Metabiblical

When I first headed down the road of trying to seriously grapple with all things biblical, I started by studying Greek and Hebrew. This is not necessarily a bad path to take. I’m glad I took it. It’s a long road, though. If I had to do it all again, I would have started not with the Greek alphabet but with the works of Henning Graf Reventlow.

However, as a fifteen-year-old, I was not aware of Reventlow. Very few people have anything to say about Reventlow. A little googling tells me that the website Goodreads has had over 50 million user reviews posted.

Nine of these 50,000,000 are about Henning Graf Reventlow. As far as I can tell, the internet does not seem to have anyone talking about Reventlow’s work, except for booksellers.

This seems very strange to me. Reventlow wrote a five-part history of biblical interpretation, which traces the history of how Christians and Jews have interpreted the Bible from the earliest days right up to the twentieth century. His four volumes appeared in German from 1990 to 2001, and since 2010 English translations of all four have been available, along with a translation of his earlier (1980) work The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, which covers much of the same ground but focuses particularly on England.

I plan to say more about Reventlow. For now, here are the titles:

• The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World
• History of Biblical Interpretation: Volume 1: From the Old Testament to Origen
• History of Biblical Interpretation: Volume 2: From Late Antiquity to the End of the Middle Ages
• History of Biblical Interpretation: Volume 3: Renaissance, Reformation, Humanism
• History of Biblical Interpretation: Volume 4: From the Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century