Reading Other Peoples' Texts

This volume draws together eleven essays by scholars of the Hebrew Bible New Testament Greco-Roman religion and early Judaism to address the ways that conceptions of identity and otherness shape the interpretation of biblical and other religiously authoritative texts.<br/><br/>The contributions explore how interpreters of scriptural texts regularly assume or assert an identification between their own communities and those described in the text while ignoring the cultural social and religious differences between themselves and the text's earliest audiences. Comparing a range of examples these essays address varying ways in which social identity has shaped the historical contexts implied audiences rhetorical shaping redactional development literary appropriation and reception history of particular texts over time. Together they open up new avenues for studying the relations between social identity scriptural interpretation and religious authority.