Just below the surface of any Christian view of the Bible is the knotty issue of the biblical canon. How and when was it decided which books would make up the Bible? What makes a book canonical? In this volume, respected Old Testament scholar Christopher Seitz helps readers understand how the Old Testament fits into the canon's development. Brief and readable yet substantive, this volume challenges current understandings of the formation of the Christian canon, utilizing the latest research on the biblical prophets. Seitz reveals canonical connections woven into the fabric of the Prophetic Books and argues that the Law and the Prophets cohere and give shape to the subsequent Christian canon.

The Old Testament is not just a collection of disparate stories, each with its own meaning and moral lessons. Rather, it's one cohesive story, tied together by the good news about Israel's coming Messiah, promised from the beginning. Covering each book in the Old Testament, this volume invites readers to teach the Bible from a Reformed, covenantal, and redemptive-historical perspective. Featuring contributions from twelve respected evangelical scholars, this gospel-centered introduction to the Old Testament will help anyone who teaches or studies Scripture to better see the initial outworking of God's plan to redeem the world through Jesus Christ.

The church in the West has subsisted for five hundred years in a state of ever-increasing multiple identities, many of which claim to be the best representation of the church established by Christ. Often attending novel models of the church are new scriptural interpretive methods that support theological claims. Rarely, however, has an exploration been undertaken to test the impact of this ecclesiological division on the reading of the Bible. A Darkened Reading explores the specific case of the nineteenth-century Church of England and competing interpretations of the book of the prophet Isaiah--a book of great importance in theological history--as a kind of parable of the existential anguish the church has experienced as a consequence of being torn apart.

Is there a gap between the academic study of the Bible and the work of theologians? What lies behind this gap? And most important, how have biblical scholars tried to bridge the gap with hermeneutical methods? This book addresses the exegesis vs. theology impasse and categorizes the most important attempts to bridge it over the past century, especially those of the last decades. These attempts are assessed and evaluated so that readers can see the philosophies undergirding each and the potential each has for a true "theological interpretation" of the Bible.

Since Brevard Childs first introduced it as a “fresh approach” in the late 1960s, canonical exegesis has grown into a widely discussed and developed program—virtually a “school” of biblical interpretation—with many scholars carrying forward an approach to theological exegesis that emphasizes the role of canon as the central context for interpretation of the Christian Scriptures. In this study, Keener takes a twofold approach: (1) he demonstrates that a canonical exegesis is tenable if the task is approached with clarity regarding its core theological foundation; and (2) he applies the approach to the interpretation of the often thorny questions surrounding the understanding of Psalm 8. This is useful in that Psalm 8 touches upon several questions germane to the successful implementation of canonical exegesis due to the many intertextual connections it shares with the rest of the Bible. Keener concludes that Psalm 8 in the Old Testament represents the intersection of two trajectories: (1) the reversal motif in which YHWH maintains the created order through the exaltation of the weak and the humble; and (2) the motif of the conflicted and conflicting human, in which humans are shown as beset by trials, often failing and even occupying the role of the enemies of YHWH. A third trajectory becomes visible in the context of the New Testament, that of the redeeming Christ; this third trajectory intersects with the two Old Testament trajectories and makes possible the redemption of conflicted humanity, giving the ultimate answer to the psalmist’s question, “What is the human?”

Christian readers of the Hebrew Bible are often faced with a troubling tension. On the one hand, they are convinced that this ancient text is relevant today, yet on the other, they remain perplexed at how this can be so, particularly when parts of it appear to condone violence. Barker’s volume seeks to address this tension in two parts: (1) by defending a particular form of theological interpretation and (2) by applying this interpretive method to the imprecatory psalms. Barker suggests that the goal of theological interpretation is to discover God’s voice in the text. While he recognizes that this goal could encourage a subjective methodology, Barker offers a hermeneutic that clearly locates God’s voice in the text of Scripture. Utilizing the resources of speech act theory, Barker notes that texts convey meaning at a number of literary levels and that God’s appropriation of speech acts at these levels is not necessarily uniform for each genre. He also discusses how the Christian canon alters the context of these ancient speech acts, both reshaping and enabling their continued function as divine discourse. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of this hermeneutic, Barker offers theological interpretations of Psalms 69 and 137. He demonstrates how christological fulfilment and the call to forgive one’s enemies are determinative for a theological interpretation of these troubling psalms, concluding that they continue to form an essential part of God’s voice that must not be ignored.

Lee Martin McDonald provides a magisterial overview of the development of the biblical canon --- the emergence of the list of individual texts that constitutes the Christian bible. In these two volumes -- in sum more than double the length of his previous works -- McDonald presents his most in-depth overview to date. McDonald shows students and researchers how the list of texts that constitute 'the bible' was once far more fluid than it is today and guides readers through the minefield of different texts, different versions, and the different lists of texts considered 'canonical' that abounded in antiquity. Questions of the origin and transmission of texts are introduced as well as consideration of innovations in the presentation of texts, collections of documents, archaeological finds and Church councils. In the first volume McDonald reexamines issues of canon formation once considered settled, and sets the range of texts that make up the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) in their broader context. Each indidvidual text is discussed, as are the cultural, political and historical situations surrounding them. This second volume considers the New Testament, and the range of so-called 'apocryphal' gospels that were written in early centuries, and used by many Christian groups before the canon was closed. Also included are comprehensive appendices which show various canon lists for both Old and New Testaments and for the bible as a whole.