In the first volume of a new series of “Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics” Charles Mabee offers a bold experiment designed to contribute to a fresh understanding of the root document of American religious experience, the Bible. A renewed American encounter with the Bible will, he contends, alter the way Americans understand themselves and their mission in the world. Americans are a “religious” people, but they are also “scientific.” Professor Mabee abandons the mask of scientific objectivity by self-consciously incorporating “the historical nature of the reader” into the historical interpretation of the text. “We are,” he writes, “part of the meaning of the text from the beginning.” Employing the often-debated “American mythos of exceptionality and mission” as “an interpretive key” for his “hermeneutic of hermeneutics,” Professor Mabee begins with Thomas Jefferson's scissors-and-paste Bible, The Life and Morals of Jesus, and then turns to Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack. He proceeds to read Herman Melville's Moby-Dick in conversation with the Book of Job and Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in association with the Jesus of the Gospels.