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WILFRED CANTWELL SMITH, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993). Pp. x+381. Paper $19.
Professor Smith's self-appointed task is that of thinking about the meaning of "scripture" in human experience and history, not only Jewish or Christian history. The work is challenging not only because of the size of the task or the complexity of the subject matter but also because it is quite simply an immensely difficult work. One must be prepared to read and reread sentences like this one: Any scripture--Gita,
Bible, a Buddist Sutra, or whatever-and any verse or term within it, means what it in fact means, and has meant, to those for whom it has been meaningful"(p. 89). This paradoxical statement nevertheless contains one of S.'s central ideas.
Already in the first chapter, S. establishes his view that scripture is a social phenomenon and therefore must be thought of only in relation to the communities that make it meaningful. Such an approach sounds very similar to the philosophical assumptions behind, for example, B. Childs's project of "canon criticism" (a similarity that S. himself takes note of), but it was equally an important element in H. Gunkel's form-critical attempt to locate texts in a Sitz im...