The origins of the complex interplay linking heresy and medieval translation of the Bible may be identified in the ambiguous French cultural context of the 12 th century.

Then follow the sections Translation and Interpretation from Jerome to the Post-Holocaust period, Preaching and Teaching the Bible in the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment, Biblical Characters as Models in medieval hagiography, Biblical Poetry from Late Antiquity to Bruce Springsteen, and finally the retelling strategies and challenges of Children's Bibles and a brief treatment of retelling Beyond the Text. After a detailed general introduction defining the Bible itself and the concept of retelling, the notion of Apocrypha is readdressed, particularly analyzing the way they are composed. Every section starts with an introduction presenting a brief overview of the field, the issues treated, as well as the nature and directions of contemporary scholarly discourse. Retelling the Bible, edited by Lucie Dolezalova and Tamas Visi, presents a collection of case studies of biblical retellings in various contexts. The choice is rooted in the fact that this narrative “became one of the most influential examples of how to write the Life of a saint for all later hagiographers in Western as well as Eastern Christendom” (Brakke).

A reliable model of the genre is the Life of Antony, a description of an Egyptian hermit and his epic struggle with temptations on his way to holiness. Since the material is so vast, it seems necessary to somehow limit the presentation, to discuss only a pars pro toto. In their own way, these lives of saints constitute a retelling of the Bible sometimes helped by referencing done in an open manner, sometimes merely indicated in a more subtle way.

Early Christian lives are a fourth-century phenomenon which later exploded and became immensely productive, as testified by the Acta sanctorum, a titanic collection which is still not finished and which only provides a portion of what was actually produced.

A bible retelling