Aims

By the end of the course, the student should be able to:
- correctly situate the essential data about OT history and culture;
- describe the historical background of the New Testament, the steps of its production and its constitution as a corpus, as well as the evolution of modern exegetic research in the matter;
- read a biblical text using mainly the historical-critical method and narrative criticism;
- use the basic tools in biblical exegesis (synopsis, concordances and dictionaries);
- think about the questions raised in reference to the Bible as a founding document and inspiring source of faith and Christian traditions.

Main themes

To reach these objectives, the course deals with the following themes (divided into 3 units: (A) Introduction to the NT; (B) Introduction to the OT; (C) Theological questions about the Holy Scriptures):
- main historical questions about Israel and OT (formation of the books and the texts of OT); theoretical and practical introduction to the narrative analysis of biblical texts; brief survey about the Jewish reading of the Bible;
- common issues related to the Introduction to the New Testament, particularly the Gospels and Acts (characteristics of the books, objectives, author, date, plan); survey of the historical background of the NT ; research history; theoretical and practical presentation of exegetic methods (authenticity criticism, source criticism, literary forms criticism, redaction criticism, structural analysis);
- practical introduction to the tools used in biblical exegesis;
- theology of the Holy Scripture: truth of the Bible, revelation and inspiration of the Scriptures, formation of the biblical canons, questions raised by the text and by the reading of the Bible, as well as the relationship between exegesis and other theological disciplines.

Content and teaching methods

Unit A Introduction to the New Testament :
Students will be introduced to a critical reading of the Gospels through a theoretical and practical presentation of exegetic methods. Methods and results of the historical research on Jesus and his contemporaneous society will be also treated. Finally the common issues related to the Gospels and Acts (literary genre, objectives, author, date, plan) will be dealt with.

Unit B Introduction to the Old Testament
Content:
Historical questions : main lines of the history of Israel people, of the progressive formation of the Old Testament and of the tradition of its text. This theoretical presentation is completed by the reading of some important texts; the scope is to introduce to the principal exegetical methods. A general bibliography on the O.T. is also presented.
Methods:
For historical questions: teaching and personal readings; for text readings: interactive work and comments of the teachers on the methods used in these readings.

Unit C Theology of the Holy Scripture :
The questions of revelation, inspiration and truth of the Bible will be successively dealt with. The formation of the biblical canons will be examined historically and theologically. The main Apocrypha of the OT and the NT will be presented. The course will end with a brief introduction to the textual criticism of the NT.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

without object

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