Includes bibliographical references (pages 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 and reception theory -- Postmodernism and hermeneutics -- Some concluding comments.

Here, Anthony Thiselton brings together his encyclopedic knowledge of hermeneutics and his nearly four decades of teaching on the subject to provide an ideal textbook which takes the reader through the time-honoured interpretation techniques of the past and on to modern times.