International students graduate cum laude
International students Beatrix Biró and Norbert Nagy graduated cum laude in August. Beatrix Biró made a fascinating comparison between an exegesis and a bibliolog study of 2 Kings 4:1-7, to gain insight into how the latter broadens the horizon of understanding the text. Norbert Nagy's innovative research tried to (re)explore the traditions from the Gospels where Jesus might have been in touch with real slavery. Both are students from our esteemed Romanian partner institution the Protestant Theological Institute in Cluj-Napoca.
Beatrix Biró: a comparative study of exegesis and bibliolog
Beatrix Biró has shown in a fascinating interdisciplinary and comparative study, that exegetical approaches and bibliolog are forms of biblical interpretation that overlap, but each also have their own added value. In bibliolog, by putting oneself in the world of the text, participants are enabled to arrive at insights, many of which parallel historical-critical and ideology-critical exegetical approaches, which adopt an outside perspective. But through identification, bibliolog enables emotional and existential insights, which can be of both personal and exegetical value. “I have always been attracted by creative forms, and innovative and practical ways of bringing the vivid, colorful and rich world of the texts closer to people who are searching for the real content of the pages of Scripture,” Biró says. “The bibliolog, which I have researched, is one such method.” International expert on bibliolog Prof Uta Pohl-Patalong from Kiel was involved as a assessor. Like Biró’s PThU supervisors Annette Merz and Erik Olsman, she was impressed by the research and sees great potential for a follow-up.
Norbert Nagy: real slavery and the earliest Palestinian Jesus movement
Norbert Nagy has done a very innovative New Testament master's thesis on the traditionally invisible and silenced slaves, who must have been around Jesus and his earliest circle of followers. He considers where we can make the presence of enslaved people historically plausible. He also asks what the message of the Father's kingdom may have meant to enslaved hearers. In the process he arrives at a new interpretation of the metaphor of the family of God in the gospels. “To write this thesis, I was dedicated to unravelling the hidden truth and bringing to the surface the unheard voices and unseen bodies of the invisible slaves in the Gospels,” he says. “I intended to reconstruct the relationship between slaves and the historical Jesus and sought Jesus' possible answer and mission to the slaves.” Like Biró’s research, this research too has a lot of potential for follow-up, according to Nagy’s supervisor, Annette Merz, and the assessor, Martijn Stoutjesdijk. Both are part of the Church and Slavery project, a joint project by the PThU, VU Amsterdam and University of Curacao.
