Dr. Steven Richard Scott, Canadian Society for Biblical Studies, Society of Biblical Literature

Hi there

I have had a long standing interest in religion and mysticism. I have explored various mystical traditions from Christianity, to Islam and Judaism, from Hinduism to Taoism, and Buddhism, and also various New Age traditions. However, my main focus of study is the Bible, primarily from a literary and historical perspective. In this regard I am more a historian than a theologian. That being said, Biblical theology is one of my main interests.

BA

University of Toronto: Main focus was religious studies, especially the Ancient Near East and the Middle East; secondary focus was philosophy and literature

MA

University of Ottawa: In Second Temple Judaism. The focus of my degree was understanding Second Temple Judaism in its Ancient Near Eastern context. I did research and wrote papers on the rise of Apocalyptic thought, the origins of Judaic religious sects, and the concepts of Wisdom, the Son of Man, and the Messiah.

PhD

University of Ottawa: I did research and wrote minor papers on the understanding of faith in the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, the teaching of Jesus, and the letters of Paul, while studying in Heidelberg University on an exchange program. The focus of my PhD was the historical Jesus with an analysis of Jesus's miracles of raising people from the dead. Much of the thesis was a structural analysis and the relationship between structure and meaning, which demonstrated that these miracles had an important role in showing that Jesus was the Heavenly Messiah, the Son of Man.

Literary Analysis

Much of my research involves detailed literary analysis of texts. This research focuses on the ancient use of structuring device known as chiasm, which is a concentric structure, In such structures the text starts from a beginning, it then moves in a linear fashion to the middle, which often has thematic connections to the beginning, and then the sequence of events reverses to the end point, which has strong parallels with the beginning. Much of the Bible seems to have been written using this device, which would have been useful when composing and passing on compositions orally. 

Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha, 2008

"The Binitarian Nature of the Book of Similitudes": this article is based on my MA research on the understanding of the Son of Man. The Book of Similitudes is part of the Book of Enoch and describes a vision of Enoch of the Son of Man. I argue that the Son of Man is also referred to "the Name of the Lord of Spirits", and thus God, the Lord of Spirits, is presented as having two aspects, that of the Son of Man, and that of the Ancient of Days.