Vassiliadis Petros, Biblical Hermeneutical Studies, series “Biblical Library”, no 6, Pournaras Publications, Thessaloniki 2000, pp. 488.

In this volume Petros Vassiliadis presents to the Greek reading public twenty three of his biblical hermeneutics papers, fruit of academic research over the past fifteen years. The papers cover the whole spectrum of New Testament science and are classified in four sections. The first includes “biblical hermeneutics” research and refers to the position of the Holy Bible and its relation to worship in the Orthodox Church, the importance of Biblical critique for Orthodoxy, the particularities of Orthodox hermeneutics and the problem of the Holy Bible’s authenticity in proto-Christian hermeneutics.

            The second section is a collection of papers around the translation of the Holy Bible and in particular touches upon matters of Orthodox points of departure for the assessment of a Holy Bible translation, in the problems of the translational process and other technical problems of translation, as well as the role of Bible Societies and the history of Bible translations.

            The third section contains papers of “biblical critique”. Specifically it broaches issues of introduction to the New Testament, mostly though the section containing analyses of problems related to the two most ancient sources of Evangelical tradition, the Gospel of Mark and the Q. In this context he analyses Q’s initial structure and tackles the question of location, time and identity of its author.

            The fourth and last section contains papers of “Biblical theology”. These refer to the theological importance of John the Baptist as he appears in the two most ancient sources of Evangelical tradition and in the fourth evangelist, the social dimension of pauline theology, aspects of ecclesiology in the New Testament, relations between the Church and the State as they appear in the New Testament, on the issue of different approaches and views on the New Testament.