Before the Bible. By Judith Newman
‘Rather than focusing simply on the scribal hand at work on written texts, I am concerned with the scribal body, or rather what I call the "liturgical body."’ This early line (p. 6) in Judith Newman’s new book can be taken as a programmatic statement for the whole work. The nexus between l...
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2021
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| In: |
The journal of theological studies
Year: 2021, Volume: 72, Issue: 2, Pages: 929-932 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | ‘Rather than focusing simply on the scribal hand at work on written texts, I am concerned with the scribal body, or rather what I call the "liturgical body."’ This early line (p. 6) in Judith Newman’s new book can be taken as a programmatic statement for the whole work. The nexus between liturgy and the Bible is one which has recently begun to garner interest from biblical scholars. It is an interest Newman has expressed in earlier publication but now takes on with full force, and with impressive results.Before the Bible is not mainly concerned with the origins of Scripture or the closure of canon. Rather it demonstrates that ‘that which is liturgical . . . cannot be separated from the scriptural so tidily in antiquity. They are in fact intertwined even at the compositional level’ (p. 7). Newman wants to ‘understand praying bodies to shape a particular kind of self and community by engaging oral and written texts that are invested, or come to be invested, with a revelatory status’ (p. 13). For Newman, early liturgical uses of text are not just a question of the reception but the production of canonical texts, either in the production of canonical collections and norms or in the production of the texts themselves. The texts, she underscores, are ‘sites’ because ‘they might better be considered as construction sites in process’ (p. 17). In this endeavour, she follows the ‘bodily turn’ in academic studies and attempts to combine approaches from the humanities and the neurosciences in order to look at praying as ‘embodied cognition’, a knowing as a body-in-the-world, in which Newman turns to household names such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty but also medical anthropologists and researchers. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4607 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The journal of theological studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jts/flab088 |