Where this began for me is in an initial attraction to some projects in “Digital Storytelling” that I saw at a conference. I’ll link a few examples in the next part.

Have I told you that I am writing my dissertation on this subject? My two aims are to lay out the philosophical differences between “intertextuality” (poststructural literary theory or Theory) and “allusion” (representing a more traditionalist literary criticism) and to address how they should be applied in biblical studies. And yes, I am aware this topic is ambitious/going to kill me.

I had not seen Carr’s new book, so thanks for the resource. Konrad Schmid just published the first major work in German on the subject. Blast him!

Schriftgelehrte Traditionsliteratur: Fallstudien zur innerbiblischen Schriftauslegung im Alten Testament

Benjamin Sommer is still has the best work out there on this subject, in my opinion.

jk

Zondervan’s best customers are naturally Christians, but there’s a limit to how many bibles you can sell to Christians who already own multiple bibles that they never use for anything anyway.

The Story allows Zondervan to sell an edited bible as if it is something new. They’re marketing it to congregations more aggressively than to individuals so if a church decides to use the program they can hope to sell a bible to every single member.

While that’s quite a haul, the financial icing on the cake is that Zondervan then gets to sell the church all kinds of supplemental materials.

The omissions in The Story are sometimes very subtle. Obviously, some books and whole sections of others have been removed, but sometimes only a few verses are removed with nothing in The Story to indicate anything is missing.

When long section are removed there is usually a brief synopsis of what is missing, but these are often incomplete and reek of personal interpretation.

Ironically, The Story is being embraced by Christians who cry heresy when scholars using textual criticism say that the bible was edited and compiled from previous sources. Generally, conservative Christians believe God would never have allowed that to happen to his inspired word, but they are perfectly happy now that Zondervan is doing just that!