includes index and biblioraphy

Though biblical criticism in its traditional forms continues to be widely practiced, it faces increasing hostility on two fronts: from biblical conservatives, who claim iti s inherently positivistic and religiously skeptical, and from postmodernists, who see it as drinven by the falsities of objectivity and neutrality. in this magisterial overview of the key factors and developments in biblical studies, John Barton demonstrates that these evaluations of biblical criticism fail to do justice to the work that has been done by critical scholars over many generations. he shows that traditional biblical criticism has had as its central concern a semantic interest: a desire to establish the `lanin sense` of the biblical text, which in itself requires sensitivity to many literary aspects of texts. Therefore, he argues, biblical ciriticism already includes many of the methodological approaches now being recommended as alternatives to it - and, further, and the agenda of biblical studies is far less fragmented than often thought.