The New Interpreter's Bible : General and Old Testament Articles; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus. - Vol. 1 - book reviews

Christian Century, Nov 22, 1995 by Patrick J. Willson

The New Interpreter's Bible (Vol. 1): General and Old Testament Articles; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus.

Abingdon, 1,200 pp., $65. 00. The New Interpreter's Bible (Vol. 8): General Articles on the New Testament; Matthew, Mark.

Abingdon, 850 pp., $55.00.

AT THE SEMINARY I attended, there was one sure sign heralding the approach of graduation: the bookstore began to fill with boxes containing sets of the 12-volume Interpreter's Bible (IB). Parents and spouses had been informed that this was the gift that would most help graduates succeed in their first pastorates.

Students, pastors and parishes have echoed that judgment for more than 40 years. The success of the IB can be measured in many was. It has sold almost 3 million volumes and remains in print more than four decades after its initial offering. Those red and gray volumes decorate pastors' studies and church libraries with amazing regularity Library copies are on their second (or perhaps third) binding, and their worn pages suggest that they have been read, marked and inwardly digested. Though some regard the IB as a hopelessly pious scholarly dinosaur, for many Christians it remains a primary means of access to the scriptures.

The IB proposed to connect the scholarship of the academy with the intellectual and spiritual hungers of the parish. During the early years of World War II, George A. Buttrick, then pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, was having dinner with Pat Beaird of Abingdon Cokesbury Press. The publisher asked Buttrick, "What do you consider the most urgent task in the field of religious publishing today?" Without a moment's hesitation Buttrick answered: "To bring out a new commentary on the Bible which would bridge the gap between exegetes and rank-and-file teachers and preachers." Buttrick eventually became editor of the enterprise. His preface set forth the objective of the series:

For 50 years no full-scale commentary has been produced

in the English language on the whole Bible. Exegetical

studies on the one hand and expository aids on

the other have appeared, not with a "great gulf fixed"

between them, but with too little mutual concern. Both

scholarship and preaching have suffered from the separation:

perhaps scholarship has tended to barren erudition,

and preaching to "vain imaginings"--vain because

of somewhat tenuous contact with the meaning of

scripture.

Forty-three years after the first appearance of the IB, Abingdon Press began publication of the New Interpreters Bible (NIB). Volume 1 appeared in 1994 and Volume 8 this past summer; Volume 9 is scheduled for December, in time for preachers to take advantage of Alan Culpepper's work on Luke's Christmas story and Gail R. O'Day's treatment of the first chapter of John. The NIB expands the commentary's scope by including those writings commonly designated the Apocrypha. (It also expands Buttrick's vision of "honest scholarship within the Protestant evangelical faith" b including 17 Roman Catholic scholars among the contributors--the largest representation of any single Christian body.) If it keeps to the schedule of publishing a new volume every six months, Abingdon should complete the 12-volume set at the millennium. Abingdon will also make this opus available on CD-ROM.

LIKE ITS venerable predecessor, the NIB aims "to bring the best in contemporary biblical scholarship into the service of the church to enhance preaching, teaching, and the study of the scriptures." But both biblical scholarship and the church have changed drastically since the IB first appeared. Leander E. Keck of Yale Divinity School, convener of the editorial board for the NIB, explains: "To do in our time what our predecessors did in theirs requires ... a wholly new work for a largely new situation." The "General Articles" which introduce the commentaries evidence this change. Perhaps the most dramatic modification in the NIB is an awareness of the ways in which social location influences the reading of the scriptures. "White male liberal Protestants"' Keck reminds us, wrote the IB. The list of contributors included but one woman and one African-American. Where the IB could confidently preface its commentaries with papers on the transmission and interpretation of the scriptures, the IVIB offers articles on "Reading the Bible as" African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Native Americans and women. Each of these articles surveys a wide literature. Differing social interests and viewpoints collide, alerting readers to the continuing challenge of a faithful and just reading of scripture. The issues raised by the contributors of these papers echo throughout the commentaries.

The historical-critical reading of scripture which ruled the IB has been supplemented (if not supplanted) by myriad approaches to interpretation. These often leave pastors, seminarians and teachers lost in a forest of shifting paradigms in which all directions appear to be in a foreign vocabulary. In articles on "Contemporary Theories of Biblical Interpretation" and "Contemporary Methods of Reading the Bible," Moises Silva and Carl Holladay skillfully guide interpreters through this rough terrain.