Introduction

The “New Testament” is a global book. The texts collected in the New Testament canon are read, studied, and interpreted both individually and in groups or larger communities (“Interpretationsgemeinschaften”) across the borders of countries, nations, cultures, languages, traditions, and churches. In different Christian churches and denominations, New Testament texts are the subject of personal scripture reading and meditation as well as preaching and pastoral care. In order to facilitate accurate reading, understanding, preaching, and application of New Testament texts, they are the subject of theological education at universities and colleges all over the world. Applying certain rules to interpretation enables “supra-individual understanding,” which at the same time recognizes the uniqueness of the early Christian texts and their divergence from the expectations of modern readers (“Fremdheit der Texte”).

Throughout the history of scholarly analysis of the New Testament texts, philological, historical and hermeneutical methods have been developed and found widespread recognition, from Mediterranean and Near Eastern Christianity in antiquity to the modern European arts of exegesis. The 1960s saw the emergence of contextual hermeneutics (e.g. feminist hermeneutics, liberation theology, postcolonial studies), especially in America, and these approaches link the interpretation of New Testament texts to the task of understanding them as vehicles of cultural, social and political change. This is especially true for the “interpretive communities” (Interpretationsgemeinschaften) that are commonly linked to the “global south.” Meanwhile, it is broadly recognized that the New Testament texts were created in specific historical situations and contexts, and those who interpret these texts do so from their own specific historical situations and contexts. Thus, “context” is a key concept for hermeneutical theorizing.

As scholars of Biblical studies, we owe our awareness of the historical contingency of texts to historical-critical exegesis. The awareness of the contextual framework in which text-reception and interpretation take place is the heritage of a centuries-old hermeneutical tradition, and contextual hermeneutics have emphasized the socio-political aspects of that framework. Are—in consequence—interpreters of New Testament texts solely concerned with reconstructing the historical situations in which those texts were written on the one hand and identifying the political or religious conditions in which they are read on the other? Will New Testament exegesis disintegrate into diverse and unconnected interpretive processes? Or is it possible to view the “New Testament” as a global book and establish a constant worldwide dialogue between different approaches to and settings for the interpretive task?