The Bible in the Renaissance – Scholarship in the Middle East

The international conference "The Bible in the Renaissance", held in Jerusalem on May 22-24, 2017, was an important academic event on the Renaissance readings of the Bible. It provided a formal framework for historians, art historians and literary scholars to meet and discuss the subject in a collegial context. Under the aegis of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, the Israel Science Fund, Bar-Ilan University and Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII, this three-day event was structured along the lines of a methodological statement: in order to understand the possible range of intentions motivating the various artistic elaborations of biblical topics in the Renaissance, one has to first understand the religious context in which those particular works were produced. Beyond the well-planned structure of the event, and the methodological bases motivating it, there was also an underlying scope to the initiative, namely to show how dispute, variety and incoherent interpretations have always characterized modern engagements with Scriptural texts; and that in 2017, in Jerusalem, in a city that stands on five-thousand years of stratified stones, dirt, words and blood, scholars of different faiths and denominations can come together to discuss and interpret, question and embrace the Holy Scriptures.