Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters

David R. Powell
2008 Theological Librarianship  
U nder a slightly different title, Donald McKim and a covey of contributors have produced an update of McKim's 1998 Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters. The Dictionary is significantly expanded with about 130 new entries and double the number of contributors in the earlier edition. The entries continue to include biographical sketches of each exegete, descriptions of his or her work, and an assessment of his or her significance along with bibliographies listing primary sources
more » ... orks") and secondary sources ("studies"). (Many of the secondary sources are more general and do not deal with the subject of the entry directly.) The work contains the standard but welcome "how to use" section, list of abbreviations, and list of contributors (indicating affiliation and entries for which each contributor is responsible). indexes are provided for persons, subjects, and articles. in the first edition (the Historical Handbook) the articles were divided into time periods, each with an introductory essay. in the Dictionary all of the essays are gathered to the front of the volume followed by the articles in alphabetical order. While the articles in the Handbook were in alphabetical order within each time period, at least there was some general sense of where each exegete fell along the timeline. even lacking any sort of expressed temporal relationship within each period, the keeping of the former arrangement might have helped contextualize a given exegete to some extent especially for those new to the name. McKim points out in the preface that two of the six introductory essays ("biblical interpretation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" and "biblical interpretation in europe in the Twentieth century") were expanded by one scholar for the Dictionary. The others appear to have been carried over from the Handbook with slight editing for clarification and the occasional updated citation in the bibliographies at the end of each essay. some of these cited works, of course, were published after the first edition, such as the Handbook of Patristic Exegesis, and some that were published prior to the first edition have been added. The first occurrence in each essay of a named interpreter represented by an article is marked with an asterisk, but, as in the Handbook, not every individual mentioned has a corresponding article. examples range from apollinarius of laodicea ("...condemned for heresy in the last decade of his life, [and] was the most celebrated interpreter of scripture at antioch when Jerome enrolled among his students in 374" (10)) to burton Mack, John Dominic crossan, and Marcus borg, who, among others, set forth "major positions" (98) in the Jesus of history discussions (though robert W. Funk, the founder of the Jesus seminar, is included). one wonders at the exclusion of these other "celebrated" and "major" figures. such questions regarding the selection of which exegetes to include and which to exclude continue in the current revision. "Major," of course, is a relative term. McKim certainly admits in the preface that there are individuals who could and should have been included but for the limitations of space. perhaps in response to reviewers of the first edition, McKim has added new entries for many of the interpreters whose exclusion they criticized. This
doi:10.31046/tl.v1i1.28 fatcat:6upcqiwyqneytmqxordjqvrrci