TITLE OF THE BOOK-
OLD and NEW in INTERPRETAION – A STUDY OF THE TWO TESTAMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR-
The Reverend Professor James Barr who was a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), was born on March 20th, 1924 in Glasgow, Scotland. He then became a Scottish Old Testament scholar on October 14, 2006 in Claremont, California. He held professorships at Manchester and Vanderbilt University in the United States of America. He was Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Scripture at Oxford from 1976 to 1978 and Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford from 1978 to 1989.Arguably his most influential work was The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961), in which he criticized the tendency of many scholars to rely on linguistically flawed arguments, such as arguments from etymology or based upon misconceptions about the relation between Hebrew thought and language. Much of the critique was built upon the work of French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. In turn, Barr’s student Moisés Silva built on Barr’s work in Biblical Words and Their Meaning (1983).He was also an outspoken critic of conservative evangelicalism, which he attacked in his 1977 book Fundamentalism. In particular he criticized evangelical scholars such as Bernard Ramm and J.I. Packer for the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy, the teaching that the Bible is without error. However, he also had high praise for evangelicals whom he thought deserved to be treated as serious scholars, such as F. F. Bruce and Donald Guthrie. Barr’s other works about fundamentalism include The Scope and Authority of the Bible (1980) and Escaping Fundamentalism (1984).
TABLE CONTENTS–
Foreword by the President, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary 9-
Preface 11-
1. The Multiplex Nature of the Old Testament Tradition 15-
2. Athens or Jerusalem?—The Question of Distinctiveness 34-
3. The Concepts of History and Revelation 65-
4. Typology and Allegory 103-
5. Old and New Testaments in the Work of Salvation 149-
6. Conclusions 171-
Appendix: A note on the Fundamentalism 207-
Bibliography 208-
Index 213-
WHAT THE BOOK IS ALL ABOUT–
Reverend James Barr states in this book that the Old Testament is not only multiplex in character but it is also multiplex in the form which it now presents; it is also historically multiplex, in that a number of very different processes have gone into its formation. The multiplicity doesn’t mean that historically the processes cannot be unraveled, provided that we have the data to work from. Professor Barr alludes here on the premise that one of the chief relations in which the growth of tradition leads to decisions which are fateful for the achievement of salvation is the relation between Jew and Gentile. We do not need to spend much time in describing the Greek-Hebrew thought contrast as it operates in the minds of, for example, theological students at the present time. The heavily philosophical character of the Greek-Hebrew contrast has, however, another and a more serious defect. By being characterized through comparison with Greek thought in a philosophical framework of this kind, Hebrew thought itself is assimilated to a philosophical type. It has been repeatedly urged upon us that the emphasis upon history as the medium of revelation par excellence is a central contribution of the Old Testament to theology. James Barr here expresses that it is a real difficulty in many views centered in a revelation history that, in spite of a primary assertion of God’s actions in history, they come to have their actual centre in a historical emphasis, or a historical way of thinking, or a historical form of self-understanding or perception of life, rather than in an actual history. In modern theology, whether reason is accepted as an additional source of Theological knowledge or not, the use of the idea of revelation works against two particular problems. These are firstly, the position where it is denied that God exists, or that any true or meaningful knowledge of Him exists; secondly, the position where such knowledge as he has given of himself has to be carefully demarcated against the methods and contents of man’s sciences as they work apart from this revelation. One of the most commonest tendencies in modern theology is the tendency to suppose that the quality of biblical interpretation can be controlled through a study of presuppositions. This tendency is by no means confined to purist trains of thought; it is evident in externalist approaches also. Nevertheless it is particularly evident in purist thought, where it seems sufficient to identify “alien” or “foreign” presuppositions in order to discredit an exegetical suggestion.
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