The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto

What is a "biblical scholar"? Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood provide a thoroughly defamiliarizing and frequently entertaining re-description of this peculiar academic species and its odd disciplinary habitat. The modern - and postmodern - biblical scholar, they argue, is a product of the Enlightenment. Even when a biblical scholar imagines that she is doing something else entirely (something confessional, theoretical, literary, or even postmodern), she is sustaining Enlightened modernity and its effects. This study poses questions for scholars across the humanities concerned with the question of the religious and the secular. It also poses pressing questions for scholars and students of biblical interpretation: What other forms might biblical criticism have taken? What untried forms might biblical criticism yet take?