e. The exegete must realize that he does not occupy a neutral position above or outside history of the Church. This sort of fancied immediacy of access to the purely historical can only short-circuit exegesis. The first presupposition of all exegesis is that it takes the Bible as one book. If it does so, then it has already chosen for itself a position that is rooted in much more than the literary aspects of the text. It has recognized this literature as the product of a coherent history, and this