Grumpy? Moi? But thanks John for the update. I’m sure the review is coming along nicely.

Andrew’s response misses my point: that if the historical/contextual/narrative approach to criticism is the only legitimate route to to biblical understanding, it places us in just as much of a straitjacket as other forms of understanding which incur the censure. I was actually affirming the approach - but also raising the possibility of a weakness, which I think is allowable, that it may tend to limit the faith to its historic context, without relating it to the present day, or different cultural contexts. I do accept the argument about how it can relate the faith to the present day, and a variety of contexts - I just haven’t seen personally how that works.

As for the four Jewish ways of interpreting the scripture: I have a feeling that the NT turns the tables on ‘midrash’ - in that the birth accounts of Jesus in Matthew follow a midrashic pattern, but (to my mind) pointing to things that actually happened, rather than cleverly spun inventions. The final method of interpretation sounds cabalistic - or close to a method which was reduced to absurdity in The Bible Code.