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Many readers of the Bible believe that interpreting the Scriptures well simply involves a two-way dialogue between themselves and the text. Implied in this view is the idea that we can simply jump over two thousand years of biblical interpretation. However, if we believe that God has been speaking through the Bible to devout believers throughout history it would seem that we should find a way to identify the insights they perceived in the text so that we can learn to read these sacred texts with them. Drawing on resources from Reception Theory, the goal of Reading the Bible with the Giants is to enable the contemporary reader to interpret the Bible in dialogue with those who have gone before us.

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Traditional methods employed in biblical interpretation involve a two-way dialogue between the text and the reader. Reception theory expands this into a three-way dialogue, with the third partner being the history of the text's interpretation and application. Most contemporary biblical interpreters have ignored this third partner, although recently the need to include the history of interpretation has gained some attention. This book explores the hermeneutical resources that reception theory provides for engaging the history of biblical interpretation as a third dialogue partner in biblical hermeneutics. The first third of this work explores the philosophical background and hermeneutical framework that Hans-Georg Gadamer provides for reception theory. The center of this study examines how this hermeneutical approach is fleshed out by Hans Robert Jauss. Jauss not only builds upon Gadamer's work, but his literary hermeneutic provides a model applicable to the biblical text and its tradition of interpretation. The focus for the final third of the book shifts toward three studies that seek to demonstrate the applicability of various aspects of reception theory to biblical interpretation.

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