This chapter demonstrates the growth and broadening reach of Jewish–Christian dialogue, and especially Christian reflections on the significance of the Holocaust. Documents discuss the significance of the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul, alongside fraught discussions about the State of Israel.

Places the Museum of the Bible back into the history of white evangelicalism in the twentieth century and speculates on what role the museum might play in white evangelical networks in the future. Further maps out alternative pathways how the museum could be productively studied.

Shows how the Museum of the Bible produces a bible resistant to moral critique, particularly when it comes to racism, slavery, and civil rights in US history. Argues that the museum’s exhibits engage in selective history-telling and other techniques to protect the Bible from complicity in societal harms and to frame the Christian Bible as in indispensable ally for progress. The museum’s bible participates in the constructions of Christian cultural heritage narratives and Christian nationalism in the United States.

Allegory is an undeniably central feature of Renaissance literature. But it is often reduced to a Catholic or an anti-Catholic cliché. Too often, the entanglement of Catholic and Protestant interpretation and the survival of theological interests in biblical study are quickly downplayed. To document the continued importance of figurative reading in early-modern bible scholarship, this chapter views allegory broadly, as a manner of figurative reading evident in the way theologians practiced interpretation. It draws widely from a great variety of materials, roaming across the vast landscape of post-Reformation bible scholarship to suggest that the trouble with allegory was this: not that allegory exists, but that it must exist, it could never be overcome, and its division from the literal always remained fluid and tenuous. Biblical allegory becomes an expression of yet another “third force” in early modern religion, because the bible evaded a simple assertion of literalism and because it eluded confessional boundaries among the very people who helped create and police them.

The Epilogue offers two different venues where the influence of claims to be able to avoid all tradition to arrive at truer readings are seen in modern society in the United States of America. These two are biblical literalism and constitutional originalism. The study examines a number of cases, both exegetical and legal. In each case, the rules for reading “correctly” and only according to the text are shown to be instead part of a complex reading tradition that foregrounds certain facets of the text while ignoring others. The argument is not that biblical literalists or constitutional originalists are wrong in their conclusions. Instead, the evidence demonstrates that the hermeneutical high ground that claims only to read the text with no further rules, traditions, or caveats – does not exist.

This chapter shows that thinkers across the antebellum religious spectrum, from Charles Hodge’s orthodox Calvinism to Andrews Norton’s liberal Unitarianism, accepted history as the favored battleground in debates about canon and religious truth. These developments had colonial roots, but flowered in the nineteenth century. Although America’s antebellum biblical scholars responded differently to developments in German biblical criticism, those developments led them to defend their canonical choices with historical arguments, base their hermeneutics in historical analysis, and center their epistemologies in historical knowledge. Even those who rejected aspects of historical interpretation nonetheless recognized the need to address historical readings. Whether in using historical readings or in dismissing them as dangerous or problematic, American biblical interpreters’ efforts highlighted crucial contextual differences between their world and the biblical pasts they looked to for guidance. In short, the stress on historical difference in biblical interpretation introduced a sense of historical distance, which carried with it the threat of questioning the Bible’s relevance.

Late antique monasticism both participated in and disrupted familial networks of power in the Mediterranean world. The book concludes by arguing that Christian monasticism as an institution positioned itself as both rival and heir to the classical tradition of familia, challenging the ancient household’s position as the cornerstone of society’s political and economic apparatuses. Monasticism asceticized a key component of this institution – fatherhood –while maintaining that this anomaly – the celibate, ascetic father – was no innovation; the monastic father was but one node in a chain of fathers and sons stretching back into the biblical era and forward into eternity. Monasticism transformed traditions of paternity, inheritance, and genealogy. Focusing on the monastic federation of Shenoute in upper Egypt and the monastery of Cassian in Gaul, this chapter demonstrates how the coenobiumpositioned itself as a “house” or domus in late antique culture – an ancient institution that included home, household, property, and family, and required the financial, religious, disciplinary, and educational management of all of those moving parts.

Chapter 3 examines the colonies’ evolving group narratives through three lenses: their interpretations of the Gran Chaco, their actions during the Chaco War (1932–35), and their interactions with indigenous peoples after the war. The Menno colonists arrived in the Chaco with a stable and coherent group narrative. They drew on biblical stories with comic plot progressions to interpret their situation. A comedic plot takes the narrative shape of a U, wherein a period of hardship is followed by a happy resolution. They believed the toils of resettlement were essential tests of their faithfulness to scripture. By contrast, the Fernheim Colony was formed out of a group of disparate refugees and arrived with a tragic understanding of their group narrative. This type of story takes the shape of an inverted U, which rises to a point of crisis before plunging to catastrophe. Fernheim colonists therefore debated how they would give their tragic narrative a happy resolution – whether independently, collectively, or with the aid of outsiders (the Paraguayan government, indigenous people, or Mennonites abroad). This chapter argues that each colony’s collective narrative – as faithful nomads and as displaced victims – led them to make profoundly different choices and kept them separated throughout the 1930s.

This chapter focuses on the period 1680–1720, noting how religious confrontations exacerbated tensions between different visions of legitimate power and civic society across many parts of Europe. This instability is reflected both in the experimental work produced by some writers and in the need for subversive texts to be disseminated illegally to evade censors. Textual analysis of the Bible itself led to profound controversies to which the only rational response seemed to be the implementation of some form of religious toleration, but no government could do so effectively. This chapter looks at the very different arguments and styles deployed by a range of writers from Hobbes and Spinoza to less well–known underground polemicists in the early years of the eighteenth century. A rich vein of fictional writing, too, confirms that this was a period of huge significance in terms of questioning established authority in all fields of knowledge, creating new networks of writers with ideas that might be considered ‘dangerous’, and laying solid foundations for a recognisable public opinion. Print was creating an effective ‘republic of readers’.