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The course seeks to (1) introduce students to the textual foundations, that is, the “canon”, but also to the dominant modes of exegesis of the three Abrahamic traditions; (2) help students develop an understanding of what the challenges and limits, but also the continued promise(s) of textual approaches in the study of religion are..
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This course is structured in four parts. The first part provides an overview of the scriptural canons of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, while also examining issues of power and authority in the construction, past and present, of these canons. The second part deals with interpretive techniques in the three Abrahamic traditions, from premodern types of scriptural exegesis to modern and contemporary ones, including a reflection on 20th-century philosophical hermeneutics. The third part addresses the ‘crisis’ of textual scholarship in the 20th and 21st centuries: it reviews the nexus between philology and Orientalism in the work of the early scholar of religion, F. M. Müller, but also studies the emergence in the 21st century of new paradigms (“future philology”, and distant reading) in the textual study of religion. The fourth part explores a number of other recent trends in the study of religious texts, namely, the various proposals to study religious texts and interpretive practices in terms of their performative, ritual and material dimensions.
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