British New Testament Society

With the notable exception of Luz's work, most commentaries on the NT treat history of reception as at best an adjunct to historical criticism, at worst as a way of collecting interesting curios. At best, readings garnered from Christian history may help to refine or confirm certain views. In most cases they serve to reinforce the view that historical criticism is the touchstone against which `pre-critical' readings of the New Testament should be measured.

This paper will consider first Luz's use of Auslegungsgeschichte in his Matthew commentary in which he shows how the history of the formation of Matthew's Gospel (tradition and redaction criticism) has produced a text which is a rich source of subsequent readings, demonstrating its Sinnpotential. Thus his aim is no longer to discover the literal/original meaning of the text but to demonstrate and explain the sources of the multivalency of the text.

The remainder of the paper will consider: to what extent a primarily reception historical study of a text should embrace a different set of goals to Luz's; how far such a study requires a somewhat different theoretical underpinning; what place historical critical studies should assume in such a task. It will be argued that the primary aim of a reception historical study is to analyse the literary history of a text in order to enable/provide resources for the generation of new readings and that in this undertaking the work of Hans-Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser provide valuable resources.

Finally we will consider in relation to Gal 1:4 and 2:20 what account of the historical critical readings of these passages is most appropriate to a reception historical commentary. It will be argued 1) that historical critical study can play an important role in the literary history of a text by bringing into play meanings which have been disqualified: thus the work of the history of religions school in uncovering apocalyptic texts and making their relevance to the interpretation of the New Testament known forced German Lutheran scholarship to consider dualist readings of Gal 1:4 which it has regarded initially with deep theological suspicion; 2) that historical critical study, in so far as it deliberately eschews theological modes of interpretation, may also cut itself off from many of the most powerful readings of the text.

The question of whether texts have an influence or only ‘used’ by readers to support beliefs and actions that are held for other reasons is a difficult one. However, it does seem that in general it is more often the reader than the text that is the dominant in the process of biblical interpretation. In some cases, however, the text itself can be seen fairly clearly to have had an influence and that as a result individuals and/or groups will behave in ways in which they would not have behaved had the biblical text not been there. An example of this, I shall argue, is the fire at Mt. Carmel, home of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. In 1993 Mt. Carmel caught fire and some 80 deaths resulted. The cause of that fire has been much debated. Some have argued that the FBI set fire to the place deliberately in an effort to force the Branch Davidians out (the siege was in its fifty-first day). Others argue that Mt. Carmel caught fire by accident, perhaps as a result of kerosene lamps being knocked over by government tanks that were in the process of inserting tear-gas into the buildings. A third view is that Branch Davidians set fire to Mt. Carmel in an act of mass suicide.

In this paper I argue that there is another possibility: that the Branch Davidians set fire to Mt. Carmel (or at least reacted to a fire that had perhaps been set by others either by accident or design) in an effort to act out their expectations that fire would be the means by which they (the Branch Davidians) would be cleansed prior to the destruction of the wicked (and the sectarians viewed the US government forces as the lamb-like beast of Rev 13.11-18). That cleansing fire would also be a means of destruction for the group’s enemies. Such views go back a long way in the Branch Davidian tradition and were not made up on the spur of the moment and certainly not, obviously, after the event. Key texts include Rev 6.9-11, Rev 9.16 and parts of Rev 14, though these were interpreted in the context of a mass of Hebrew Bible passages.

John the Baptist has played a significant role in the history of interpretation of the New Testament, being portrayed in a variety of ways, not just as forerunner of the Messiah but as a representative of monastic asceticism (Albert the Great), a model of bold prophetic protest (Chrysostom), a figure of virtue (Chaucer), or as a polemicist (Blake). This paper explores the history of interpretation (or afterlife) of John the Baptist in art, music and literature, arguing that through these mediums neglected dimensions of the biblical text are often illuminated.

Part I of the paper examines portrayals of John the Baptist in art, pursuing two examples in detail: (1) a seventeenth-century Russian icon, depicting John as an angel (2) the beheading of John the Baptist, from an altar-piece in Lüneburg Cathedral, Germany.

Part II of the paper concentrates on the presentation of John the Baptist in music, with specific reference to Massenet’s opera Hérodiade. This section argues that the synthesis of John the Baptist with Jesus by Massenet bears striking resemblance to the second artistic representation described above, highlighting implicit parallelism between the sacrificial imagery applied to both John and Jesus in the biblical text.

Part III examines John the Baptist’s role in literature, focusing again on the theme of sacrifice, but in different contexts and in a different medium. Here I will trace the idea of John the Baptist as a figure of bold prophetic protest through the early church fathers (Chrysostom and Augustine) to later contexts, such as Dundee in the 1540s where James Wedderburn’s tragedy of the beheading of John the Baptist was performed. Therefore we can compare the continuity in theme with the contrasting social and political situations in which the text was used.