There is a large amount of advanced bible study carried out around the world. Two statistics illustrate this: firstly, the annual conference for the Society of Biblical Literature attracts more than a thousand participants. It is held in the USA as a joint conference with the American Academy of Religion and a joint conference program is run. For this joint conference, the attendees number up to five thousand and it is difficult to get an accurate proportionate figure for the SBL attendees.
In the UK, the annual NT conference for the British New Testament Society attracts about 300 participants and the corresponding OT conference about one hundred participants (the membership for the OT Society is over three hundred). The periodicals Old Testament Abstracts and New Testament Abstracts each offer one-paragraph abstracts of articles relevant to biblical studies from over four hundred magazines and journals from around the world. In a typical year, New Testament Abstracts will abstract about two thousand articles and books in its field, and Old Testament Abstracts will abstract up to fifteen hundred. Of course, these statistics interpret “bible study” in broad terms to cover comparative historical and archeological research into bible times; both journals exclude university theses from their abstracts.
Any student samples this material and will form an impression of its value. On the basis of one sampling over many years, it seems that academic research contains a great volume of mistaken interpretation. This is a platitude easily proven by reference to citations of the work of other scholars. Secondly, and more seriously, the OT is “broken” in many ways: copyist errors (intentional and unintentional) are proposed as a matter of routine; multiple editorial changes during the history of transmission, particularly the exile, are accepted; multiple authors are proposed for the books, often late, and with competing agendas; and historical inaccuracies and theologically motivated presentation of events are de rigueur.
As fortune would have it, these two characteristics have a cancelling affect. If a scholar argues the text is “broken” in a certain way, there is bound to be a scholar who argues that in this instance it is not “broken”. S/he is likely to say that it is “broken” in other ways. Either way it does not matter. What this situation affords is an opportunity to reconfigure genuine scholarly insights within a framework that does not “break” the text. Conservative scholars, who are in the minority, offer some directions in this enterprise; but it is also often the case that conservative scholars have taken on board dominant critical readings. What is required is a flexible approach to the historical imagining of the text and close attention to the intertextual connections within the text.
What is a Bible Student?