När gamla texter talar. Om att tolka det förgångna

This article is based on the author's inaugural lecture as professor of New Testament studies at Lund University and articulates his view of the hermeneutics of text and history by reference to the notion of memory. The old veneration of Mnēmosynē and her daughters Clio and Polyhymnia indicates the close and yet complex relationship between historical truth and persuasion and points to the decisive mnemonic negotiation between the past and the present imbedded in the New Testament texts. These texts have two further important characteristics: they reflect a web of the written word and the oral performance and they interpret profound religious experiences of the Christological past in order to communicate them to and persuade others. Such texts drive us towards a scholarly activity that is in line with their mnemonic dimension and special character, becoming a part of an interactive relationship between the scholar and the Biblical past and of a continued mnemonic negotiation of reconfiguration and dialogue. Since the texts are theologically loaded and the church cherishes and strongly influences the collective memory of the Biblical history, the interaction with theology and the church is an inevitable and an integrated part of the scholarly work in that it opens the texts anew from different perspectives and brings the memory of the past into a meaningful dialogue with the concerns and convictions of the present.