ABSTRACT
The story of how the Bible has been understood within the church and academy is long and complex. There are many different ways of telling this story, each dependent on the particular interests and aims of the narrator. For some it is about philosophies shaping culture and religion; for others it is about the development of method in hermeneutics; for yet others it is about the struggle between the academy and the church for the ‘ownership’ of these texts. No one perspective can embrace all the complexities, and what follows is no exception. There is now a plethora of stories recounting this same history from different perspectives and for different purposes. 1 The common view is that academic biblical studies evolved rapidly over the last thirty years as the historical-critical method was joined first by literary-critical approaches and latterly by a concentration on readers. I will look briefly at developments from three different but closely related viewpoints: philosophical, methodological and theological. The aim will then be to speculate on how these developments might or might not impact on ordinary churchgoers and what they mean for an empirical study of Bible reading.
