New Testament Semiotics

Navigating through different realist and nominalist traditions, Timo Eskola suggests that signs are about conditions and functions and participate in a web of relations. Questioning Derridean poststructuralism, the author reinstates Benveniste’s hermeneutics of enunciation and suggests a new approach to metatheology.

This book is an introduction to the field of semiotics specifically directed to students of the Bible as well as to biblical scholars trained in other methodologies. The primary focus is on what semiotics is now-how contemporary scholars actually approach the Bible semiotically. Attention is given to the history and varieties of semiotic theory, because as it has influenced the work of more recent thinkers, and because postmodern reappraisals of semiotics call for rereading of biblical texts. The book is organized according to topics ('Sign', 'Message', 'Text', etc.), which provide a way to interrogate semiotics as a system. This stimulating account also includes, for good measure, reflections on what theology has become, for believer and unbeliever alike, in a post-Nietzschean, post-Heideggerian world: What does it mean to see theology as 'ideology'-a complex and never wholly conscious network of understandings, preconceptions, and expectations about 'the way things are'.

Crystal Downing brings the postmodern theory of semiotics within reach for today's evangelists. Following the idea of the sign through Scripture, church history and the academy, Downing shows you how signs work and how sensitivity to their dynamics can make or break an attempt to communicate truth.

New Testament Basics introduces college, university, seminary, and divinity school students to the study of the New Testament. Authors Stefan Alkier and David M. Moffitt adopt five major aims: (i) to explore how the Bible came to exist, dealing with the formation and significance of the Christian canon; (ii) to discuss the ways the Bible continues to exert influence on contemporary culture, demonstrating the ongoing value and importance of biblical literacy; (iii) to introduce readers to some of the most fundamental methods used in the study of the New Testament, including a substantial discussion of semiotics and its usefulness for New Testament interpretation; (iv) to provide a survey of central historical, social, and economic information as important contextual knowledge for interpreting the New Testament; and (v) to offer some brief discussion of the contents of several New Testament texts and consider ways they might inform theological reflection. In the end, Alkier and Moffitt's New Testament Basics fosters within students important competencies needed to read and interpret the New Testament for themselves.

This book explains and illustrates a variety of semiotic issues in the study of biblical law. Commencing with a review of relevant literature in linguistics, philosophy, semiotics and psychology, it examines biblical law in terms of its users, its medium and its message. It criticizes our use of the notion of 'literal meaning', at the level of both words and sentences, preferring to see meaning constructed by the narrative images that the language evokes. These images may come from either social experience or cultural narratives. Speech performance is important, both in the negotiation of the law and the narratives of its communication. Non-linguistic semiotic phenomena, utilizing other senses and involving such notions as space and time, also need to be taken into account. For the early biblical period, at least, conceptions of law based upon modern models need to be replaced by the notion of 'wisdom-laws'. Amongst the issues addressed in the course of the argument are the structure of the Decalogue, the role in the law of (Greenberg's) 'postulates', 'covenant renewal' and 'talionic punishment'.

Ancient manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are composed with no punctuation and no spacing between words. Readers are free to score the text as they see fit, resulting in different readings and quotes supporting various sectarian Christian purposes.