BS1235.52.H64

- The Constructio of Galilee as a place for the historical Jesus - The road To Reimarus - Landscape Of Democracy - Nation Making - Jesus On Water - Diogenes Of Capernaum - Enoch Powell and The Gospel Tradition - Homelessness as a way home

Viewed altogether, several of the papers in this book (Moxnes, Long, Whitelam, Baergen) point toward a direction that, I think, needs to be further explored and developed in biblical studies, what could be called a cultural and intellectual geography of Palestine: the study of the construction of cultural and symbolic landscapes through time, in close connection to historical contexts and processes. These papers make us think about the Western intellectual and religious appropriation of Palestine since early Christianity to modern times. In fact, the book offers us but a glimpse, from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, of what can be achieved through a critical address of the polysemic concept of Holy Land in relation to the modern territories of Israel/Palestine as a religious homeland, as a national homeland, and so on. The intellectual construction of the Holy Land can certainly be traced back to the church fathers and before that to the biblical notions of eretz yisrael as well, but always with heterogeneous meanings, each of which is attached to religious and cultural conceptions of the land (see Sand 2012). This anthology is therefore a most welcome addition to the stream of scholarship within biblical studies that seeks to deconstruct the social, cultural, and political contexts in which the modern interpretation of biblical stories and the writing of ancient Palestine’s past take place. Actually, this deconstructive task is an unavoidable condition for those studying biblical matters in a truly scholarly manner, which clearly establishes that there is no historical analysis that is innocent or isolated from ideological and historiographical considerations, and such considerations cannot be properly addressed without epistemological and methodological reflection. This book, in its varieties of approaches and discussions, fosters such critical biblical scholarship. Emanuel Pfoh, Review of Biblical Literature.