Kasper Bro Larsen Boeken

The volume offers a new critical reflection on the use of the Bible in contemporary cultural and political debates in the Nordic countries. In Nordic Lutheran societies, the Bible has been perceived as a basis of religion and social cohesion. Whereas such religious and confessional factors are well-researched vis-à-vis the historical genesis of the Nordic welfare states, the focus here is on public use of the Bible in debates of today.

In recent decades New Testament scholarship has developed an increasing interest in how the Gospel of John interacts with literary conventions of genre and form in the ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman context. The present volume brings together leading scholars in the field in order to discuss the status quaestionis and to identify new exegetical frontiers. In the Fourth Gospel, genres and forms serve as vehicles of ideological and theological meaning. The contributions to this volume aim at demonstrating how awareness of ancient and modern genre theories and practices advances our understanding of the Fourth Gospel, both in terms of the text as a whole (gospel, ancient biography, drama, romance, etc.) and in terms of the various literary tiles that contribute to the Gospel’s genre mosaic.