Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2012, Page 14

The hermeneutical questions became acute. To the old question “Do you
understand WHAT you read?” was added “Do you understand HOW you
read?” and “Do you understand WHY you read?”
In Sweden you could notice the new situation in the seventies in New
Testament monographs and dissertations. René Kieffer came in contact with
French structuralism and wrote his Essais de méthodologie néo-testamentaire
1972 and an analysis of 1 Corinthians with an emphasis on the deep
structures of the text. I met the linguist Eugene A. Nida at two European
workshops on Bible translation in 1968 and 1970 and wrote a text-
linguistic dissertation, published in 1974, on texts from the Gospel of
John, the first New Testament monograph with the word “text-linguistic”
in its title. And Bengt Holmberg used sociological theories (Max Weber)
when he investigated ministry and community in the Early Church 1978.
New methods provided us with with new criteria, when we had to choose
among different interpretations and also new results, but we were still most
interested in finding the best interpretation of a text or the most probable
historical reconstruction of a specific event.
These new ways of reading the New Testament texts were parts of
a general change of the Western culture at the end of the sixties, often
referred to by the year 1968. The strong focus on our own contexts and on
economic and social conditions made Bible criticism more open for theories
and results of other disciplines. We got a new interest in the contexts of our
sources and in the contexts of our interpretation
Text = the primary sign of the language
I want to say something more about the linguistic change of the time. The
text became the primary sign ofthe language. That is my third point. Words,
phrases, clauses and sentences had a crucial place in philological analyses
and in description of language. In the seventies we see a clear shift from
sentences, via utterances, to discourse. Text as a delimited communicative
unit is the natural point of departure when you want to interpret a text.
Such a text theory has several consequences. I have to start my analysis
with the text as we now have it, i.e. from what we usually describe as the
final stage of the history of the text, attributed sometimes to the author or
to a redactor. We got many synchronic analyses. The genesis of the text was
not any longer in the centre.
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