Course Description for English 252--Part 1

English 252:  The Bible as Literature

Joe Ryan

Nature and Purpose of the Course:

This course provides an overview of the Old (aka the Hebrew Bible) and New Testaments. Students will be expected to read representative books from the scriptures, in addition to assignments from the couse text books. The course introduces students to the historical-critical literary method of biblical study and illustrates a number of ways this method helps us to understand the Old and New Testament documents in their original contexts. The course also links the individual texts of the Old Testament to past and current literature (for example, to the poetry of William Blake, the prose of Hemingway, to popular music, etc.).  In addition, the final weeks of the course will cover the typology of the New Testament, the teaching methods of Jesus Christ, and the book of Revelations.

Students will bring to the course varying backgrounds and expectations about the Bible, in general, and the Old Testament, in particular. It is not the aim of the course either to convert the unbeliever nor to subvert the faith of the believer.  The course aims at helping students to read biblical texts with the same care and intelligent analysis as they would use to read any piece of literature, historical document, philosophical essay, or legal contract. (By the way, all these sorts of writings can be found in the Old Testament.)

A guiding assumption behind this course is that biblical texts are best apprehended when one critically examines them in the context of their original languages, social setting, history, and purpose. To do so means putting aside many theological assumptions in order to allow the texts to speak to us with the same sort of freshness as they did to their first readers. Thus, a guiding rule-of-thumb for reading and interpreting texts in this course is to ask, "What were the intentions of the authors of the books, and how might the first readers of this text have understood it?"