ABSTRACT
Among the humanities, biblical scholarship is one of the more well-defined fields. Unlike English departments, biblical studies does not continually face a redefinition of canon. While philosophers write philosophy and historians write history, biblical scholars do not write the Bible. The main purpose that drives most biblical scholars is almost a uniform one-to explicate and clarify, through commentaries and articles, what the biblical texts are saying. Despite the vast proliferation of biblical scholarship in the last few decades, and despite a great deal of research in closely related fields (archaeology, sociology, etc.) which have been employed by biblical scholars, most biblical scholarship continues to display a tacit assumption that it is dedicated to a corpus of either 39 (Hebrew Bible) or 66 (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament plus New Testament) writings, and that the scholarly output is parasitic and secondary to those writings.
