through the consuming subject—through the interaction of author and public.12 us Jauss’s reception aesthetics sought to mediate between, on the one hand, historicizing approaches to literature that locate meaning strictly 11) See esp. H.R. Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary eory,” New Literary History 1 (1970), pp. 7-37, which is a translation of chapters V-XII of Liter- aturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft (Konstanz, 1967). It is included, along with other related essays, in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (trans. T. Bahti; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 12) Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic, p. 15; cf. Mailloux, p. 75: “An act of reading is precisely the historical intersection of the different cultural rhetorics for interpreting such texts within the social practices of particular historical communities.” Roughly contempo- rary with Jauss’s development of his aesthetics, Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality, which conceives of every text as a “field of transpositions of various signifying systems,” emphasizes the point that a text’s in “original” creation is likewise an event of produc- tion and reception. See J. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (abridged; trans. M. Waller; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 60. 362 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 in a text’s original context and production, and, on the other hand, aesthetic approaches that treat texts as trans-historical works whose meaning is found strictly in the reader’s present experience of them. “If the history of literature is viewed in this way as a dialogue between work and public, the contrast between its aesthetic and its historical aspects is also continually mediated. us the thread from the past appearance to the present experience of a work, which historicism had cut, is tied together.”13 In this light, a work of literature is not a “fact” but an “event,” a moment of meaningful relationship, and the study of that event must be historicized just as much as any earlier event, includ- ing the text’s beginnings. Indeed, the creation of a text is as much an event of production and reception as any subsequent moment in its literary history.14 A primary theoretical influence on Jauss’s aesthetics of reception was Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as developed in Truth and Method (originally published in German in 1960 as Warheit und Methode), in particular two key concepts: first, his principle of Wirkungsgeschichte, usually translated as “effective history” (sometimes translated “history of effects” or “impacts”), which refers to the histor- ical and linguistic situatedness of every human subject; and, second, his related conception of interpretation as a “fusion” of two horizons, that is, the horizon of the work (literary or artistic) which comes to the interpreter from a distant, incommensurable past, and the horizon of the interpreter, situated within her own subjective “effective history.” Understanding, for Gadamer, is the surmounting of the distance between those two horizons through the making of a new interpreta- tion that is a fusion of them. In this way, Gadamer accomplishes a “rehabilitation of prejudice,” insisting on the “historical and linguistic situatedness” of any human subject in the process of interpretation.15 13) Jauss, “Literary History,” p. 8 14) Jauss, “Literary History,” p. 24. 15) H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall; New York: Continuum, 1989); first published as Warheit und Methode (Tübingen, 1960). e principle of Wirkungsgeschichte and the concept of the fusion of horizons are summarized in William E. Deal and Timothy Beal, eory for Religious Studies (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 77-78, and helpfully explicated vis-à-vis biblical studies in U. Luz, “e Contribution of Reception History to a eology of the New T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 363 As New Testament scholar Ulrich Luz puts it, Gadamer’s principle of Wirkungsgeschichte “gave us back to history … Neither history nor texts of the past are simply objects of research: rather, they belongto the stream of history which also carries the boat of the interpreter.”16 It would be difficult to overestimate Gadamer’s influence on Jauss, whose aesthetics of reception is, in many ways, an interruption of Gadamer’s notions of history and interpretation within the discourse of literary theory. Jauss essentially argued, in good Gadamerian fash- ion, that literary history is not a history of influence from an original text on its subsequent readers, but rather a history of hermeneutical fusions of horizons of pasts and presents, and that all of this history is part of the historical development and concretization of a work’s mean- ing, thus transforming the canon itself over time within different “hori- zons of expectations” which are by no means individual but are constructed by one’s culture, language, psychology, and so on (i.e., one’s “effective history”).17 At the same time, Jauss pushed Gadamer’s notions farther than Gadamer himself took them, and in the process underscored the spe- cial value of his approach for biblical studies. Gadamer, he pointed out, wanted to distinguish the “classical” work from other works as that which, by its very nature, does not require the surmounting of histor- ical distance. In every age, Gadamer had claimed, the classic continu- ously overcomes that distance in itself; it “means itself and interprets itself.”18 Jauss criticized this view as an example of “second horizon change: the unquestioning acceptance as self-evident of a so-called mas- terwork, which conceals its negativity in the retrospective horizon of an exemplary tradition and necessitates our regaining of the ‘right hori- zon of questioning’ in the face of guaranteed classicism.”19 us he insisted on a hermeneutical distance from so-called classics that recog- nizes not only the history of contextual productions of meaning around Testament,” in C. Rowland, C.M. Tuckett, and R. Morgan (eds.), e Nature of New Testament eology: Essays in Honour of Robert Morgan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 124-25. 16) Luz, p. 125. 17) Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic, p. 147. 18) Gadamer, quoted by Jauss, “Literary History,” p. 21. 19) Jauss, “Literary History,” p. 22. 364 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 these texts but also the vested interests and conflicts of interpretation therein, interests and conflicts that begin within texts themselves. Possibilities and Limits of the Reception History of the Bible Informed by Jauss’s aesthetics of reception, which was itself informed by Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy, biblical reception history at its best conceives biblical literary history not as the history of the influ- ence of an original “classic” text, but as the ongoing, culturally-specific process of relationship between texts and readers. To transpose Jauss, we can say that biblical literature is not a fact but an event, a dialectic relationship of production and reception. As such, biblical reception his- tory has called for a new level of critical attention to the historically specific, subjective horizon of every interpretation, that is, the various conditions of subjection that constitute the reading subject and thus shape the meaning-making process. It also rejects the idea of the Bible or any particular biblical text as a Gadamerian “classic” or “masterwork” that interprets itself meaningfully into any horizon. Indeed, in the process of researching the inevitably diverse and conflicted reception history of any particular biblical text, that notion quickly begins to appear absurd. Reception history is potentially revolutionary for the field of bibli- cal studies in at least two respects. First, in its mediation between his- torical and aesthetic approaches (insisting that it is all effective history, always both production and reception), it possesses the welcome poten- tial to overcome the tired, decades-old opposition between so-called historical-critical approaches (source-critical, form-critical, redaction- critical, and textual-critical) and literary-critical approaches (new-crit- ical, reader-response, structuralist, poststructuralist, etc.) within the field of biblical studies. Second, and more significantly, insofar as it is less interested in discovering meaning in biblical texts than it is in how meaning is made from biblical texts in different cultural contexts, past and present, it has the potential to bring biblical scholarship into more significant conversation with other fields of academic religious studies.20 20) e discovery of meaning in biblical texts, whether such meaning is pursued his- torical-critically, in terms of their “original” historical context, or literary-critically, in T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 365 Yet, I wish to argue that reception history per se does not, indeed cannot, carry biblical studies far enough into a reengagement with com- parative scriptures and therefore academic religious studies. I wish to identify three specific limitations, all of which are inherent to its theo- retical and methodological framework in philosophical hermeneutics. e first two limitations are, in my view, general limitations of recep- tion history in any field, whereas the last and most serious limitation is specific to biblical studies. All of them are brought to light most clearly when we take into account the material and medial dimensions of scriptures, past and present. First, the reception historical approach conceives of the received work primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of literary content, that is, as immaterial, disembodied words that are embodied and given material form through the production-reception dialectic on different horizons of meaning—words made flesh, so to speak, in different effective-his- torical contexts. Rooted in philosophical hermeneutics, whose own his- tory has roots in biblical hermeneutics, reception history remains oriented towards the interpretation of words and the Word. To be sure, reception history can and does examine the material forms and embod- ied actions that those words take in the process of reception, and there are many fine examples of that sort of research in biblical reception his- tory.21 But its hermeneutical orientation leaves little if any room for the materiality and mediality of scriptures themselves, and how that light of their aesthetic qualities, has been the primary aim of academic biblical studies, especially in the United States, where its most influential disciplinary centers have emerged from and in relation to educational institutions established to serve religious bodies. 21) See, e.g., the model works D.M. Gunn: “Colonialism and the Vagaries of Scrip- ture: Te Kooti in Canaan (A Story of Bible and Dispossession in Aotearoa/New Zealand),” in T. Linafelt and T.K. Beal (eds.), God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter Brueggemann (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), pp. 127-142; and “Covering David: Michelangelo’s David from the Piazza della Signoria to My Refrigerator Door,” D.M. Gunn and P.M. McNutt (eds.), ‘Imagining’ Biblical Worlds: Spatial, Social and His- torical Constructs in Honor of James W. Flanagan (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), pp. 139-70. ese and other works by Gunn begin to move beyond reception history proper and toward what I will call cultural history of scriptures, examining different forms of what I call the “sacred capital” of scriptures in different cultural 366 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 materiality interacts with their historical and material embodiments in the production-reception process. is privileging of scriptural content over scriptural materiality turns reception history away from much potentially fruitful comparative research. Indeed, there is at least as much potential for comparison of human interactions (ritual andoth- erwise) with the materiality of scripture—studied anthropologically, cultural-historically, cognitive-scientifically, and from a sensual stud- ies perspective—as there is for comparison of scriptural contents and their interpretations. Such research is largely bracketed out by the lit- erary orientation of biblical reception history. Some might argue that this first limitation is surmountable from within biblical reception history. It is not an inherent limit; material- and media-historical approaches to the biblical can be added. Perhaps, but they would be necessarily secondary to the main focus on recep- tion as influence, impact, and interpretation. At best, the materiality of scriptures and human interactions with that materiality are supple- mental to biblical reception history. At worst, they are ignored entirely, as in the common “Adam-and-Eve-through-the-centuries” approach to biblical reception history, where the particularities of material scrip- tures would come as interruptions to the grand narrative being pre- sented. Second, in disregarding or at least downplaying the materiality of scripture itself, reception history also brackets off critical attention to the economic aspects of scriptural production, marketing, and con- sumption, and to the way those processes trade in various unstable forms of social, cultural, financial, and sacred capital. To be sure, lit- erary reception history can and sometimes does attend critically to the socio-economic conditions and social/cultural capital of particular read- ers and their vested interests, especially in terms of class, sex and gen- der, race, and ethnicity. And biblical reception histories are often centrally concerned with the ways in which biblical words are wielded in order to gain or challenge hegemonic power. But historical-critical attention to the cultural and socio-economic processes of production, marketing, and consumption of Bibles and the biblical is lacking; indeed, contexts (Timothy Beal, e Rise and Fall of the Bible: e Unexpected History of an Accidental Book [New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011], pp. 75-78). T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 367 they are largely precluded by this approach’s preclusion of attention to the particular thingnesses of Bibles and the biblical.22 ird, “reception” implies origination, an original work to be received and interpreted on subsequent effective-historical horizons. is is an especially acute problem for biblical studies, insofar as there is no orig- inal, singular “the Bible” to be received through history. We may per- ceive an undercurrent of uneasiness about this problem in some definitions of the reception history of the Bible. James Barr, for exam- ple, in noting that biblical reception historians are undertaking an “his- torical, evidence-based operation,” rather than a theological one, writes that they “direct their gaze towards what was done with texts after they were composed, after they were finalized.”23 e wording here acknowl- edges no solid original—that, as most biblical scholars would argue, the further we go back in the literary history of most biblical texts, the more diversity we find.24 Barr therefore shifts ahead, to a later time when they were “finalized.”25 But when exactly did that take place, and 22) Note, moreover, that Jauss’s own economic language, quoted earlier, is figurative: “consuming subject” is a metaphor for the reader attending to the work; and “systems” of “literary production” refer to the processes of production of literary meanings, not of literary things. 23) J. Barr, Biblical eology: An Old Testament Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), p. 447; italics added. 24) Cf. a kindred uneasy vagueness in Luz’s description, p. 123, of the focus of New Testament reception history on “the reception of biblical texts in periods subsequent to New Testament times.” 25) As early as 1965, in his presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature, K.W. Clark asked “if there really was a stable text at the beginning,” or at least whether it “remained stable long enough to hold a priority.” e address was published a year later as “e eological Relevance of Textual Variation in Current Criticism of the Greek New Testament,” Journal of Biblical Literature 85 (1966), pp. 1-16. On textual criticism and the question of a common original source in Jewish Scriptures, especially in light of Dead Sea Scrolls discoveries, see E. Tov, “Textual Criticism (OT),” e Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, pp. 393-412. Much earlier, P.E. Kahle, “Untersuchun- gen zur Geschicthe des Pentateuchtextes,” eologische Studien und Kritiken 88 (1915), pp. 399-439, argued that there was no “Ur-text” (single original text), but rather mul- tiple versions of Jewish Scriptures (Vulgärtexte) from the earliest times. He did so based on rabbinical quotations and differences among Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew versions known before the discoveries at Qumran. Tov partially disagrees with Kahle and his followers, arguing that there was an Ur-text, which he defines as the “finalized literary 368 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 for which version or canon? Where and when is the starting point, when finalization is completed and reception begins? After the early second century, when the latest Christian texts now in the canon were writ- ten? In the fourth century, when Athanasius’s Easter letter gives the earliest known list of scriptures that matches the canon as we now know it? (Surely Athanasius would not have asserted that list if there had not been other contenders.) After Jerome’s Vulgate? After that Vulgate was more or less standardized, “finalized,” centuries later? Would that mean Jerome and other early theologians, not to mention rabbinic scholars, would be pre-reception-historical? ese questions, of course, are already severely limiting of the many possible forms of finalization, presuming as they do that “the Bible” refers to a Christian canon of scriptures. e problems are clear even when we focus narrowly on trying to identify a finalized, reception-ready version of the literary content of a Christian canon of scriptures. When we broaden our scope to attend to the material history of scriptures, they become far more glaring. Indeed, if there is one thing the material history of Bibles makes extremely clear, it is that there is no such thing as the Bible, and there never has been. ere is no Gadamerian or Jaussian other horizon of “the text” to be received and understood within effective history. e Bible is not a thing but an idea, or rather a constellation of often competing, hetero- geneous ideas, more or less related to a wide variety of material bibli- cal things. Truly overwhelming evidence of this fact may be found even within print culture among the many thousands of widely varied Bibles archived in the special collections of the American Bible Society in New York; or in the descriptions of various biblical contents and forms in T.H. Darlowe and F.H. Moule’s Historical Catalogue of the Printed Edi- tions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Soci- ety.26 ere is no “e Bible,” only “the Bibles,” a paradoxical construct product which incorporated the last recognizable literary editing of the book.” Yet he recognizes that other versions (earlier editions, for example) would not have disap- peared at that point, and so there were, even then, multiple versions. Moreover, he sees subsequent generations of scribes making various changes, intentional and uninten- tional, to that Ur-text, so that the period of the early first century was one of great textual variety. 26) T.H. Darlowe and F.H. Moule, Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society(London: e Bible T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 369 I use here to highlight the material and literary manyness of the one and only Bible. All that to say, “reception” of what, which, and from whence? Behind this problem lies a partial misconstruing of Gadamer’s Wirkungsgechichte as “history of effects” or “impacts” rather than “effec- tive history.” “History of effects” invites biblical scholars to offer his- torical narratives of the effects or impacts or influences of biblical texts through time. But, as Luz rightly points out, “effective history” is the better translation, insofar as Gadamer’s aim was to challenge “histori- cal objectivity that is satisfied with the reconstruction of the ‘historical horizon’ of a text of the past only … History [as Wirkungsgeschichte] is for him the basic element that enables our life. History is effective, because we owe to it almost everything we are: our culture, our lan- guage, our questions and our worldviews” (124-25). Gadamer’s phi- losophy of effective history therefore does not lend itself to the reception history of the Bible or any “work.” Yes, his hermeneutics describes interpretation as a process of fusion of horizons, but Wirkungsgeschichte is not the history of those processes, let alone the history of those pro- cesses on a single work, biblical or otherwise, through time. His effec- tive history is not a historical narrative but a conception of subjective history. ere is no effective history of something. It’s all Wirkungsge- schichte all the way down. at is certainly true of the Bible, which is not only received through the centuries in different cultural contexts but is also variously made and remade within these contexts, driven as much by more or less conscious ideological struggles as by commercial competition. Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures e rise of the reception history of the Bible has indeed been revolu- tionary. Yet, with an eye on the horizon it has opened, its limits also become clear, especially when we try to incorporate the material and House, 1903-11). Based on this work and the collections of the American Bible Soci- ety, I provide many examples from the wide variety of form, format, and content published as “the Bible” in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in e Rise and Fall of the Bible, pp. 131-144. 370 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 media histories of scriptures, both of which call our attention to the relationships of thing and idea, materiality and text, medium and mes- sage, sensual-aesthetic experience and linguistic interpretation. All of which relations highlight the fact that there is no the Bible or the biblical to be received, but rather multiple, often competing, symbolic and material productions of them that are generated and generative in dif- ferent scriptural cultures. With the rise of reception history, biblical studies has begun to make the cultural turn from cause, impact, and influence to meaning. But it has not, I suggest, gone far enough. It is time to move beyond biblical reception history to an approach that keeps the following concerns front and center. First, our approach must recognize, up front, that “the Bible,” “the biblical” and related language represent cultural concepts whose rela- tionships with cultural productions of particular material objects, sym- bolic contents, and embodied interactions are far from self-evident or fixed. What Michel Foucault said of subjects of historical research such as medicine and the state may also be said of the Bible and the bibli- cal: they are not given or self-evident intellectual objects to be partic- ularized or incarnated in various interpretations through time; they are, rather, historically given “discursive objects,” constantly changing as they are made and remade in different cultural productions of mean- ing.27 Second, our approach must be open to any and all material and media forms for scripture. “e Bible” as the name of our subject does not fit this bill, insofar as it presumes a canonical whole, which does not in fact exist, and insofar as a common dimension of the cultural meaning of the Bible today is its bookishness. Indeed, the Bible often stands as a veritable icon of print and bibliographic culture. ird, our approach must account for the fact that scriptural culture is always material as well as symbolic, sensual as well as semantic. It is 27) Lynn Hunt, “Introduction: History, Culture, Text,” and Patricia O’Brien, “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” in Lynn Hunt (ed.), e New Cultural History (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1989). Michel Foucault’s genealogical interest in historicizing how “truth effects” are produced within particular cultural discourses is central to cultural history as discussed below. T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 371 about things as much as ideas, form as much as content, medium as much as message, and performance as much as interpretation. I suggest that these priorities call for a move beyond reception his- tory of the Bible to cultural history of the Bible. Why cultural history rather than reception history? Cultural history encompasses reception history even as it opens toward horizons of research that are beyond reception history’s theoretical and methodological reach. e rise of cultural history over the past several decades has marked a shift in the focus of historical research from cause, which had previously dominated political, social, and economic historical research, to meaning, based on anthropological approaches, including several that are familiar to religionists, such as those of Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, and Marshall Sahlin. In relation to the reception history of the Bible, the turn to cultural history of scriptures would signal a parallel shift in focus from the impacts or influences of biblical texts and Bibles to the cultural meanings of them, as well as of the biblical and the Bible, insofar as those too are discursive objects whose meaning and value are culturally produced. In this light, the cultural history of the Bible and other scriptures involves a radical shift in orientation in two respects. First, it is a shift from hermeneutical reception to cultural production, that is, from con- ceiving of biblical interpretation as receiving from the horizon of the past that which has been passed down to us from the beginning, so to speak, to conceiving of biblical texts, the Bible, and the biblical as dis- cursive objects that are continually generated and regenerated within particular cultural contexts in relation to complex genealogies of mean- ing that are themselves culturally produced. Second, this approach shifts from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture, espe- cially religious culture, via scripture. As such, it presumes that the proper academic context for biblical studies is religious studies and, more gen- erally, the academic humanities. I would propose, moreover, that the cultural history of the Bible, in all its material, literary, and ideal forms, be pursued as a subfield within the cultural history of scriptures within academic religious studies. Not only will such an orientation advance the kind of critical, comparative engagement with research and scholarship on other religious scriptures and their scriptural cultures that both Wilfred Cantwell Smith and 372 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 Jonathan Z. Smith have advocated, but it will also maintain the mate- rial and medial dimensions of the Bible and the biblical, especially inso- far as these terms are culturally linked to ideas of the book and print, as we discussed earlier. Indeed, today, beholding the twilight of book culture and the dawn of digitalnetwork culture, and wondering what on earth might come next, we are aware more than ever before in the history of critical biblical research and interpretation of the inextrica- bility of message and medium, word and thing, reception and produc- tion. Copyright of Biblical Interpretation is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
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