God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism [Hardcover]

David S. Katz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2004

This wide-ranging book is an intellectual history of how informed readers read their Bibles over the past four hundred years, from the first translations in the sixteenth century to the emergence of fundamentalism in the twentieth century. In an astonishing display of erudition, David Katz recreates the response of readers from different eras by examining the "horizon of expectations" that provided the lens through which they read. In the Renaissance, says Katz, learned men rushed to apply the tools of textual analysis to the Testaments, fully confident that God's Word would open up and reveal shades of further truth. During the English Civil War, there was a symbiotic relationship between politics and religion, as the practical application of the biblical message was hammered out. Science - Newtonian and Darwinian, as well as the emerging disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, and geology - also had a great impact on how the Bible was received. The rise of the novel and the development of a concept of authorial copyright were other factors that altered readers' experience. Katz discusses all of these and more, concluding with the growth of fundamentalism in America, which brought biblical interpretation back to the Lutheran certainty of a demonstrable authority.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It's commonplace by now to recognize that every reader or group of readers understands the Bible differently. What these readers do hold in common, however, is the notion that Scripture contains the words of God to humankind. Using the reader-response theory of Stanley Fish and Gadamer's hermeneutics (that every interpreter understands a text based on his or her own horizon of expectations regarding that text), Katz provides a sometimes fascinating, sometimes frustrating overview of the history of the Bible's reception. He traces the evolution in the interpretation of the Bible from Martin Luther and the Reformation to modern American fundamentalism. For example, Luther's community of interpretation read the Bible literally according to Luther's own dictum of sola scriptura—only Scripture was authoritative for faith and practice. By the 19th century, however, the certainty that the Bible formed a unified whole was challenged not only by Darwin's theory of evolution but also by the advent of a biblical criticism that emphasized the numerous sources that lay behind the various books of the Bible. In a brief section on American fundamentalism, Katz observes that this community's reading of the Bible echoes the literalism of Luther's readings. While the book offers a completely different model for thinking about the impact of the Bible on culture, Katz's academic tone and his references in the introduction to a number of philosophers requires a great deal of effort from readers unacquainted with these ideas.
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About the Author

David Katz holds the Abraham Horodisch Chair for the History of Books at Tel-Aviv University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (March 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300101155
• ISBN-13: 978-0300101157
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,131,591 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars What this book isn't, September 17, 2004

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[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (Hardcover)

In order to appreciate David Katz's "God's Last Words," it is important to recognize what it isn't. It is not a history of the bible's influence on the English people over the past five centuries. It is not a history of the role the bible played in English politics, English philosophy or even Anglican theology. It is not a history of how people slowly developed a more critical attitude towards the Bible. There are aspects of all three things in this book, but there are also important things missing. For a start, this is not a book that looks at how Milton, Dryden, Bunyan, Blake or many others used biblical material for their art. Nor is it a history of how the English population reacted to the vernacular bible.

Instead Katz starts by discussing the growth of a proper biblical criticism in the Renaissance. For centuries the Bible in the Western World was the Latin Vulgate, translated more than a millenium earlier by Saint Jerome. There were a number of problems with this. For a start, in the many copyings over the past thousands years errors had accumulated, and there was a natural desire to use a more authentic text. Second, and much more importantly, the bible was never actually written in Latin. The Jewish bible is written in Hebrew (with the exception of parts of Daniel and Ezra, which are written in Aramaic) while the New Testament is written entirely in Greek. And so scholars sought to find a proper Greek testament. Erasmus was a leading figure here, though Katz points out that when he didn't have proper Greek documents, he simply translated the Vulgate into Greek. This sort of undermined the whole point of the exercise, but absolute accuracy was not that important a goal. (Katz also reminds us that the very first translation of the New Testament into Hebrew occurred in the 16th century.)

After discussing Tyndale, Katz bascially skips a century, with only a brief discussion of the writing of the King James Bible and starts a somewhat meandering tone that the book continues to the end. There is a discussion of sabbatarianism (Katz quotes a scholar who suggests this is the only English contribution to Christian theology) and the ubiquity of millenialism in Cromwell's England. Then we go on to Newton and Locke, and how Newton worked on a proper chronology for biblical events, teasing out speculations from the contradictory statements in the Old Testament. We get discussions of such strange documents as the Sybilline Oracles, the Samaritan Penateuch, and the Islamic forgery "The Gospel of Barnabas." We learn about 18th century scholars who emphasized the aesthetic values of scriptures. We also meet the Hutchinsonians, at the time an influential group of scholars who worked with the fact that the Hebrew scripture originally had no vowels. This led them to the crackpot idea that one could manipulate the consonants into saying whatever mystical ideas came into their heads. The last third of the book deals with the long nineteenth century. We get discussions of Milman's controversial description of Abraham as a shiek, controversies over "Essays and Reviews" and Bishop Colonso in the 1860s and James Frazier's "The Golden Bough."

It is important to recognize what we do not get here. We do not get a full history of the rise of biblical criticism. We get a discussion of the various impossibilities of the Biblical exodus. But we do not get a discussion of such major issues as the authorship of the Gospels, the Q hypothesis, or the historical Jesus. Indeed, the criticism of the New Testament in largely ignored, while such questions as the origins of Daniel or the structure of Isaiah get short shift as well. There is some discussion of Hobbes, but Spinoza is only mentioned because Matthew Arnold finds him interesting, while the rest of the Enlightenment goes unmentioned (there is no real discussion of Paine's 'The Age of Reason'). Granted that much biblical scholarship occurred in Germany, we get only a brief discussion of Wellhausen, while less important Germans get more attention. The book concludes with a brief discussion of Fundamentalism that does not really clarify its relation to other Protestants or to the traditions of conservative biblical scholarship. The book is certainly well-documented, but the reader may well wonder what the point is.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Goes Around, Comes Around, March 29, 2004

By 

Dan R. Dick "doroteos" (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (Hardcover)

This scholarly work will sadly be overlooked by our "Purpose Driven" church culture. The Bible means many things to many people, but we too often forget that it is an interpreted medium, even by those who believe it arrived straight from God's own mouth. David Katz marvelously illustrates how the reading of the Bible has changed its meaning time after time. What modern Christians hold to be timeless and eternal is little more than the current version of an everchaging, constantly evolving faith. For those open to learn this book will be a revelation, and will deepen the appreciation of, and devotion to, the greatest book ever written.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars God's Last Words, July 27, 2009

By 

Sam Adams (Minnesota. USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (Hardcover)

The author, David Katz, "holds the Abraham Horodisch Chair for the History of Books at Tel Aviv University."

This is not a casual introduction for the novice. The scholarship runs deep and the references in the endnotes are extensive. The book begins with the appearance of being about translations into English of the Christian Bible, and the pursuit of authoritative texts in the original languages. (The preface, with its talk of Jauss and Gadamer and hermeneutics and reader response criticism is a red herring. None of it is explicitly referred to in the book again.) The true focus of the book is on the various Protestant interpretations of the Bible in England and the effect of those interpretations on claims to authoritative original-language texts of the Old and New Testaments, with the second half of the book being more on the growing dismissal of the biblical claims, almost exclusively concerning the early books of the Old Testament, in the ever brightening light of historical, social, and scientific understanding. The book is, as a consequence, uneven.

The following excerpt from the Encyclopaedia Britannica will help to clarify my meaning:

"The major types of biblical criticism are: (1) *textual criticism*, which is concerned with establishing the original or most authoritative text, (2) *philological criticism*, which is the study of the biblical languages for an accurate knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, and style of the period, (3) *literary criticism*, which focuses on the various literary genres embedded in the text in order to uncover evidence concerning date of composition, authorship, and original function of the various types of writing that constitute the Bible, (4) *tradition criticism*, which attempts to trace the development of the oral traditions that preceded written texts, and (5) *form criticism*, which classifies the written material according to the preliterary forms, such as parable or hymn.

"Other schools of biblical criticism that are more exegetical in intent -- that is, concerned with recovering original meanings of texts -- include *redaction criticism*, which studies how the documents were assembled by their final authors and editors, and *historical criticism*, which seeks to interpret biblical writings in the context of their historical settings."

From "biblical criticism" in Encyclopaedia Britannica from the Encyclopaedia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD.

So this book isn't exactly about biblical criticism per se in England, but about the scholarly interpretation of the Bible there and about historical criticism studies of it in the light of science. The author doesn't stick exclusively with England. He refers when needed to German higher criticism, but not in any instructive detail, and he spends quite a few pages on Emanuel Swedenborg and his influence in England.

Biblical studies in the United States are excluded till a very brief mention of Fundamentalism in the final four pages of the book, a mere allusion, and inexcusable given the book's subtitle. Katz mentions a series of influential pamphlets known as "The Fundamentals", published between 1910 and 1915 (from which the movement apparently gets its name), the Scofield Reference Bible published in 1909 by Cyrus Scofield, and Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth from 1970. He ends with the words:

"From the viewpoint of our story, the birth of the Fundamentalist movement brings us right back to the beginning, when scriptural authority was axiomatic and the Bible was self-evidently God's Last Words to mankind. Far from being a deviant group of religious extremists, Fundamentalists are actually those whose theological position is closest to the message of the Protestant revolution, while we are the ones who have gone into the sunset of the 'horizon of expectations'." (p. 315)

This last phrase, 'horizon of expectations', is Katz's way of circling back to Gadamer and his hermeneutics, mentioned in the preface but not discussed in the body of the book.