The
Institute for Renaissance and Reformation Biblical Studies (formerly
the Institute for Reformation Biblical Studies) was founded in 1987,
the year our first major work appeared in print, Theodore P. Letis,
ed. The Majority Text: Essays and Reviews in the Continuing  Debate.
This work was intended to introduce the academic world to the platform
the Institute saw as its agenda: to promote an ecclesiastical and
theological perspective on the work of text criticism, Bible translations,
and the interpretation of Scripture in general. As Debora Shuger
has recently noted in her splendid study, The Renaissance Bible:
Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Univ. of Calif. Press,
1994), religion in the sixteenth-century did "not float like
a single, separable 'layer' atop the surface of Renaissance culture
but informs it, shapes its conceptual categories, social behavior,
and moral codes." While not a religious organization itself,
the purpose of the IRRBS is to provide the historical data that
recalls the religious and theological dimensions of the texts now
reproduced, catalogued and kept safe at the Institut für Neutestamentliche
Textforschung (The Institute for the Study of New Testament Text
Criticism, Münster, Germany). Hence, we desire to stay in dialogue
with the legitimate and vital work both of the Münster Institute
as well as the text critical guild. To that end the director of
the IRRBS is a member of the Society for Biblical Literature and
served on the steering committee of the History of Interpretation
Section of this society. We intend to publish original work developing
these themes in both essays in our Bulletin as well as in monographs.
Moreover, we see ourselves as acting as a kind of consumer's advocate,
informing laymen as well as religious and academic professions,
about the historical understanding of the Bible as a sacred text.
We also will be providing first hand studies and critiques on the
activity of the near monopolistic nature of the modern Bible publishing
network (see the expose in World magazine, March 29, 1997 and April
19, 1997), which has developed outside of the normal ecclesiastical
and peer influences which historically accompanied the production
and use of the Bible in times past. |
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