Andrew Mein - The First World War and the Mobilization of Biblical Scholarship

SCRIPTURAL TRACES: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE

Editors

Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University

Matthew A. Collins, University of Chester

Andrew Mein, Durham University

Editorial Board

Michael J. Gilmour, David Gunn, James Harding, Jorunn kland

Published under

LIBRARY OF HEBREW BIBLE/OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES

Formerly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

Editors

Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University

Andrew Mein, Durham University

Founding Editors

David J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies and David M. Gunn

Editorial Board

Alan Cooper, Susan Gillingham, John Goldingay,

Norman K. Gottwald, James E. Harding, John Jarick, Carol Meyers,

Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, James W. Watts

CONTENTS

Part I
INTRODUCTION

Part II
INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS

Part III
BIBLICAL TEXTS AND THEMES

Part IV
RESPONSE

This book has its origins in a conversation between Andrew Mein, Matthew A. Collins and Jason Silverman at the annual meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies in Leipzig in July 2013. Prompted by the impending centenary, we decided that there would be value in exploring the use of the Bible during the First World War. We were soon joined in our deliberations by Nathan MacDonald and Loren Stuckenbruck, and the result was a Cambridge-based AHRC Research Networking project, which ran from 2015 to 2017 under the title The Book and the Sword: The Bible in the Experience and Memory of the First World War. The project brought together biblical scholars, historians and theologians in a series of workshops focused on different aspects of the use and impact of the Bible during and after the First World War. The majority of the papers in the present volume were initially written for our first meeting, which took place in April 2016 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt in Munich on the topic of the war and the mobilization of biblical scholarship.

We are very grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for its financial support (AHRC Reference: AH/M011186/1), as well as to the Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultt of LMU for additional funding to support our meeting there. We are also grateful for support provided by the Master and Fellows of St Johns College, Cambridge, in order to enable a preliminary advisory board meeting in September 2015. Neither the networking project nor this volume would have come to fruition without the encouragement and support of a number of people. On the academic side, we would like to thank Simon Goldhill, W. John Lyons, Suzanne Marchand, Christopher Rowland, Marc Saperstein, Jason Silverman, Michael Snape, Loren Stuckenbruck and Jay Winter, as well as all the participants in our three workshops. For more practical support, we would like to thank Gillian Burrows, Peter Harland and Laura Jeffrey in Cambridge, and Anna Kellerer in Munich. We are also grateful to Claudia Camp as series editor of Scriptural Traces, and to Sarah Blake and Dominic Mattos at Bloomsbury.

Finally, we would like to dedicate this volume to the memory of Petra Ernst-Khr, whose support and friendship were invaluable to us as we began to plan our work together, and who died on 29 November 2016.

Lukas Bormann is Professor of New Testament at the Philipps-Universitt Marburg.

Mark D. Chapman is Professor of the History of Theology at the University of Oxford, and Vice-Principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon.

Matthew A. Collins is Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Chester.

James Crossley is Professor of Bible, Society and Politics at St Marys University, Twickenham.

Timothy J. Demy is Professor of Leadership and Ethics at the US Naval War College, RI.

Jan Willem van Henten is Professor of New Testament, Early Jewish and Early Christian Literature at the University of Amsterdam, and Extraordinary Professor of Old and New Testament at the University of Stellenbosch.

Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, NH.

Toms Irish is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Swansea University.

Paul Michael Kurtz is Marie Skodowska-Curie Individual European Fellow at the University of Cambridge and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queens College, Cambridge.