ME FEZ PENSAR © 2009 DANIEL SANTOS

Texto lido:
ROGERSON, J. W. and LIEU, J. M. eds. Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008. xviii + 896 pp. £27.50/$55.00.
Comentário:
The very idea of putting together a handbook of biblical studies should alert the
informed reader about the longstanding difficulties with regard to synchronizing the
contributions coming from just about everywhere. At the core of such difficulty is the
uncertainty regarding the way one should handle the many issues related to the subject. The
editors are well aware that synchronizing does not entail harmonizing the contributions,
instead, the “diversity that becomes apparent in the Handbook is a reliable guide to the
present state of biblical studies” (p. xvii). That continues to be the aim and certainly the main
contribution of The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies—to encourage scholars to integrate
and contextualize their findings into this diverse whole.
The opening essays on the history of the discipline show us that the resultant picture
“is that of a discipline full of vigour, offering many new challenges and possibilities” (p. 22). In
this regard it is encouraging to see the integration of the essays on the contribution of
archaeology (Bartlett) and ANE studies (Lambert and Kitchen), in section 2, with their
“counterpart” in part 5 dealing with methods in biblical scholarship: “The main problem of
biblical archaeology was that it was one-sided, attempting to fit archaeological evidence into
the mould set by biblical historians” (p. 576). The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies is an
attempt to interfere with this one-sided approach by making available in one volume a sizable
collection of contributions. This is a significant contribution of the handbook, namely, to
acknowledge the impact that other disciplines have upon biblical scholarship.
Since its first appearance in 2005, the Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies has been
reviewed and criticized from different angles; the last section on authority seems to attract all
types of reaction. The essay by Harriet Harris dealing with Fundamentalism has been criticized
elsewhere in that “the primary focus seemed to be on critiquing fundamentalism, rather than
describing the larger (and quite varied) landscape of views about how the Bible functions
authoritatively today”. Yet, Harris ends her essay with a review of Kevin Vanhoozer’s
contribution on the subject, saying that he responds to fundamentalism by offering the
conditions for a theology constructed differently, in which the triune God is the ground of faith
and Scripture, and the Spirit speaks through Scripture to make it efficacious. On a
fundamentalist rendering, by contrast, Scripture is the ground of faith, meaning that it is the
basis upon which we know anything about God, and the triune God inspires and interprets
Scriptures in order to ensure the sufficiency of the evidence it contains. This section on
authority ends with an essay by
J. W. Rogerson, who is conscious that the section will seek to do the impossible,
namely, to describe how and in what ways the Bible is authoritative. For Rogerson, the
impossibility has to do with the many different ways in which such authority is viewed by
different churches (p. 853).
Unfortunately, the purpose of such a promising project can be easily defeated by the selective
reader who bypasses the synchronizing character of the handbook genre and focuses on the
conflicting voices in the essays. Being involved in Latin American scholarship, I certainly
welcome the project of a handbook on biblical studies for the simple reason that it fosters
contribution without isolation, a problem that has characterized much of the Latin American
voice in current discussion.
Daniel Santos
http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/publications/34-1/book-reviews/the-oxford-handbook-of-biblical-studies