This volume of essays by distinguished international scholars celebrates and pays tribute to the multifarious contributions to the study of scripture that Henry Wansbrough OSB has made over the last 50 years, in a number of wide-ranging contexts, but most notably as General Editor of the New Jerusalem Bible. The essays answer the title's question in three inter-related areas: interpretation, translation and reception. Wansbrough's academic career has been focused in Oxford where he was Master of St Benet's Hall.Involved in many inter-religious and ecumenical dialogues, he is also a longstanding member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, founded to foster and guide biblical studies. For much of his time on the commission he worked under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Finally, as a monk of Ampleforth Abbey, Wansbrough has played a crucial role in scriptural studies for many generations of members of religious communities in the UK and abroad.
Contributors include: John Barton; Willem Beuken SJ; Donald Bolen; Kevin Cathcart; James D. G. Dunn; Susan Gillingham; Mark Goodacre; Nicholas King SJ; Henry Mayr-Harting; John Muddiman; Wulstan Peterburs OSB; Adrian Schenker OP; Francesca Stavrakopoulou; Michael Tait; Albert Vanhoye SJ; Olivier-Thomas Venard OP; Benedicta Ward SLG; Bishop Kallistos Ware of Diokleia and John Webster.
Philip McCosker is a postgraduate student of theology at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He holds degrees in theology from Oxford and Harvard Universities. He is co-editor (with Denys Turner) of the Cambridge Companion to the Summa Theologiæ of Thomas Aquinas (in preparation).
Chris Keith is Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, Norway. He is the author of The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John and the Literacy of Jesus, a winner of the 2010 John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, and Jesus' Literacy: Scribal Culture and the Teacher from Galilee. He is also the co-editor of Jesus among Friends and Enemies: A Historical and Literary Introduction to Jesus in the Gospels, and was recently named a 2012 Society of Biblical Literature Regional Scholar.