Enfald och mångfald i mitt umgänge med bibeltexter

Abstract

In this article, my farewell lecture as professor of New Testament at the Centre of Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University, I give some personal comments on my forty years as a university teacher, scholar and research leader. Scholarship is for me a fourfold activity: «scholarship of discovery, scholarship of integration, scholarship of application and scholarship of teaching» (Ernest Boyer). During the 1960’s I was teaching very much on different levels and wrote a lot of exegetical analyses for pastors; a Swedish substitute for Bultmann’s hermeneutical program. I was engaged in the new official translation of the Bible into Swedish (committees appointed by the Government 1963-2001) and leamt a lot about language. At translation seminars E. A. Nida and others gave me lessons on semantic structures and communication. In the 1970’s I combined these insights with German text linguistics and wrote the first (?) text-linguistic analysis in our discipline. Taking the text as the basic linguistic sign has important consequences for philology, text interpretation and theology. In the 1980’s I focused on the roles of the interpreter, on perspectives and on contexts in the interpretation process. During the latest decade, I have become more and more interested in the reception history of the Bible as a combination of my different interests: interpretations, different medias, history, central human themes and the hermeneutical process. Bibliography, see http://www.teol.lu.se/nt/forskning/olsson.htlm.