Religious Texts and Interpretive Practices

Course goals

Content

This course is structured in four parts, beginning with an overview of the scriptural canons of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, alongside a critical examination of power and authority in their historical and contemporary construction. It then explores interpretive techniques in the three Abrahamic traditions, from premodern scriptural exegesis to modern and contemporary approaches, including reflections on 20th-century philosophical hermeneutics. The course also addresses the ‘crisis’ of textual scholarship in the 20th and 21st centuries, analyzing the nexus between philology and Orientalism in the work of early scholars like F. M. Müller, while considering new paradigms such as “future philology” and distant reading. Finally, it examines recent trends in the study of religious texts, emphasizing their performative, ritual, and material dimensions.