Includes bibliographical references (p. 356-380) and indexes.

The aims and scope of hermeneutics -- Hermeneutics in the context of philosophy, biblical studies, literary theory, and the social self -- An example of hermeneutical methods : the parables of Jesus -- A legacy of perennial questions from the ancient world : Judaism and the ancient Greeks -- The New Testament and the second century -- From the third to the thirteenth centuries -- Reform, the Enlightenment, and the rise of biblical criticism -- Schleiermacher and Dilthey -- Rudolf Bultmann and demythologizing the New Testament -- Some mid-twentieth-century approaches : Barth, the new hermeneutic, structuralism, post-structuralism, and Barr's semantics -- Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics : the second turning point -- The hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur -- The hermeneutics of liberation theologies and postcolonial hermeneutics -- Feminist and womanist hermeneutics -- Reader-response amd reception theory -- Postmodernism and hermeneutics -- Some concluding comments.