The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided a number of new paradigms for reading the Bible that challenged the then prevailing literal or allegorical model of reading the Bible. In the late twentieth century, the number of methods for reading the Bible multiplied to such an extent that by the end of the century there were almost as many models for reading Scripture as there were readers of Scripture.

The editors have gathered essays by a number of internationally recognized scholars, ranging from evangelical biblical critics to postmodern biblical critics, who explore a variety of models for reading the Bible in the Third Millennium. The collection includes an Afterword by distinguished church historian Martin Marty on the relation between the past and the future.

Robert M. Fowler is Professor Religion and Chair of the religion Department at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. He is the author of Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark and Loaves and Fishes: The Function of the Feeding Stories in the Gospel of Mark. Edith Blumhofer is a Professor of History and Director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. Fernando F. Segovia is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity in The Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.