05-01'04 | G.M.H. Ratheiser

Joint Jewish-Christian Bible exegesis is possible

Christian and Jewish Bible researchers still disagree about the question of how the classic Jewish Bible text should be approached. Whereas Christians mainly concentrate on historical-critical and theological-confessional explanations, the Jewish focus is mainly on philological and ethical text interpretation. PhD student Ratheiser conducted a critical evaluation of the hermeneutic systems of both groups, in particular in the last 250 years of Bible research. Ratheiser states that collaboration between Jews and Christians in the field of Bible interpretation is possible on condition that both groups use the same methodological and interpretative tools and focus on the same goal: ethics and mitzvoth ethics rather than theology. Such a non-confessional system would use the Jewish Bible as an explanatory (etiological) and ethical work that was written by ancient Jews for future generations of Jews and is thus the ‘property’ and heritage of Judaism and not of Christianity. Ratheiser illustrates this approach with an example of a paradigm, which he applies to the biblical figure and character Joshua. /GG

Gershom Ratheiser (Olten, Switzerland, 1966) studied theology in Prague, Zürich and Cambridge, and conducted his PhD research at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen. He is currently director of the Stichting Synagoge Enschede.

Date and time

Monday 5 January 2004, 2.15 p.m.

PhD student

G.M.H. Ratheiser

PhD thesis

(commercial edition: Continuum International Publishing Group - T & T C (3 May 2007),  ISBN 978-0567029621)

An alternative hermeneutical-exegetical approach to the Jewish Bible: the paradigm of examples

Supervisors

Prof. E. Noort and Prof. L.J. Greenspoon