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The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided a number of new paradigms for reading the Bible that challenged the then prevailing literal or allegorical model of reading the Bible. This new biblical criticism, whose influence has fostered common ways of talking about readings of Scripture, demonstrated the ways that the biblical texts were pastiches of literary sources and forms, often edited by later hands to form the biblical book now in the canon. In the late twentieth century, the number of methods for reading the Bible proliferated and by the end of the century there were almost as many models for reading Scripture as there were readers of Scripture. These models arose mostly out of literary criticism of the Bible and thus there were a variety of deconstructionist readings that focused closely on the text, as well as rhetorical readings that focused on literary forms of particular units of Scripture. The greatest difference between biblical criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the criticism of the late twentieth century was the latter's increasing focus on politics and historicism. Thus, in the last decades of the twentieth century, feminist criticism, postcolonial criticism, and new historicism became models of reading Scripture. The editors have gathered essays by a number of internationally recognized scholars, ranging from evangelical biblical critics to postmodern biblical critics, who explore a variety of models for reading the Bible in the Third Millennium.

First published in hardcover in 1991, Robert Fowler s Let the Reader Understand was ahead of its time. Using reader-response criticism, a pioneering method for reading the Gospel of Mark, he invited contemporary readers to participate actively in making the meaning of the Gospel. Ten years later, the importance of this methodology is clear to all. In Let the Reader Understand Fowler provides clues to the rhetorical strategies used in Mark, and asks the reader to be attentive to the ways in which the narrative weaves its spell. He also demonstrates how the narrative provides both direction and indirection for the reader through its use of irony and paradox. Rather than providing a complete exposition of Mark, Fowler s book offers hints and suggestions about how readers can read Mark and fashion contemporary meaning for themselves. Robert M. Fowler is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Religion Department at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. He is the author of Loaves and Fishes: The Function of the Feeding Stories in the Gospel of Mark and is a contributor to The Postmodern Bible. For: Seminarians; graduate students; undergraduates; general audiences; pastors>