Biblical

Interpretation

Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 brill.nl/bi

Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural

History of Scriptures

Timothy Beal
Case Western Reserve University

Abstract
After highlighting the substantial gains made by the reception historical approach, this
article proceeds to point out some of its inherent limitations, particularly when applied
to biblical texts. In attending to the material-aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts,
media, and ideas of the Bible, especially in dialogue with anthropological, material-
historical, and media-historical approaches, these limitations become acute and call
for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly reception-historical approach.
is article proposes to move beyond reception history to cultural history, from
research into how biblical texts and the Bible itself are received to how they are cultur-
ally produced as discursive objects. Such a move would involve a double turn in the
focus of biblical scholarship and interpretation: from hermeneutical reception to cul-
tural production, and from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture,
especially religious culture, via its productions of scripture. As such, it would bring
biblical research into fuller and more significant dialogue with other fields of com-
parative scriptural studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities and social
sciences in general.

Keywords
reception history, cultural history, hermeneutics, media history, material scripture,
Jauss, Gadamer, Foucault, Wilfred Canwell Smith, Jonathan Z. Smith

Four decades ago, Qurʾanic scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith called atten-
tion to the new vistas that were opening for biblical scholarship thanks
to the emergence of departments of religious studies within institutions
of “the liberal arts,” that is, colleges of humanities and social sciences.1

1)
W.C. Smith, “e Study of Religion and the Study of the Bible,” JAAR 39 (1971),
pp. 131-40; see also What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: For-

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156851511X595530

358 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372

Such contexts, he suggested, require a shift from teaching religion to

studying it as a human phenomenon. In that context, he called for a
course of study focused on “the Bible as scripture,” with scripture as a
“generic phenomenon,” allowing comparison of the concepts and roles
of “scripture as a religious form” in different traditions and communi-
ties throughout history.2 Framed this way, biblical research and teach-
ing would involve “investigation into the history of the Bible over the
past twenty centuries,” treating it “not merely as a set of ancient docu-
ments or even as a first- and second-century product but as a third-
century and twelfth-century and nineteenth-century and contemporary
agent.”3 Smith’s articulation of the goals of Qurʾanic historical research
would apply as well to biblical research: “… to understand how it has
fired the imagination, and inspired the poetry, and formulated the
inhibitions, and guided the ecstasies, and teased the intellects, and
ordered the family relations and the legal chicaneries, and nurtured the
piety, of hundreds of millions of people in widely diverse climes and
over a series of radically divergent centuries.”4 In this light, research
into what produced the Bible and other scriptures would continue to
be an important field of inquiry, but it would be secondary to research
into what they have produced.
In his recent lecture to the Society of Biblical Literature on “Reli-
gion and the Bible,” Jonathan Z. Smith, recalls and reiterates Wilfred
Cantwell Smith’s often disregarded challenge to biblical scholars to
carry out research within the context of academic religious studies.5
Offering several late nineteenth-century examples of comparative reli-
gionists whose research focused substantially on biblical and ancient
Near Eastern languages and literatures, including Max Müller, Morris
Jastrow, Jr., and Cornelius P. Tiele, Smith sees the best hope for a pro-
ductive future for biblical studies qua religious studies to be in the
emerging field of the reception history of the Bible.

tress, 1993).
2)
W.C. Smith, pp. 132-33.
3)
W.C. Smith, pp. 133-34.
4)
W.C. Smith, p. 133; italics added.
5)
J.Z. Smith, “Religion and the Bible,” Journal of Biblical Literature 128 (2009),
pp. 5-27.
 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 359

e reception history of the Bible is concerned, most basically, with

the history of the reception of biblical texts, stories, images, and char-
acters through the centuries in the form of citation, interpretation, read-
ing, revision, adaptation, and influence.6 As such, it goes well beyond
the previous generation of research into the history of biblical interpre-
tation, embracing the broadest possible definition of “interpretation”
to include not only academic and theological readings but also biblical
appearances in visual art, literature, music, politics, and other works of
culture, from “high” to “low.” At its best, it also focuses on the histor-
ically and culturally particular hermeneutical rules that shape and gov-
ern the creation of meaning from biblical texts in particular contexts.
Many reception-historical studies are longitudinal, exploring a partic-
ular biblical book, character, or image through the ages (e.g., a recep-
tion history of the book of Ruth or the character of Naomi from the
earliest to the most recent post-biblical appearances in as many social
and cultural works and contexts as can be found).7 Others are literary-
historical, examining the use of biblical texts in particular cultural con-
texts (e.g., a study of the reception history of biblical passages about
slavery in the context of debates over Frederick Douglass’s autobio-
graphical Narrative).8
e impact of reception history upon biblical studies is proving to
be profound, comparable to the influence of source criticism and form

6)
J.F.A. Sawyer, who has been a leading influence on its development over the past
two decades, defines it simply as “the history of how a text has influenced communities
and cultures down the centuries,” in Sacred Language and Sacred Texts (London: Rout-
ledge, 1999), p. 2.
7)
Prime examples of reception-historical studies of biblical books are the Blackwell
Bible Commentaries: rough the Centuries; abundant examples of reception-histor-
ical studies of biblical characters across the centuries are available in H.-J. Klauck,
B. McGinn, P. Mendes-Flohr, C.-L. Seow, and H. Spieckermann (eds.), e Encyclo-
pedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 1, Aaron-Aniconism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
2009).
8)
I refer to the excellent example by S. Mailloux, “Ideological Rhetoric and Bible
Politics: Fuller Reads Douglass,” in Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and
American Cultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), which examines
Margaret Fuller’s 1845 review of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative in relation to concur-
rent conflicting interpretations of particular biblical texts, slave narratives, secular and
religious newspapers, and philosophical and political treatises concerning slavery.
360 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372

criticism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to

the influence of rhetorical and literary criticism over the past several
decades.9 Indeed, its influence shows no sign of waning. Every year sees
increasing numbers of reception-historical articles, monographs, books,
and dissertations in biblical studies; there is an active Centre for Recep-
tion History of the Bible at Oxford University; the Blackwell Bible
Commentaries series is well on its way to producing reception histo-
ries of every biblical book; Walter de Gruyter has published the first
two volumes of its Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (EBR),
and a host of biblical scholars around the world are working on entries
for the estimated thirty volumes yet to come; the Oxford University
Press will soon publish e Oxford Handbook of Reception History of the
Bible; academic journals in biblical studies such as Postscripts and Bib-
lical Interpretation are publishing increasing numbers of articles on bib-
lical reception history; and David J.A. Clines and Cheryl Exum are
launching a new journal devoted exclusively to this reception-histori-
cal research on biblical literature.10
In what follows, I should like first to highlight the substantial gains
made by biblical reception history, but then proceed to point out some
of its limitations. When we attend to the material-aesthetic dimensions
of biblical texts, media, and ideas of the Bible and the biblical, espe-
cially in dialogue with anthropological, material-historical, and media-
historical approaches, these limitations become particularly clear, and
call for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly recep-
tion historical approach. Such a turn will put biblical scholarship into
fuller and more meaningful dialogue with other fields of scriptural

9)
Cf. J. Muilenberg, “Form Criticism and Beyond,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 88
(1969), pp. 1-18. Echoes of that essay are intentional.
10)
See also the books in the series, Afterlives of the Bible, co-edited by Tod Linafelt
and myself, and published by the University of Chicago Press from 2004 to 2009.
Most of its titles, including our co-edited Mel Gibson’s Bible: Religion, Popular Culture,
and e Passion of the Christ, could justifiably be included in the growing bibliogra-
phy of reception-historical biblical research. In fact, J.Z. Smith, p. 23, specifically
mentions this series as an example of biblical reception history, quoting the following
from our original prospectus to the press: “Books in the series will not simply read the
Bible ‘backward’ toward its hypothetical origins but read it ‘forward,’ invigorating the
study of biblical literature by opening it towards issues, approaches, and literatures
lying outside the current disciplinary confines of biblical scholarship.”
 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 361

studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities in general. I

hasten to add that this emerging perspective would not be conceivable
without the foundation that has been laid by biblical reception history
in recent years.

eoretical Roots of the Reception History of the Bible

e thickest and healthiest theoretical roots of biblical reception history
are found primarily in Hans Robert Jauss’s “aesthetics of reception,”
which he developed in a series of essays in the late 1960s and early 70s.11
Jauss argued that the meaning of a text is located neither in the text
itself nor in the experience of the reader, but in the relationship between
the two. Literature, he argued, does not exist independent of the history
of its reception by readers; it is, rather, a dynamic, historically situated
relationship between production and reception:

… the relationship of work to work must now be brought into this interaction
between work and mankind, and the historical coherence of works among
themselves must be seen in the interrelations of production and reception. Put
another way: literature and art only obtain a history that has the character of a
process when the succession of works is mediated not only through the producing
subject but also through the consuming subject—through the interaction of
author and public.12

us Jauss’s reception aesthetics sought to mediate between, on the one

hand, historicizing approaches to literature that locate meaning strictly

11)
See esp. H.R. Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary eory,” New
Literary History 1 (1970), pp. 7-37, which is a translation of chapters V-XII of Liter-
aturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft (Konstanz, 1967). It is included,
along with other related essays, in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (trans. T. Bahti;
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
12)
Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic, p. 15; cf. Mailloux, p. 75: “An act of reading is precisely
the historical intersection of the different cultural rhetorics for interpreting such texts
within the social practices of particular historical communities.” Roughly contempo-
rary with Jauss’s development of his aesthetics, Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality,
which conceives of every text as a “field of transpositions of various signifying systems,”
emphasizes the point that a text’s in “original” creation is likewise an event of produc-
tion and reception. See J. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (abridged; trans.
M. Waller; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 60.
362 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372

in a text’s original context and production, and, on the other hand,

aesthetic approaches that treat texts as trans-historical works whose
meaning is found strictly in the reader’s present experience of them.
“If the history of literature is viewed in this way as a dialogue between
work and public, the contrast between its aesthetic and its historical
aspects is also continually mediated. us the thread from the past
appearance to the present experience of a work, which historicism had
cut, is tied together.”13 In this light, a work of literature is not a “fact”
but an “event,” a moment of meaningful relationship, and the study of
that event must be historicized just as much as any earlier event, includ-
ing the text’s beginnings. Indeed, the creation of a text is as much an
event of production and reception as any subsequent moment in its
literary history.14
A primary theoretical influence on Jauss’s aesthetics of reception was
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as developed in
Truth and Method (originally published in German in 1960 as Warheit
und Methode), in particular two key concepts: first, his principle of
Wirkungsgeschichte, usually translated as “effective history” (sometimes
translated “history of effects” or “impacts”), which refers to the histor-
ical and linguistic situatedness of every human subject; and, second,
his related conception of interpretation as a “fusion” of two horizons,
that is, the horizon of the work (literary or artistic) which comes to the
interpreter from a distant, incommensurable past, and the horizon of
the interpreter, situated within her own subjective “effective history.”
Understanding, for Gadamer, is the surmounting of the distance
between those two horizons through the making of a new interpreta-
tion that is a fusion of them. In this way, Gadamer accomplishes a
“rehabilitation of prejudice,” insisting on the “historical and linguistic
situatedness” of any human subject in the process of interpretation.15

13)
Jauss, “Literary History,” p. 8
14)
Jauss, “Literary History,” p. 24.
15)
H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall;
New York: Continuum, 1989); first published as Warheit und Methode (Tübingen,
1960). e principle of Wirkungsgeschichte and the concept of the fusion of horizons
are summarized in William E. Deal and Timothy Beal, eory for Religious Studies
(New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 77-78, and helpfully explicated vis-à-vis biblical
studies in U. Luz, “e Contribution of Reception History to a eology of the New
 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 363

As New Testament scholar Ulrich Luz puts it, Gadamer’s principle of

Wirkungsgeschichte “gave us back to history … Neither history nor texts
of the past are simply objects of research: rather, they belong to the
stream of history which also carries the boat of the interpreter.”16
It would be difficult to overestimate Gadamer’s influence on Jauss,
whose aesthetics of reception is, in many ways, an interruption of
Gadamer’s notions of history and interpretation within the discourse
of literary theory. Jauss essentially argued, in good Gadamerian fash-
ion, that literary history is not a history of influence from an original
text on its subsequent readers, but rather a history of hermeneutical
fusions of horizons of pasts and presents, and that all of this history is
part of the historical development and concretization of a work’s mean-
ing, thus transforming the canon itself over time within different “hori-
zons of expectations” which are by no means individual but are
constructed by one’s culture, language, psychology, and so on (i.e.,
one’s “effective history”).17
At the same time, Jauss pushed Gadamer’s notions farther than
Gadamer himself took them, and in the process underscored the spe-
cial value of his approach for biblical studies. Gadamer, he pointed out,
wanted to distinguish the “classical” work from other works as that
which, by its very nature, does not require the surmounting of histor-
ical distance. In every age, Gadamer had claimed, the classic continu-
ously overcomes that distance in itself; it “means itself and interprets
itself.”18 Jauss criticized this view as an example of “second horizon
change: the unquestioning acceptance as self-evident of a so-called mas-
terwork, which conceals its negativity in the retrospective horizon of
an exemplary tradition and necessitates our regaining of the ‘right hori-
zon of questioning’ in the face of guaranteed classicism.”19 us he
insisted on a hermeneutical distance from so-called classics that recog-
nizes not only the history of contextual productions of meaning around

Testament,” in C. Rowland, C.M. Tuckett, and R. Morgan (eds.), e Nature of New

Testament eology: Essays in Honour of Robert Morgan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006),
pp. 124-25.
16)
Luz, p. 125.
17)
Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic, p. 147.
18)
Gadamer, quoted by Jauss, “Literary History,” p. 21.
19)
Jauss, “Literary History,” p. 22.
364 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372

these texts but also the vested interests and conflicts of interpretation
therein, interests and conflicts that begin within texts themselves.

Possibilities and Limits of the Reception History of the Bible

Informed by Jauss’s aesthetics of reception, which was itself informed
by Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy, biblical reception history at
its best conceives biblical literary history not as the history of the influ-
ence of an original “classic” text, but as the ongoing, culturally-specific
process of relationship between texts and readers. To transpose Jauss,
we can say that biblical literature is not a fact but an event, a dialectic
relationship of production and reception. As such, biblical reception his-
tory has called for a new level of critical attention to the historically
specific, subjective horizon of every interpretation, that is, the various
conditions of subjection that constitute the reading subject and thus
shape the meaning-making process. It also rejects the idea of the Bible
or any particular biblical text as a Gadamerian “classic” or “masterwork”
that interprets itself meaningfully into any horizon. Indeed, in the
process of researching the inevitably diverse and conflicted reception
history of any particular biblical text, that notion quickly begins to
appear absurd.
Reception history is potentially revolutionary for the field of bibli-
cal studies in at least two respects. First, in its mediation between his-
torical and aesthetic approaches (insisting that it is all effective history,
always both production and reception), it possesses the welcome poten-
tial to overcome the tired, decades-old opposition between so-called
historical-critical approaches (source-critical, form-critical, redaction-
critical, and textual-critical) and literary-critical approaches (new-crit-
ical, reader-response, structuralist, poststructuralist, etc.) within the
field of biblical studies. Second, and more significantly, insofar as it is
less interested in discovering meaning in biblical texts than it is in how
meaning is made from biblical texts in different cultural contexts, past
and present, it has the potential to bring biblical scholarship into more
significant conversation with other fields of academic religious studies.20

20)
e discovery of meaning in biblical texts, whether such meaning is pursued his-
torical-critically, in terms of their “original” historical context, or literary-critically, in
 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 365

Yet, I wish to argue that reception history per se does not, indeed
cannot, carry biblical studies far enough into a reengagement with com-
parative scriptures and therefore academic religious studies. I wish to
identify three specific limitations, all of which are inherent to its theo-
retical and methodological framework in philosophical hermeneutics.
e first two limitations are, in my view, general limitations of recep-
tion history in any field, whereas the last and most serious limitation
is specific to biblical studies. All of them are brought to light most
clearly when we take into account the material and medial dimensions
of scriptures, past and present.
First, the reception historical approach conceives of the received work
primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of literary content, that is, as
immaterial, disembodied words that are embodied and given material
form through the production-reception dialectic on different horizons
of meaning—words made flesh, so to speak, in different effective-his-
torical contexts. Rooted in philosophical hermeneutics, whose own his-
tory has roots in biblical hermeneutics, reception history remains
oriented towards the interpretation of words and the Word. To be sure,
reception history can and does examine the material forms and embod-
ied actions that those words take in the process of reception, and there
are many fine examples of that sort of research in biblical reception his-
tory.21 But its hermeneutical orientation leaves little if any room for
the materiality and mediality of scriptures themselves, and how that

light of their aesthetic qualities, has been the primary aim of academic biblical studies,
especially in the United States, where its most influential disciplinary centers have
emerged from and in relation to educational institutions established to serve religious
bodies.
21)
See, e.g., the model works D.M. Gunn: “Colonialism and the Vagaries of Scrip-
ture: Te Kooti in Canaan (A Story of Bible and Dispossession in Aotearoa/New
Zealand),” in T. Linafelt and T.K. Beal (eds.), God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter
Brueggemann (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), pp. 127-142; and “Covering David:
Michelangelo’s David from the Piazza della Signoria to My Refrigerator Door,” D.M.
Gunn and P.M. McNutt (eds.), ‘Imagining’ Biblical Worlds: Spatial, Social and His-
torical Constructs in Honor of James W. Flanagan (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
2002), pp. 139-70. ese and other works by Gunn begin to move beyond reception
history proper and toward what I will call cultural history of scriptures, examining
different forms of what I call the “sacred capital” of scriptures in different cultural
366 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372

materiality interacts with their historical and material embodiments in

the production-reception process. is privileging of scriptural content
over scriptural materiality turns reception history away from much
potentially fruitful comparative research. Indeed, there is at least as
much potential for comparison of human interactions (ritual and oth-
erwise) with the materiality of scripture—studied anthropologically,
cultural-historically, cognitive-scientifically, and from a sensual stud-
ies perspective—as there is for comparison of scriptural contents and
their interpretations. Such research is largely bracketed out by the lit-
erary orientation of biblical reception history.
Some might argue that this first limitation is surmountable from
within biblical reception history. It is not an inherent limit; material-
and media-historical approaches to the biblical can be added. Perhaps,
but they would be necessarily secondary to the main focus on recep-
tion as influence, impact, and interpretation. At best, the materiality
of scriptures and human interactions with that materiality are supple-
mental to biblical reception history. At worst, they are ignored entirely,
as in the common “Adam-and-Eve-through-the-centuries” approach
to biblical reception history, where the particularities of material scrip-
tures would come as interruptions to the grand narrative being pre-
sented.
Second, in disregarding or at least downplaying the materiality of
scripture itself, reception history also brackets off critical attention to
the economic aspects of scriptural production, marketing, and con-
sumption, and to the way those processes trade in various unstable
forms of social, cultural, financial, and sacred capital. To be sure, lit-
erary reception history can and sometimes does attend critically to the
socio-economic conditions and social/cultural capital of particular read-
ers and their vested interests, especially in terms of class, sex and gen-
der, race, and ethnicity. And biblical reception histories are often
centrally concerned with the ways in which biblical words are wielded
in order to gain or challenge hegemonic power. But historical-critical
attention to the cultural and socio-economic processes of production,
marketing, and consumption of Bibles and the biblical is lacking; indeed,

contexts (Timothy Beal, e Rise and Fall of the Bible: e Unexpected History of an
Accidental Book [New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011], pp. 75-78).
 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 367

they are largely precluded by this approach’s preclusion of attention to

the particular thingnesses of Bibles and the biblical.22
ird, “reception” implies origination, an original work to be received
and interpreted on subsequent effective-historical horizons. is is an
especially acute problem for biblical studies, insofar as there is no orig-
inal, singular “the Bible” to be received through history. We may per-
ceive an undercurrent of uneasiness about this problem in some
definitions of the reception history of the Bible. James Barr, for exam-
ple, in noting that biblical reception historians are undertaking an “his-
torical, evidence-based operation,” rather than a theological one, writes
that they “direct their gaze towards what was done with texts after they
were composed, after they were finalized.”23 e wording here acknowl-
edges no solid original—that, as most biblical scholars would argue,
the further we go back in the literary history of most biblical texts, the
more diversity we find.24 Barr therefore shifts ahead, to a later time
when they were “finalized.”25 But when exactly did that take place, and

22)
Note, moreover, that Jauss’s own economic language, quoted earlier, is figurative:
“consuming subject” is a metaphor for the reader attending to the work; and “systems”
of “literary production” refer to the processes of production of literary meanings, not
of literary things.
23)
J. Barr, Biblical eology: An Old Testament Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1999), p. 447; italics added.
24)
Cf. a kindred uneasy vagueness in Luz’s description, p. 123, of the focus of New
Testament reception history on “the reception of biblical texts in periods subsequent
to New Testament times.”
25)
As early as 1965, in his presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature,
K.W. Clark asked “if there really was a stable text at the beginning,” or at least whether
it “remained stable long enough to hold a priority.” e address was published a year
later as “e eological Relevance of Textual Variation in Current Criticism of the
Greek New Testament,” Journal of Biblical Literature 85 (1966), pp. 1-16. On textual
criticism and the question of a common original source in Jewish Scriptures, especially
in light of Dead Sea Scrolls discoveries, see E. Tov, “Textual Criticism (OT),” e
Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, pp. 393-412. Much earlier, P.E. Kahle, “Untersuchun-
gen zur Geschicthe des Pentateuchtextes,” eologische Studien und Kritiken 88 (1915),
pp. 399-439, argued that there was no “Ur-text” (single original text), but rather mul-
tiple versions of Jewish Scriptures (Vulgärtexte) from the earliest times. He did so based
on rabbinical quotations and differences among Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew versions
known before the discoveries at Qumran. Tov partially disagrees with Kahle and his
followers, arguing that there was an Ur-text, which he defines as the “finalized literary
368 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372

for which version or canon? Where and when is the starting point, when
finalization is completed and reception begins? After the early second
century, when the latest Christian texts now in the canon were writ-
ten? In the fourth century, when Athanasius’s Easter letter gives the
earliest known list of scriptures that matches the canon as we now know
it? (Surely Athanasius would not have asserted that list if there had not
been other contenders.) After Jerome’s Vulgate? After that Vulgate was
more or less standardized, “finalized,” centuries later? Would that mean
Jerome and other early theologians, not to mention rabbinic scholars,
would be pre-reception-historical? ese questions, of course, are already
severely limiting of the many possible forms of finalization, presuming
as they do that “the Bible” refers to a Christian canon of scriptures.
e problems are clear even when we focus narrowly on trying to
identify a finalized, reception-ready version of the literary content of a
Christian canon of scriptures. When we broaden our scope to attend to
the material history of scriptures, they become far more glaring. Indeed,
if there is one thing the material history of Bibles makes extremely clear,
it is that there is no such thing as the Bible, and there never has been.
ere is no Gadamerian or Jaussian other horizon of “the text” to be
received and understood within effective history. e Bible is not a
thing but an idea, or rather a constellation of often competing, hetero-
geneous ideas, more or less related to a wide variety of material bibli-
cal things. Truly overwhelming evidence of this fact may be found even
within print culture among the many thousands of widely varied Bibles
archived in the special collections of the American Bible Society in New
York; or in the descriptions of various biblical contents and forms in
T.H. Darlowe and F.H. Moule’s Historical Catalogue of the Printed Edi-
tions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Soci-
ety.26 ere is no “e Bible,” only “the Bibles,” a paradoxical construct

product which incorporated the last recognizable literary editing of the book.” Yet he
recognizes that other versions (earlier editions, for example) would not have disap-
peared at that point, and so there were, even then, multiple versions. Moreover, he sees
subsequent generations of scribes making various changes, intentional and uninten-
tional, to that Ur-text, so that the period of the early first century was one of great
textual variety.
26)
T.H. Darlowe and F.H. Moule, Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy
Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London: e Bible
 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 369

I use here to highlight the material and literary manyness of the one
and only Bible. All that to say, “reception” of what, which, and from
whence?
Behind this problem lies a partial misconstruing of Gadamer’s
Wirkungsgechichte as “history of effects” or “impacts” rather than “effec-
tive history.” “History of effects” invites biblical scholars to offer his-
torical narratives of the effects or impacts or influences of biblical texts
through time. But, as Luz rightly points out, “effective history” is the
better translation, insofar as Gadamer’s aim was to challenge “histori-
cal objectivity that is satisfied with the reconstruction of the ‘historical
horizon’ of a text of the past only … History [as Wirkungsgeschichte] is
for him the basic element that enables our life. History is effective,
because we owe to it almost everything we are: our culture, our lan-
guage, our questions and our worldviews” (124-25). Gadamer’s phi-
losophy of effective history therefore does not lend itself to the reception
history of the Bible or any “work.” Yes, his hermeneutics describes
interpretation as a process of fusion of horizons, but Wirkungsgeschichte
is not the history of those processes, let alone the history of those pro-
cesses on a single work, biblical or otherwise, through time. His effec-
tive history is not a historical narrative but a conception of subjective
history. ere is no effective history of something. It’s all Wirkungsge-
schichte all the way down. at is certainly true of the Bible, which is
not only received through the centuries in different cultural contexts
but is also variously made and remade within these contexts, driven as
much by more or less conscious ideological struggles as by commercial
competition.

Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures

e rise of the reception history of the Bible has indeed been revolu-
tionary. Yet, with an eye on the horizon it has opened, its limits also
become clear, especially when we try to incorporate the material and

House, 1903-11). Based on this work and the collections of the American Bible Soci-
ety, I provide many examples from the wide variety of form, format, and content
published as “the Bible” in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in e Rise and Fall of
the Bible, pp. 131-144.
370 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372

media histories of scriptures, both of which call our attention to the

relationships of thing and idea, materiality and text, medium and mes-
sage, sensual-aesthetic experience and linguistic interpretation. All of
which relations highlight the fact that there is no the Bible or the biblical
to be received, but rather multiple, often competing, symbolic and
material productions of them that are generated and generative in dif-
ferent scriptural cultures.
With the rise of reception history, biblical studies has begun to make
the cultural turn from cause, impact, and influence to meaning. But it
has not, I suggest, gone far enough. It is time to move beyond biblical
reception history to an approach that keeps the following concerns front
and center.
First, our approach must recognize, up front, that “the Bible,” “the
biblical” and related language represent cultural concepts whose rela-
tionships with cultural productions of particular material objects, sym-
bolic contents, and embodied interactions are far from self-evident or
fixed. What Michel Foucault said of subjects of historical research such
as medicine and the state may also be said of the Bible and the bibli-
cal: they are not given or self-evident intellectual objects to be partic-
ularized or incarnated in various interpretations through time; they are,
rather, historically given “discursive objects,” constantly changing as
they are made and remade in different cultural productions of mean-
ing.27
Second, our approach must be open to any and all material and media
forms for scripture. “e Bible” as the name of our subject does not fit
this bill, insofar as it presumes a canonical whole, which does not in
fact exist, and insofar as a common dimension of the cultural meaning
of the Bible today is its bookishness. Indeed, the Bible often stands
as a veritable icon of print and bibliographic culture.
ird, our approach must account for the fact that scriptural culture
is always material as well as symbolic, sensual as well as semantic. It is

27)
Lynn Hunt, “Introduction: History, Culture, Text,” and Patricia O’Brien, “Michel
Foucault’s History of Culture,” in Lynn Hunt (ed.), e New Cultural History (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1989). Michel Foucault’s genealogical interest in
historicizing how “truth effects” are produced within particular cultural discourses is
central to cultural history as discussed below.
 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372 371

about things as much as ideas, form as much as content, medium as

much as message, and performance as much as interpretation.
I suggest that these priorities call for a move beyond reception his-
tory of the Bible to cultural history of the Bible. Why cultural history
rather than reception history? Cultural history encompasses reception
history even as it opens toward horizons of research that are beyond
reception history’s theoretical and methodological reach. e rise of
cultural history over the past several decades has marked a shift in the
focus of historical research from cause, which had previously dominated
political, social, and economic historical research, to meaning, based
on anthropological approaches, including several that are familiar to
religionists, such as those of Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Clifford
Geertz, and Marshall Sahlin. In relation to the reception history of the
Bible, the turn to cultural history of scriptures would signal a parallel
shift in focus from the impacts or influences of biblical texts and Bibles
to the cultural meanings of them, as well as of the biblical and the Bible,
insofar as those too are discursive objects whose meaning and value are
culturally produced.
In this light, the cultural history of the Bible and other scriptures
involves a radical shift in orientation in two respects. First, it is a shift
from hermeneutical reception to cultural production, that is, from con-
ceiving of biblical interpretation as receiving from the horizon of the
past that which has been passed down to us from the beginning, so to
speak, to conceiving of biblical texts, the Bible, and the biblical as dis-
cursive objects that are continually generated and regenerated within
particular cultural contexts in relation to complex genealogies of mean-
ing that are themselves culturally produced. Second, this approach shifts
from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture, espe-
cially religious culture, via scripture. As such, it presumes that the proper
academic context for biblical studies is religious studies and, more gen-
erally, the academic humanities.
I would propose, moreover, that the cultural history of the Bible, in
all its material, literary, and ideal forms, be pursued as a subfield within
the cultural history of scriptures within academic religious studies. Not
only will such an orientation advance the kind of critical, comparative
engagement with research and scholarship on other religious scriptures
and their scriptural cultures that both Wilfred Cantwell Smith and
372 T. Beal / Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011) 357-372

Jonathan Z. Smith have advocated, but it will also maintain the mate-
rial and medial dimensions of the Bible and the biblical, especially inso-
far as these terms are culturally linked to ideas of the book and print,
as we discussed earlier. Indeed, today, beholding the twilight of book
culture and the dawn of digital network culture, and wondering what
on earth might come next, we are aware more than ever before in the
history of critical biblical research and interpretation of the inextrica-
bility of message and medium, word and thing, reception and produc-
tion.