Simulating Aichele

Simulating Aichele pays tribute to the title of George Aichele's 2011 book, Simulating Jesus. In contemporary biblical scholar-ship, Aichele is a notable leader whose writings explore the prob¬lems of meaning and referentiality in the Bible and in bibli¬cal texts found in non-biblical contexts. His close readings of canonical texts alongside 'the fantastic' in film, television and literature reveal the relationships between texts and inter-texts. Such juxtapositions expose gaps and liberate strange voices in the Bible and break the stranglehold of canonical ideolo¬gies. Aichele shows how the afterlives of biblical texts simul¬taneously produce present and past realities by simulat-ing both. These afterlives not only pull ancient texts into the pre¬sent but in the process also change the precursor text(s).

This Festschrift presents some of the afterlives of Aichele's re-search in Bible, film, culture and theory. Exercises in intertextual¬ity and textual liberation include Yvonne Sher-wood's reading of Jacob and Esau alongside a Sierra Leone twin story 'Kanu and the Book'; Richard Walsh's pairing of Je-sus' final lament in Mark with Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony'; Tina Pippin's exploration of the afterlives of Jesus' baptism in Mark; Gary A. Phillips's ethical imagining of Martha as the Levinasian Other; and Scott S. Elliott's interpretation of 1 Corin¬thians 9 in light of Roland Barthes' 'Neutral'. Other con¬tributors explore Bible and film. Robert Paul Seesengood and Jennifer L. Koosed review recent apocalyptic films; Fred W. Burnett analyses the greatest contemporary slacker, the Dude, from The Big Lebowski; and Erin Runions compares the panoptic desire for complete knowledge found in 1 Corinthi-ans and A Scanner Darkly. Finally, Roland Boer looks at the unex¬pected afterlives of Hebrew and Christian scriptures in Lenin's speeches, and Stephen D. Moore offers a retrospective es¬say on postmodernism and biblical studies.