Book Review: Ireland and the Reception of the Bible: Social and Cultural Perspectives and The Cultural Reception of the Bible: Explorations in Theology,Literature,and the Arts. Essays in Honour of Fr Brendan McConvery CSs

What is reception history of the Bible, and what does it do? The recent explosion of interest in reception, and the closely related ‘history of effects’ (or perhaps ‘effective history’ as a better translation of Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte), is a striking manifestation of the broader turn towards the reader/audience in biblical scholarship. Reception historians continue to debate the purposes, parameters of biblical reception history, and criteria for adjudicating between competing readings of familiar texts. What different reasons provoke an interest in a text’s reception? How wide should the net be cast? What is the relationship between reception history and other scholarly approaches to the Bible? Does anything go, or are there better and worse readings of biblical passages? One thing that is clear is the extent to which biblical reception is culturally embedded, the biblical text both speaking to and shaped by specific contexts of reading, hearing, and seeing.

Questions of what constitutes the reception history of the Bible, and its cultural embeddedness, are well demonstrated by these two recent collections of essays. The link between the two is their attention, at least in broad terms, to the dynamic relationship between the Bible and Ireland. Such is the explicit focus of Ireland and the Reception of the Bible, edited by Bradford A. Anderson and Jonathan Kearney, in T&T Clark’s Scriptural Traces series (henceforth IRB). Anderson and Kearney provide an orienting Introduction, setting out the complexity, both of the idea of ‘Ireland’ and ‘Irishness,’ and of what constitutes reception of the Bible. Theirs is a reception history which is broadly conceived, demonstrating the benefits of the rich cross-disciplinary conversation such a definition affords.

All this sets the scene for the 21 chapters, divided into four sections. Part I focuses on the big picture, broad historical descriptions of the transmission, translation, and liturgical reception of Scripture in Ireland from earliest times to the present. Part II examines the complex role of the Bible in Irish identity formation, both through specific historical case studies and through a more contemporary lens, reflecting Ireland’s religious and increasing cultural diversity. Part III (‘Reciprocal Influences’) considers the two-way traffic between Ireland and the rest of the world: the wider impact of Irish scholars, or (in the case of the Chester Beatty papyri) how biblical manuscripts from elsewhere have become part of the Irish cultural heritage. Part IV showcases the wider cultural reception of the Bible in Ireland, in visual art, music, and literature (ranging from stained glass to Handel’s biblical oratorios to the novels of James Joyce).

The second volume is a Festschrift in honour of a specific exemplar of Irish engagement with Scripture: Brendan McConvery, a Redemptorist biblical scholar whose wide scholarly and cultural interests mirror the interdisciplinarity, not only of IRB, but also of broadly based reception-historical projects like the Wiley Blackwell Bible Commentary series. The Cultural Reception of the Bible, edited by Salvador Ryan and Liam M. Tracey (henceforth CRB) offers a richly textured understanding of biblical reception befitting the wide interests of the honorand. Thirty-four contributions, preceded by the editors’ introduction, reflect this diversity. Though many contributors are Irish (and some also appear in IRB), including a good number of former colleagues and students from Maynooth, it is the wide scholarly interests of the Irish McConvery, rather than reception in Ireland or by Irish readers specifically, which gives the volume its coherence. That being said, several essays explore distinctly Irish reception (e.g. John-Paul Sheridan’s analysis of the use of Scripture in Irish Catholic religious education), or on significant Irish interpreters (e.g. Penelope Woods on Thomas of Ireland’s influence on Bohemian Christianity, or Patrick Comerford’s important reminder of the often-overlooked Irishness of the Cambridge textual critic Fenton J. A. Hort).

The contributions to CRB are organized into seven sections. The first, ‘Setting the Scene,’ contains just a single though typically stimulating essay on the theological and political presuppositions of biblical maps by Tom O’Loughlin (ironically, in the case of the maps in the 1914 British Catholic Bible O’Loughlin examines, designed by Protestant Bible-reading audiences with a more historicizing view of Scripture, and hints of a colonizing perspective). The second section offers a rich crop of theological readings, showcasing the contributions from systematic theology, moral theology, as well as biblical studies. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the largest, third section focuses on the ‘lived’ encounter with Scripture, in liturgy, homiletics, and daily life. Section four covers the challenges of biblical translation, arguably one of the most immediate (sometimes unacknowledged) modes of biblical reception, in the work of three historical figures (Jonathan Kearney on the Arabic translation of the Pentateuch by the Jewish scholar Saadia Gaon, and Martin Henry’s introduction to the inaugural lecture of the Basel-based exegete Franz Overbeck, as well as Comerford’s discussion of Hort). This is followed by nine essays exploring the reception of the Bible in literature and the arts, and four personal appreciations of McConvery by colleagues and former students. The final section comprises a single postscript, John F. Deane’s poetic response to Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, which gives the seven-part structure of CRB a suitably apocalyptic feel (as does the image of St John on Patmos on the book’s front cover, taken from a Book of Hours in Maynooth’s Russell Library).

Rather than attempt to comment on all 55 contributions, this extended review will organize its comments around issues of contemporary debate concerning biblical reception history, and specific questions provoked by the chapters themselves. The first relates to the frequent charge that reception history is often merely archival or anthological. This criticism, not without some validity, nonetheless overlooks the hermeneutical role of such anthologies, attested by the medieval catenae and glossae. Several essays demonstrate how reception history functions as a constructive activity, requiring the reception historian to make decisions about types of reception, and to locate them in a broad, historical narrative. We need these frameworks, however arbitrary, to help make sense of the big picture, and identify possible genealogical relationships between receptions.

Two essays in IRB, along with the editors’ scene-setting introduction, illustrate this aspect in relation to Irish reception. Martin McNamara provides an impressive historical sketch of the afterlives of the Bible in Irish history and culture from the pre-Norman period through to 1200 CE. McNamara’s catalogue, which includes the rich apocryphal literature he himself has retrieved (a fact noted by John Collins in his Foreword to the volume), lays an important foundation upon which others can build (as McNamara observes, the history of the Bible in Ireland ‘yet remains to be written,’ p. 39). Salvador Ryan brings the story up to ca. 1650, discussing biblical reception across the social strata of Irish society. His nuanced approach underscores the complexity of describing the Bible’s impact, and the channels of its mediation, which, in (to use Sallie McFague’s term) a ‘sacramental universe,’ cannot be reduced to preaching or visual reception through stained glass or other religious images. In a profound sense, the medieval Irish Christian worldview was the world that Scripture described, even if mediated through hagiography or devotional poetry (Ryan provides an example from the 12th-century Life of Ruadhán of Lorrha, with its evocation of Luke’s story of the widow of Nain’s son, Luke 7:11–15).

By way of contrast, many of the contributions to both volumes also demonstrate the value of narrowly focused examples of biblical reception. These allow greater attention to cultural and religious context and influences, and the dynamic interplay between Bible and personal biography. Indeed, particularly illuminating are those contributions where the author’s own autobiography is to the fore. Such is Carmel McCarthy’s ‘Voyage of Discovery’ in CRB. This presents a personal narrative of post-Vatican II European biblical scholarship, contextualizing her own engagement with Chester Beatty Syriac Manuscript 709, the only extant Syriac copy of Ephrem’s commentary on the Diatessaron, and other important projects such as the Biblia Hebraica Quinta and the Antioch Bible, in a scholarly journey for which the faith dimension of studying the Scriptures is paramount.

To this we might add the contributions to CRB which consider how Brendan McConvery’s own story is woven into his biblical interpretation. The personal appreciations by Tríona Doherty, Julieann Moran, Máire Ní Chearbhaill, and Wilfrid Harrington, explore his diverse and overlapping roles as teacher, colleague, scriptural interpreter, and fellow-pilgrim. In their different ways, the contributions by Brendan’s Redemptorist confreres (Cardinal Joseph Tobin, Raphael Gallagher, Terence Kennedy, and Cornelius Casey) hint at an ‘Alphonsian hermeneutic’ shaping his own approach to Scripture. This is most explicit in Kennedy’s contribution, which reminds us of the centrality of Crib, Cross, and Sacrament in St Alphonsus’s theological vision. This interweaving of Christ’s life, passion, and risen eucharistic presence offers a helpful hermeneutic for contemporary Catholic New Testament scholars, and all Catholic readers of Scripture.

A good number of the chapters showcase distinctly Irish examples of reception, such as the use of Scripture in the sermons of the 18th-century Bishop James Gallagher (by Ciarán Mac Murchaidh in IRB). Other examples include Brian Murray’s intriguing discussion (also in IRB) of how in the early modern period some Irish saw themselves as ‘Milesians,’ tapping into an 11th-century Irish epic which crossed Irish ancestors with biblical characters, and offered a communal story which paralleled Israel’s Exodus. This myth of origins contrasts sharply with a later 19th-century emphasis on Irish insularity and unsullied pagan tradition.

Unsurprisingly, contributions to both volumes address the complex interweaving of Bible, theology, and politics during the Northern Ireland Troubles. In his contribution to IRB, Joshua Searle draws on his significant expertise in Northern Irish Evangelical exegesis to reflect on the complexities of scriptural use: illuminating society through the lens of apocalyptic eschatology. I was reminded of Judith Kovacs’s and Christopher Rowland’s definition of ‘actualization’ in their Blackwell Bible Commentary on the book of Revelation, a book close to the subject-matter Searle discusses. ²⁰ Searle also reminds us of the soteriological and not simply the ethnic/identity forming dimension of biblical convictions. His discussion fruitfully dovetails with Hugh Connolly’s partially autobiographical account in CRB of denominational tensions over Scripture in Northern Ireland. Both Connolly and Searle demonstrate how Northern Irish Protestant identity is far from monochrome. Very different biblical texts function as normative for specific Northern Irish Protestant communities: apocalyptic vision of Christ’s followers versus the powers of darkness on the one hand, and a more conciliatory focus on the biblical prophets and the Gospels on the other, directed towards challenging sectarian dichotomies.

This discussion relates to Bradford Anderson’s examination in IRB of the Bible as a political tool in the earlier period of the 1641 Depositions. Drawing on James Watts’s concept of the iconic dimension of Scripture, Anderson considers Bibles as ‘badges of Christian Identity’ (p. 131), the English Bible often functioning as a ‘Protestant signifier,’ a symbol of English imperialism from an Irish, particularly Catholic, perspective. A more positive to the ‘tempestuous history’ of the Bible in Ireland is Patrick Mitchel’s quest (in IRB) for ‘threads of grace,’ the use of the Bible by two relief agencies promoting social justice in contemporary Ireland, the Catholic Trócaire and the Evangelical Tearfund Ireland.

In the popular imagination, there is no greater example of ‘Irish’ biblical reception than the Book of Kells. Several authors across both volumes examine this iconic exemplar of the insular style, with its instantly recognizable combination of abstract and zoomorphic illuminations. Eoin O’Mahony (in IRB) approaches it from the perspective of cultural geography, to consider the book as part of a wider evangelization project in medieval Europe, and the rather different impact of its current location in Trinity College, Dublin, in which the religious and the secular interact in a dynamic way.

Also in IRB, Amanda Dillon teases out the manuscript’s multifaceted biblical reception, as well as its influence on contemporary Irish art. At the scribal level, for example, the illustration of a hare, a classic symbol of cowardice, functions exegetically to comment on Peter’s denial of Christ. But, as for O’Mahony, Dillon also reflects on its current ‘theatre of reception’ at TCD. Her striking observation, provoked by her struggle to find a Bible on sale in the Trinity College gift shop, is ‘that the one thing that has not been ‘Kells-ified’ is the Bible—or more precisely, the Gospels of the New Testament’ (p. 311). To contemporize the integration of word and image in the original, she proposes the possibility of an interlinear version, perhaps in multiple modern languages, in the digital realm: a new reception of the Gospel texts of the Book of Kells. Nicely complementary is Cornelius Casey’s contribution on the illuminations of Kells in CRB. He explores two prominent, christological images: the lion, watchful even in sleep, who ‘raises’ his cubs from the dead after three days of post-natum sleep, and the four-sided ‘lozenge,’ coming to symbolize the new Adam (Adam’s name being a tetragrammaton), as well as the cosmic stage on which the drama of the incarnation is played out.

Nor is Kells the only example of biblical reception in art. Both volumes have a rich range of art-related chapters, only a small sampling of which can be discussed here, as illustrative of the important contribution of what has come to be called ‘visual exegesis.’ A visual image can convey, in a more immediate fashion than textual commentary, a rich and complex exegetical tradition which interweaves canonical text with apocryphal expansion. A concrete example, analyzed by Myra Hayes in IRB, is Michael Healy’s stained-glass image of the Holy Family in St Brendan’s Cathedral, Loughrea, part of the new flowering of stained glass in Ireland in the early 20th century. Its simple image of Mary sewing, in the company of the child Jesus and an aged Joseph, brings together the theological conceptualization of the incarnation as a ‘clothing,’ with the Johannine reference to Christ’s seamless garment (John 19:23), and a medieval legend whereby this was woven by Mary in Jesus’ childhood. The connection between infancy and passion is already embedded in the canonical Gospels of Matthew and Luke, inviting such legendary expansion in visual art (and also well-attested in Irish traditional music, especially in nativity carols, an observation made by Siobhán Dowling Long in her chapter in IRB).

A more ‘text-based’ example appears in Jessie Rogers’s contribution to CRB, on the St John Window in the Honan Chapel of University College Cork. In contrast to many stained-glass windows of this subject, which draw upon apocryphal acts of John’s afterlife, this window by the Church of Ireland artist Catherine O’Brien sticks relatively closely to the canonical text, with only minimal harmonization. As Rogers demonstrates, careful ‘reading’ of this window, from the bottom up, reaps dividends. Most striking, perhaps, is her observation that the tilt of John’s head, focusing his gaze on Christ, is shared by three scenes: the call, the last supper, and the cross. This makes John’s response to Jesus the point of entry for the viewer into each of the scenes.

A final example of visual reception, also from CRB, is that of Martin O’Kane, highly regarded for his pioneering work on visual art as biblical exegesis. O’Kane selects three dimensions of the life of Elijah taken up by visual artists: his feeding by an angel in the wilderness (1 Kgs 19:6–9), frequently presented as a type of the Eucharist; his encounter with God at the entrance to the cave (1 Kgs 19:13), prominent in Byzantine iconography, where the cave’s darkness signifies divine transcendence; the association of Elijah with the mysterious Qu’ranic companion of Moses, known in Islamic tradition as Kidr, associated in Islamic art not only with the cave but also the fountain of life, recalling Elijah’s biblical powers over rain. Each explores, in immediate but often sophisticated ways, the prophet’s encounter with the invisible deity.

Though many contributions to the two volumes examine historical examples, biblical reception is also of contemporary significance. A recurring thread in CRB is what the use of Scripture might look like through the lens of the papacy of Francis (indeed, Joseph Tobin sees a synergy between a Franciscan hermeneutic and Brendan McConvery’s own understanding of the preacher’s task). Padraig Corkery’s examination of Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia finds parallels between Francis’s critics and reactions to Vatican II’s declaration on religious freedom, as representing rupture rather than continuity. Corkery looks not so much at the specifics of canonical Scripture related to the question of admission of divorced and remarried to the Eucharist, but the how of discernment, rooted in the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s Bible and Morality (2008). Carol Dempsey’s chapter connects an ecological reading of Israel’s prophets with McConvery’s own biography, especially his passion for the Word and his compassionate embrace of all life and concern for our planet. Engaging with the authors of The Earth Bible, as well as building on her own work, Dempsey challenges biblical scholars to consider the extent to which an uncritical anthropocentrism affects their interpretation of scriptural texts, and finds encouraging support in church documents from across the ecclesial spectrum, culminating in Laudato Si’.

The liturgical reception of the Bible also spans both volumes. Kieran O’Mahony’s contribution to IRB demonstrates the extent to which a ‘closet Marcionism’ remains even in the revised Roman Sunday lectionary (somewhat mitigated by the lectio continua of the Old Testament permitted by the ecumenical RCL). In CRB, Liam Tracey illuminates the complex interweaving of Scripture and ecclesiology in the Order for the Dedication of a Church (1977), with particular focus on the tension between people and place inherent in the biblical image of the temple.

Moreover, the broader definition of biblical reception espoused by the editors of the two volumes also takes seriously more ‘popular’ receptions by ordinary Christian communities and individuals. Especially helpful are those chapters which engage the praxis, how reception works in specific contexts. Séamus O’Connell’s discussion of lectio divina, that ancient monastic practice which retains such a powerful contemporary appeal, illuminatingly proposes how it is a discipline which engages Scripture as language, its discourse as opposed to its story, to borrow from modern narrative criticism, and which prioritizes the fundamental societal character of reading, reading together.

So, to return to one of our earlier questions: what does reception history do? One of the most striking descriptions of the reception of the Bible, specifically in the context of preaching, is provided by Katherine Meyer: ‘the unsettling art of receiving what we already know and discovering it to be also quite other, something which is more like a calling than a familiar landscape, more like an unmarked road than the faithful tracking of a known way’ (CRB, pp. 159-60). This unsettling character, she claims, has its roots in the partially continuous, partially disruptive reading of Israel’s Scriptures in early Christian congregations. This hints at the ‘ecumenical’ dimension of reception history in its broadest sense (both inter-ecclesial and cross-cultural): reminding us of what we might otherwise have forgotten, by bringing us into dialogue with different, and often challenging, patterns of reading and interpretation. Elochukwu Uzukwu’s reading of Paul’s somatic theology in light of West African ritual is a striking example from CRB. Uzukwu’s discussion illuminates the profound connectivity between corporeality and justice, and the disconnect between a Pauline theology of worship and the Pauline household codes. His is a striking example of how biblical reception can bring us face to face, both with the liberating power of Scripture, and with its deleterious effects.

These two volumes also ably demonstrate how, through careful analysis of reception at the micro-level, reception history can challenge or undermine widely held assumptions or sweeping statements. Illustrative of this dimension is Brendan McConvery’s own analysis in IRB of Irish Catholic Bible readers before the famine, which highlights the wide range of Catholic translations and editions available, as well as evidence for some, however minimal, ecumenical collaboration. He concludes that it is ‘probably accurate to speak of a Catholic biblical renaissance, albeit of comparatively restrained scope, in late-eighteenth-century/early-nineteenth-century Ireland’ (p. 103). This significantly nuances the oft-cited claim that Irish Catholics were biblically illiterate, and that the Bible was ‘a Protestant book.’ McConvery also proposes that the ‘Second Reformation’ was a minority position by comparison, though doing great damage to Catholic reading of Scripture in Ireland. This blurring of the boundaries is reinforced by Fearghus Ó Fearghail’s contribution to the same volume, which traces the emergence of Irish Bible translations from the mid-16th century, with an Irish NT promoted by Elizabeth I (published in 1602/3), though also used by Catholics, including the Franciscans in Dublin and Louvain.

Finally, for some reception critics, the task of reception history is undertaken, not primarily to see where we have come, but to illuminate traditional critical interest in textual origins. In other words, reception history can help historical critics do their job better. Jeremy Corley’s treatment (in CRB) of friendship in Sirach 6:5–17 is a model of how critical scholarship, attentive to the interpenetration of scriptural tradition (in this case, the book of Proverbs and 1 Samuel 25) and Greek culture in the book’s composition, can fruitfully dialogue with subsequent reception in rabbinic, medieval, and early modern periods. Moreover, the contemporary relevance of the topic of friendship, not least for Christian spirituality, underscores how the two-way street between text and cultural context of reading continues unabated. Corley’s discussion provides a glimpse of the potential riches to be gleaned from his forthcoming ICC commentary on ben Sira, co-authored with Bradley C. Gregory.

There is little with which to quibble in these two fine volumes. On occasion, the structural divisions may be somewhat arbitrary (or, perhaps, these simply underscore the ambiguities inherent in an essentially interdisciplinary enterprise). So, for example, Michael O’Dwyer’s insightful study of the 20th-century American writer Julien Green (in CRB) would fit rather well in the section on ‘Translation,’ given its multiple examples of Green’s grappling with biblical translations, both ancient and modern, and his consequent reflections on translation theory. On the other hand, Martin Henry’s introduction to Franz Overbeck—which helpfully allows Overbeck to stand out in his own right rather than in the shadow of Nietzsche—is less obviously concerned with biblical translation as conventionally conceived. But questions of organization in no way detract from the excellent range of readings and receptions provided by these two volumes. Together they showcase, in their different ways, the rich possibilities offered by the study of biblical reception, as well as how interpretation meshes with the specific historical and cultural contexts of the interpreter. That Ireland has played, and continues to play, a significant role in such reception is here amply demonstrated.