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Exegesis,
or critical interpretation, and hermeneutics,
or the science of interpretive principles, of the Bible have been used by
both Jews and Christians throughout their histories for various purposes.
The most common purpose has been that of discovering the truths and values
of the Old and New Testaments by means of various techniques and
principles, though very often, due to the exigencies of certain historical
conditions, polemical or apologetical situations anticipate the truth or
value to be discovered and thus dictate the type of exegesis or
hermeneutic to be used. The primary goal, however, is to arrive at
biblical truths and values by an unbiassed use of exegesis and
hermeneutics. (see also Index: Hebrew
Bible, theology)
Biblical exegesis is the actual
interpretation of the sacred book, the bringing out of its meaning;
hermeneutics is the study and establishment of the principles by which it
is to be interpreted. Where the biblical writings are interpreted on a
historical perspective, just as with philological and other ancient
documents, there is little call for a special discipline of biblical
hermeneutics. But it has been widely held that the factors of divine revelation
and inspiration in the Bible, which, according to Jewish and Christian
belief, set it apart from other literature, impose their appropriate
hermeneutical principles, although there has been divergence of opinion on
what these principles are. Again, because of the place that the biblical
writings have occupied in synagogue and church, their exploitation for
apologetical or polemical ends, their employment as a source for dogma or
as a means of grace, fostering individual and community devotion, and the
use of certain parts (especially the psalms) in the congregational
liturgy, the science of hermeneutics has been studiously cultivated as a
theological discipline. To treat the Bible like any other book (even in
order to discover that it is not like any other book) has been condemned
by believers as an unworthy, not to say impious, attitude.
At times the languages in which
the biblical texts were originally composed have for that reason been
treated as sacred languages. Hebrew may be to the philologist a Canaanite
dialect, not substantially different from Phoenician, or Moabite, or other
Semitic languages, but for some people even today this language is
invested with an aura of sacredness. As for the language of the New
Testament, in the days before its place within the general development of
Hellenistic Greek was properly appreciated, it could be called a
"language of the Holy Ghost," as it was by the German Lutheran
theologian Richard Rothe (1799-1867). And
even scholars who know very well the true character of the biblical
languages are tempted at times to make the Old and New Testament
vocabularies, down to the very prepositions, bear a greater weight of
theological significance than sound linguistic practice permits. Where in
other Greek literature the context would be allowed to determine the
precise force of this or that synonym, there is a tendency to approach the
New Testament with definitions ready made and to impose them on the text:
to give one example, of two common Greek words meaning "new," it
is sometimes laid down in advance that kainos
denotes new in character and neos
new in time ("young"). Often such distinctions are valid,
but their validity must be established by the context; where the context
discourages such precise differentiations, they must not be forced upon
it.
Again, it is a truism in
linguistic study that the meaning of a word depends on its usage, not on
its derivation. It may be of interest to know that the Hebrew word for
"burnt offering" ('ola)
etymologically means "ascending" (cf.
the verb 'ala, "ascend"),
and to trace the stages by which it attained its biblical meaning, but
this knowledge is almost wholly irrelevant to the understanding of the
word in the Old Testament ritual vocabulary, and any attempt to link it,
say, with the ascension of Jesus in the New Testament, as has been done,
can lead only to confusion.
Similarly there has been a
tendency to place the history contained in the biblical writings on a
different level from "ordinary" history. Here the increasing
knowledge of the historical setting of the biblical narrative, especially
in the Old Testament, has helped to remove the impression that the persons
and peoples portrayed in this narrative are not quite "real"; it
has integrated them with contemporary life and promoted a better
understanding of what they had in common with their neighbours and what
their distinctive qualities were.
A prerequisite for the exegetical
study of the biblical writings, and even for the establishment of
hermeneutical principles, is their critical examination. Most forms of biblical
criticism are relevant to many other bodies of literature.
Textual criticism is concerned
with the basic task of establishing, as far as possible, the original text
of the documents on the basis of the available materials. For the Old
Testament, until 1947, these materials consisted principally of: (1)
Hebrew manuscripts dated from the 9th century AD onward, the Masoretic
text, the traditional Jewish text with its vocalization and
punctuation marks as recorded by the editors called Masoretes (Hebrew masora, "tradition") from the 6th century to the end of
the 10th; (2) Hebrew manuscripts of medieval date preserving the Samaritan
edition of the Pentateuch (first five books
of the Bible); (3) Greek manuscripts, mainly from the 3rd and 4th
centuries AD onward, preserving the text of the pre-Christian Greek
version of the Hebrew Bible together with most of the apocryphal
books (the Septuagint); (4) manuscripts of
the Syriac (Peshitta) and Latin (Vulgate) versions, both of which were
based directly on the Hebrew. Since 1947 the discovery of Hebrew biblical
texts at Qumran (then Jordan) and other places west of the Dead Sea
has made it possible to trace the history of the Hebrew Bible back to the
2nd century BC and to recognize, among the manuscripts circulating in the
closing generations of the Second Jewish Commonwealth (c.
450 BC-c. AD 135), at least
three types of Hebrew text: (1) the ancestor of the Masoretic text, (2)
the Hebrew basis of the Septuagint version, and (3) a popular text of the
Pentateuch akin to the Samaritan edition. A comparative examination of
these three indicates that the ancestor of the Masoretic text is in the
main the most reliable; the translators of the Revised
Standard Version (1952) and New English
Bible (1970) have continued to use the Masoretic text as their Old
Testament basis. (see also Index: Qumran community)
For the New Testament the chief
text-critical materials are (1) manuscripts of the Greek text, from the
2nd to the 15th centuries, of which some 5,000 are known, exhibiting the
New Testament text in whole or in part; (2) ancient versions in Syriac,
Coptic, Latin, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, and other languages; and (3)
citations in early Christian writers. A comparative study of this material
enables scholars to get behind the Byzantine type of text (the type that
first diffused from Constantinople from the 4th century onward, gained
currency throughout Greek-speaking Christendom, and formed the basis of
the earliest printed editions of the Greek Testament) to a variety of
types current in various localities in the generations immediately
preceding; but the more recent discovery of manuscripts (mainly on
papyrus) of the 3rd and even 2nd centuries, which cannot be neatly
assigned to one or another of these types, makes the earlier history of
the text more problematic, and the Revised Standard Version and New
English Bible are both based on an eclectic text (in which, where the
witnesses show variant readings, the reading preferred is that which best
suits the context and the author's known style).
Philological criticism consists
mainly in the study of the biblical languages in their widest scope, so
that the vocabulary, grammar, and style of the biblical writings can be
understood as accurately as possible with the aid not only of other
biblical writings but of other writings in the same or cognate languages.
New Testament Greek, for example, is a representative of Hellenistic
Greek written in the 1st century AD, ranging from the literary
Hellenistic of Hebrews, I Peter, and portions of Luke-Acts, to the
colloquial or vernacular idiom of some other books (e.g.,
the conversations in the Gospels). Some Aramaic influences have been
discerned in parts of the New Testament that have a Palestinian setting,
but not to a point where scholars are obliged to conclude that some books,
or parts of books, were originally composed in Aramaic. Moreover, the
Septuagint version exercised on some New Testament writers the kind of
influence that the King James Version has exercised on many English
writers, especially in the provision of a theological vocabulary in areas
such as law, ethics, atonement, and sacrifice. The study of Old Testament
Hebrew has been enriched by the study of other Semitic languages--Akkadian
and Ugaritic among the ancient languages, and Arabic, which preserves many
archaic features. Such comparative study has led to the suggestion of new
meanings for a considerable number of biblical Hebrew words--a tendency
that is amply illustrated by the New English Bible--but this department of
philological criticism requires much more carefully defined guiding lines
than have hitherto been laid down. (see also Index: Aramaic language, Hebrew
language)
Literary criticism endeavours to
establish the literary genres (types or categories) of the various
documents and to reach conclusions about their structure, date, and
authorship. These conclusions are based as far as possible on internal
evidence, but external evidence is also very helpful, especially where
date is concerned. If the document under consideration is unmistakably
quoted in another composition, for example, that quotation forms a terminus
ante quem (later limiting point in time) for dating purposes. If, on
the other hand, the document is clearly dependent on another document that
can be dated on independent grounds, the date of the earlier document
provides a terminus post quem (earlier
limiting point in time).
Proved dependence on such an
earlier document may also throw light on the structure of the work being
studied. But much of the evidence for the history of its structure is
internal. The evaluation of such evidence is the province of what used to
be called the higher criticism, a term first employed with a biblical
reference by the German biblical scholar and orientalist Johann
Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827):
I have been obliged to bestow the
greatest amount of labour on a hitherto entirely unworked field, the
investigation of the inner constitution of the separate books of the Old
Testament by the aid of the higher criticism (a new name to no humanist).
Eichhorn paid special attention to
the Pentateuch; his work marks an important
step forward in Pentateuchal criticism. The chronological arrangement of
the successive law codes contained in the Pentateuch, or of the successive
editions of one fundamental law code, has been related to the history of
Israelite culture and religion recorded in the other Old Testament
books--histories, prophecies, and psalms--with the mounting aid supplied
by contemporary non-Israelite documents. The development of some Old
Testament books is indicated expressly in their contents: one can note the
composition of the first and second editions of the Book of Jeremiah in
Jer. 36:4, 32; and scholars can reach some conclusions about later
editions by a comparison of the longer edition in the Masoretic text with
the shorter edition in the Septuagint (now also attested in a fragmentary
Hebrew text from Qumran). In the absence of such explicit evidence,
conclusions about the structure of other prophetic books, such as Isaiah
and Ezekiel, must be more tentative.
In the New Testament, literary
criticism has centred principally on the Gospels. In the Synoptic
Gospels (that is, those having a common source; i.e., Matthew, Mark, and Luke) indicators as to source and
composition are provided by the presence of so much material common to two
or to all three of them. The majority opinion for well over a century has
been that Mark served as a source for Matthew and Luke, and that the two
latter had a further common source, generally labelled Q (for Quelle, the German term for "source"), comprising mainly
sayings of Jesus. Aspects of the Gospel problem that literary criticism
leaves unsolved are more likely to be illuminated by other critical
approaches. The Fourth Gospel (John),
having much less in common with the Synoptic Gospels than the latter three
have among themselves, presents an independent line of transmission, and a
comparative study of those areas where the Johannine and Synoptic
traditions touch each other yields valuable conclusions for the beginnings
of the gospel story.
Tradition criticism takes up where
literary criticism leaves off; it goes behind the written sources to trace
the development of oral tradition, where there is reason to believe that
this preceded the earliest documentary stages, and attempts to trace the
development of the tradition, phase by phase, from its primary life
setting to its literary presentation. The development of the tradition
might cover a lengthy period, as in the Old Testament narratives of the
patriarchs--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--and the judges, such as Deborah and
Samuel, many of which were originally attached to particular sanctuaries.
The recognition of the life setting of each successive phase is necessary
to the interpretation of the material received and delivered by one
generation after another. (see also Index:
oral literature)
In the New Testament, too, special
attention has been paid to the oral stage of the Gospel tradition, though
here the preliterary period is measured in decades, not (as in the Old
Testament) in generations and centuries. Not only the record of the
ministry of Jesus but the development of Christian theology in the short
preliterary stage has formed the subject matter of this study.
Form criticism has become one of
the most valuable tools for the reconstruction of the preliterary
tradition. This discipline classifies the literary material according to
the principal "forms"--such as legal, poetic, and other
forms--represented in its contents, and examines these in order to
discover how they were handed down and what their successive life settings
were until they assumed their present shape and position. In their various
ways laws, narratives, psalms, and prophecies are amenable to this
approach. By this means some scholars have undertaken to recover the ipsissima
verba ("very own words") of Jesus
by removing the accretions attached to them in the course of transmission.
The exegetical task assumes a threefold shape as scholars work back from
(1) interpretation of the present Gospels through (2) interpretation of
the tradition lying behind them to (3) reconstruction of the proclamation
of Jesus.
Scholars are not left completely
to speculation as they attempt to reconstruct the stages by which the
Gospel tradition attained its final form: here and there in the New
Testament letters, and in some of the speeches included in Acts (which
convey the general sense of what was said and should not be regarded as
the author's free creations), there are fragments and outlines of the
story of Jesus and of his teaching. Sometimes the characteristic
terminology of tradition ("I received . . . I delivered") is
used when such fragments are introduced, a decade or so before the
composition of the earliest Gospel (cf. I Cor. 11:23; 15:3).
Redaction
criticism concentrates on the end product,
studying the way in which the final authors or editors used the
traditional material that they received and the special purpose that each
had in view in incorporating this material into his literary composition.
It has led of late to important conclusions about the respective outlooks
and aims of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Historical
criticism places the documents in their
historical setting and promotes their interpretation in the light of their
contemporary environment. This is necessary for their understanding,
whether they are historical in character or belong to another literary
genre. If they are historical in character it is important to establish
how faithfully they reflect their dramatic date--the date of the events
they record (as distinct from the date of final composition). This test
has been applied with singularly positive results to Luke-Acts, especially
in relation to Roman law and institutions; and in general the biblical
outline of events from the middle Bronze Age (c. 21st-c. mid-16th
centuries BC) to the 1st century AD fits remarkably well into its Near
Eastern context as recovered by archaeological research.
"History of
religions" criticism, to use an ungainly
expression, relates Old and New Testament religion to the religious
situation of the contemporary world of the writings and tries to explain
biblical religion as far as possible in terms of current religious
attitudes and practices. This is helpful to a point, insofar as it throws
into relief those features of Hebrew and Christian faith that are
distinctive; it is carried to excess when it attempts to deprive those
features of their unique qualities and to account completely for them in
religious-historical terms. When the cult of Israel was practically
indistinguishable from that of the Canaanites, the protests of the
8th-century-BC Hebrew prophets Amos or Hosea stand out over against
popular Yahweh worship (Hebrew) and Baal worship (Canaanite) alike.
Another attempt has been made by historians of religion to recreate for
the 1st century AD a pre-Christian Gnostic myth--referring to an esoteric
dualism in which matter is viewed as evil and spirit good--of the primal
or heavenly man who comes from the realm of light to liberate particles of
a heavenly essence that are imprisoned on earth in material bodies and to
impart the true knowledge. By men's acceptance of this secret salvatory
knowledge (gnosis), the heavenly essence within man is released from its
thraldom and reascends to its native abode. Fragments of this myth have
been recognized in several books of the New Testament. But the attempt has
not been successful: according to many recent (latter half of the 20th
century) New Testament scholars and historians of the early church, it is
probable that the concepts of primal man and redeemer-revealer were not
brought together in Gnosticism except
under the influence of the Christian apostolic teaching, in which
Jesus fills the role of Son of man (or Second Adam) together with that of
Saviour and Revealer.
On the other hand, the Iranian
religious influence, primarily that of Zoroastrianism,
on the angelology and eschatology (concepts of the last times) of Judaism
in the last two centuries BC is unmistakable, especially among the
Pharisees (a liberal Jewish sect emphasizing piety) and the Qumran
community (presumably the Essenes) near the
Dead Sea. In the latter, indeed, Zoroastrian dualism finds clear
expression, such as in the concept of a war between the sons of light and
the sons of darkness, although it is subordinated to the sovereignty of
the one God of Israel.
The value of these critical
methods of Bible study lies in their enabling the reader to interpret the
writings as accurately as possible. By their aid he can better ascertain
what the writers meant by the language that they used at the time they
wrote and how their first readers would have understood their language. If
the understanding of readers today is to have any validity, it must bear a
close relationship to what the original readers were intended to
understand.
For additional information about
the various forms of biblical criticism, see above: Old
Testament canon, texts, and versions ;
and New
Testament canon, texts, and versions .
As has been said, the importance
of biblical hermeneutics has lain in the Bible's status as a sacred book
in Judaism and Christianity, recording a divine revelation
or reproducing divine oracles. The "oracles"
are primarily prophetic utterances, but often their narrative setting has
also come to acquire oracular status. Quite different hermeneutical
principles, however, have been inferred from this axiom of biblical
inspiration: whereas some have argued that the interpretation must always
be literal, or as literal as possible (since "God always means what
he says"), others have treated it as self-evident that words of
divine origin must always have some profounder "spiritual"
meaning than that which lies on the surface, and this meaning will yield
itself up only to those who apply the appropriate rules of figurative
exegesis. Or again, it may be insisted that certain parts must be treated
literally and others figuratively; thus some expositors who regard the
allegorical (symbolic) interpretation of the Old Testament histories as
the only interpretation that has any religious value maintain that in the
apocalyptic writings that interpretation which is most literal is most
reliable.
Literal interpretation is often,
but not necessarily, associated with the belief in verbal or plenary
inspiration, according to which not only the biblical message but also the
individual words in which that message was delivered or written down were
divinely chosen. In an extreme form this would imply that God dictated the
message to the speakers or writers word by word, but most proponents of
verbal inspiration repudiate such a view on the reasonable ground that
this would leave no room for the evident individuality of style and
vocabulary found in the various authors. Verbal inspiration received
classic expression by the 19th-century English biblical scholar John
William Burgon:
The Bible is none other than the
voice of Him that sitteth upon
the Throne! Every Book of it, every Chapter of it, every Verse of it,
every word of it, every syllable of it, (where
are we to stop?) every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High!
(From Inspiration and
Interpretation, 1861).
This explains Burgon's severe
judgment that the revisers of the English New Testament (1881), in
excluding what they believed to be scribal or editorial additions to the
original text, "stand convicted of having deliberately rejected the
words of Inspiration in every page" (The
Revision Revised, p. vii, London, 1883). Such a high view of
inspiration has commonly been based on the statement in II Tim. 3:16 that
"all [Old Testament] scripture is God-breathed" (Greek theopneustos,
which means "inspired by God") or Paul's claim in I Cor.
2:13 to impart the gospel "in words not taught by human wisdom but
taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths in spiritual
language." On this latter passage the English bishop and biblical
scholar Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828-89)
remarked:
The notion of a verbal
inspiration in a certain sense is involved in the very conception of an
inspiration at all, because words are at once the instruments of carrying
on and the means of expressing ideas, so that the words must both lead and
follow the thought. But the passage gives no countenance to the popular
doctrine of verbal inspiration, whether right or wrong (From Notes
on Epistles of St. Paul from
Unpublished Commentaries, 1895).
The detailed attention that
Lightfoot and his Cambridge University colleagues, Brooke Foss Westcott
(1825-1901), successor of Lightfoot as bishop of Durham, and Fenton John
Anthony Hort (1828-92), paid in their exegesis to the vocabulary and
grammatical construction of the biblical documents, together with their
concern for the historical context, sprang from no dogmatic attachment to
any theory of inspiration but, rather, represented the literal method of
interpretation at its best. Such grammatico-historical exegesis can be
practiced by anyone with the necessary linguistic tools and accuracy of
mind, irrespective of confessional commitment, and is likely to have more
permanent value than exegesis that reflects passing fashions of
philosophical thought. Biblical theology itself is more securely based
when it rests upon such exegesis than when it forms a hermeneutical
presupposition.
Moral
interpretation is necessitated by the belief
that the Bible is the rule not only of faith but also of conduct. The
Jewish teachers of the late pre-Christian and early Christian Era, who
found "in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth" (Rom.
2:20), were faced with the necessity of adapting the requirements of the
Pentateuchal codes to the changed social conditions of the Hellenistic Age
(3rd century BC-3rd century AD). This they did by means of a body of oral
interpretation, which enabled the conscientious Jew to know his duty in
the manifold circumstances of daily life. If, for example, he wished to
know whether this or that activity constituted "work" that was
forbidden on the sabbath, the influential school of legal interpretation
headed by the rabbi Hillel (late 1st century BC to early 1st century AD)
supplied a list of 39 categories of activity that fell under the ban. (see
also Index: moral
code)
The Christian Church rejected the
Jewish "tradition of the elders" but for the most part continued
to regard the Ten Commandments as ethically binding and devised new codes
of practice, largely forgetting Paul's appeal to the liberty of the
Spirit, or viewing it as an invitation to indulge in allegory. In order to
deduce moral lessons from the Bible, allegorization was resorted to, as
when the Letter of Barnabas (c. AD
100) interprets the Levitical food laws prescribed in the book of
Leviticus as forbidding not the flesh of certain animals but the vices
imaginatively associated with the animals. To set up principles of
exegesis by which ethical lessons may be drawn from all parts of the Bible
is not easy, since many of the commandments enjoined upon the Israelites
in the Pentateuch no longer have any obvious relevance, such as the ban on
boiling a kid in its mother's milk (Ex. 23:19b, etc.), or on wearing a
mixed woollen and linen garment (Deut. 22:11); and much of the teaching of
Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is widely regarded as a counsel of
perfection, impracticable for the average man, even when he professes the
Christian faith. Even summaries of the biblical ethic,
such as the golden rule (Matt. 7:12; cf.
Tob. 4:15) or the twofold law of love to God and love to one's
neighbour (Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18), in which the Decalogue (Ten
Commandments) is comprehended (Mark 12:29-31; cf.
Rom. 13:8-10), involve casuistic interpretation (fitting general
principles to particular cases) when they are applied to the complicated
relations of present-day life. The difficulties of applying biblical
ethics to modern situations do not mean that the task of application
should be abandoned but that it should not be undertaken as though it
provided an easy shortcut to moral solutions.
Allegorical interpretation places
on biblical literature a meaning that, with rare exceptions, it was never
intended to convey. Yet at times this interpretation seemed imperative. If
the literal sense, on which heretics, such as the 2nd-century biblical
critic Marcion, and anti-Christian polemicists, such as the 2nd-century
philosopher Celsus, insisted, was unacceptable, then allegorization was
the only procedure compatible with a belief in the Bible as a divine
oracle. Law, history, prophecy, poetry, and even Jesus' parables yielded
new meanings when allegorized. The surface sensuous meaning of the
Canticles (the Song of Solomon) was gladly forgotten when its mutual
endearments were understood to
express the communion between God and the soul, or between Christ and the
church. There are still readers who can reconcile themselves to the
presence of a book such as Joshua in the canon only if its battles can be
understood as pointing to the warfare of Christians "against the
spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:12). As
for the Gospel parables, when in the story of the good Samaritan (Luke
10:30-37) an allegorical meaning is sought for the thieves, the
Samaritan's beast, the inn, the innkeeper, and the two pence, the result
too often is that the explicit point of the story, "Go and do
likewise," is blunted. (see also Index:
allegory)
Closely allied to allegorical
interpretation, if not indeed a species of it, is typological
interpretation, in which certain persons, objects, or events in the
Old Testament are seen to set forth at a deeper level persons, objects, or
events in the New. In such interpretations, Noah's ark (Gen. 6:14-22) is
interpreted to typify the church, outside which there is no salvation;
Isaac carrying the wood for the sacrifice (Gen. 22:6) typifies Jesus
carrying the cross; Rahab's scarlet cord in the window (Jos. 2:18-21)
prefigures the blood of Christ; and so on. These are not merely sermon
illustrations but rather aspects of a hermeneutical theory that maintains
that this further significance was designed (by God) from the beginning.
Traces of typology appear in the New Testament, as when Paul in Rom. 5:14
calls Adam a "type" of the coming Christ (as the head of the old
creation involved its members in the results of his disobedience, so the
head of the new creation shares with its members the fruit of his
obedience), or when in I Cor. 10:11 he says that the Israelites'
experiences in the wilderness wanderings befell them
"typically," so as to warn his own converts of the peril of
rebelling against God. The fourth evangelist stresses the analogy between
the sacrificial Passover lamb of the Hebrews and Christ in his death (John
19). The writer of the Hebrews treats the priest-king of Salem,
Melchizedek, who was involved with Abraham as a type of Christ (Heb.
7)--without using the word "type"--and the Levitical ritual of
the Day of Atonement as a model (though an imperfect one) of Christ's
sacrificial ministry (Heb. 9).
Anagogical
(mystical or spiritual) interpretation seeks to explain biblical events or
matters of this world so that they relate to the life to come. Jordan is
thus interpreted as the river of death; by crossing it one enters into the
heavenly Canaan, the better land, the "rest that remains for the
people of God." "The Jerusalem that now is" points to the
new Jerusalem that is above. In Judaism of the closing centuries BC, the
Eden of Genesis, the earthly paradise, lent its name to the heavenly
paradise mentioned occasionally in the New Testament (Luke 23:43; II Cor.
12:3; Rev. 2:7).
Another form of mystical
interpretation is the Mariological (referring to Mary, the mother of
Jesus) application of scriptures that have another contextual sense. Thus Mary
is the second Eve, whose offspring bruises the serpent's head (Gen. 3:15);
Mary is the star-crowned woman of Rev. 12, whose son is caught up to the
throne of God, and in more popular piety the dark-faced Madonna of the
monastery at Montserrat, near Barcelona, Spain, can be identified with the
"black but comely" bride of the Song of Solomon.
Parallelism,
the interpretation of Scripture by means of Scripture, is a corollary of
the belief in the unity of Scripture. But as a hermeneutical principle it
must be employed sparingly, since the unity of Scripture should be based
on comprehensive exegetical study, rather than itself provide a basis.
Where one or two biblical documents (e.g.,
the letters to the Romans and to the Galatians) are treated as the
norm of biblical doctrine, there is a danger that other parts of the
volume (e.g., the Letter to the
Hebrews) will be forced to yield the same sense as the
"normative" documents; the distinctiveness of certain biblical
authors will then be blurred. One naive form of parallelism is the "concordant"
method, in which it is axiomatic that a Hebrew or Greek word will always
(or nearly always) have the same force wherever it occurs in the Bible, no
matter who uses it. There is,
again, a harmonistic tradition that smooths out disparities in the
biblical text (e.g., as between
the gospel narratives or the parallel records of Kings and Chronicles) in
a manner that imposes a greater strain on faith than do the disparities
themselves.
One exegetical device of the
Jewish rabbis (teachers, biblical commentators, and religious leaders) was
that of gezera shawa, "equal
category," according to which an obscure passage might be illuminated
by reference to another containing the same key term. There are several
examples in Paul's Old Testament exegesis, one of the best known being in
Gal. 3:10-14, where the mystery of Christ's dying the death that incurred
the divine curse (Deut. 21:23) is explained by his bearing vicariously the
curse incurred by the lawbreaker (Deut. 27:26). One may compare the
explanation in Heb. 4:3-9 of God's "rest" mentioned in Ps. 95:11
by reference to his resting on the seventh day after creation's work (Gen.
2:3)--an explanation dependent on the Septuagint, not the Hebrew.
Analogical interpretation
traditionally includes not only interpretation according to the analogy of
Scripture (parallelism, in other words) but also interpretation according
to the "analogy of faith"--an expression that misapplies the
language of Rom. 12:6 in the King James Version of 1611. It has at times
been pressed to mean that no biblical interpretation is valid unless it
conforms to the established teaching of a religious community, to the
verdict of tradition, or to the "unanimous consensus of the
fathers." Where the established teaching is based, in intention, on
Scripture, then an interpretation of Scripture that conflicts with it
naturally calls for further scrutiny, but such conflict does not rule out
the interpretation beforehand; if the conflict is confirmed, it is the
established teaching that requires revision.
There is an unconscious tendency
to conform hermeneutical principles to the climate of opinion in and
around the community concerned, and to change the hermeneutic pattern as
the climate of opinion changes. It is not surprising that in the circles
where Pseudo-Dionysius
(early-6th-century writings attributed to Dionysius, a convert of St.
Paul) was revered as a teacher, Scripture was interpreted in Neoplatonic
(idealistic and mystical) categories, and if in the latter half of the
20th century there is an influential and persuasive school of existential
hermeneutics, this may be as much due to a widespread contemporary outlook
on life as was the liberal hermeneutic of the preceding generations.
At a far different level
contemporary movements continue to influence biblical interpretation. The
interpretation of prophecy and apocalyptic in terms of events of the
interpreter's day, which has ancient precedent, is still avidly pursued.
Just as in the 16th century the apocalyptic beast of Revelation was
interpreted to be the papacy or Martin Luther (in accordance with the
interpreter's viewpoint), so also today in some nonacademic circles the
ten kings denoted by the beast's horns in Revelation are identified with
the European Economic Community in its ultimate development, or the threat
to "destroy the tongue of the sea of Egypt" (Isa. 11:15) is
believed to be fulfilled in the condition of the Suez Canal in the years
following 1967. Whatever critical exegetes think of such aberrations,
historians of exegesis will take note of them and recognize the doctrine
of Scripture that underlies them.
The beginnings of biblical
exegesis are found in the Old Testament itself, where earlier documents
are interpreted in later documents, as in the recasting of earlier laws in
later codes, or the Chronicler's reworking of material in Samuel and
Kings. In addition, even before the Babylonian Exile (586 BC) there is
evidence of the kind of midrashic exposition (nonliteral interpretations)
familiar in the rabbinical period (c.
300 BC-c. AD 500) and after. (see also Index:
Hebrew Bible)
In Isa. 40 and following, the
restoration of Israel after the return from exile is portrayed as a new
creation: the characteristic verbs of the Genesis creation
narrative--"create" (bara),
"make" ('asa) and
"form" (yatzar)--are
used of this new act of God (e.g., Isa.
43:7). Even more clearly are the same events portrayed as a new Exodus: on
their journey back from Babylon, as earlier through the wilderness, the
God of Israel makes a way for his people; he protects them before and
behind; he champions them "with a mighty hand and an outstretched
arm," he brings water from the rock for their sustenance (Isa. 43:2,
16, 19; 48:21; 52:12; Ezek. 20:33).
A pattern of divine action in
mercy and judgment is discernible as one moves from the earlier prophets
to the later prophets and apocalyptists (those concerned with the
intervention of God in history). Yahweh's "strange work" in
bringing the Assyrians against Israel in the 8th century BC (Isa. 28:21;
29:14) is repeated a century later when he raises up the Chaldaeans
(Babylonians) to execute his judgment (Hab. 1:5 fol.). Ezekiel's visionary
figure Gog is the invader whose aggression was foretold in earlier days by
Yahweh through his "servants the prophets" (Ezek. 38:17), and
one may recognize in him a revival not only of Isaiah's Assyrian (Isa.
10:4 fol.) but also of Jeremiah's destroyer from the north (Jer. 1:14
fol.; 4:6 fol.). The same figure reappears in the last "king of the
north" in Dan. 11:40 fol.; he too is diverted from his path by
"tidings from the east and the north" (cf. Isa. 37:7) and "shall come to his end, with none to help
him" (cf. Isa. 31:8).
In some degree these later
predictions are interpretations, or reinterpretations, of the earlier
ones, as when the non-Israelite prophet Balaam's "ships . . . from
Kittim" (Num. 24:24) are interpreted in Dan. 11:30 as the Roman
vessels off Alexandria in 168 BC that frustrated the Syrian king Antiochus
IV Epiphanes (c. 215-164/163 BC) in his attempt to annex Egypt.
Ezra
(c. 400 BC), whose role as the
archetypal "scribe" is magnified by tradition, is said in the
canonical literature to have brought the law of God from Babylonia to
Jerusalem (Ezra 7:14), where it was read aloud to a large assembly by
relays of readers "with interpretation"--and "they gave the
sense, so that the people understood the reading" (Neh. 8:8). This
may be the first recorded use of an Aramaic Targum--a paraphrase of the
Hebrew that included interpretation as well as translation.
In the scribal and rabbinic
tradition, two forms of exposition were early distinguished-- peshat, "plain meaning," and derash, "interpretation," by which religious or social morals
were derived, often artificially, from the text. There was, however, no
sense of conflict between the two.
The translation of the Hebrew
Bible into Greek by Alexandrian Jews in the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC
provided opportunities for recording interpretations that were probably
current in Hellenistic Judaism. Literal
translations might be misleading to Greek readers; metaphors natural in
Hebrew were rendered into less figurative Greek. "Walking with
God" or "walking before God" was rendered as "pleasing
God." Such renderings are scarcely to be called
anti-anthropomorphisms (that is, against depicting God in human terms or
forms). In certain books there are some renderings that might be so
described: in Ex. 24:10, for example, "they saw the God of
Israel" becomes "they saw the place where the God of Israel
stood"; but an examination of the Hebrew context suggests that this
is precisely what was seen. (see also Index:
Greek language)
There was a tendency to
universalize certain particularist statements of the Hebrew: in Amos 9:11
fol. the prophecy that David's dynasty will repossess the residue of Edom
becomes a promise that the residue of men (the Gentiles) will seek the
true God--a promise that is quoted in the New Testament as a
"testimony" to the Christian Gentile mission.
The other main contribution to
biblical exegesis in Alexandria was made by the Jewish philosopher Philo
(c. 30/c.
20 BC-after AD 40), whose interpretation of the Pentateuch in terms of
Platonic idealism and Stoic ethics had more influence on Christian than on
Jewish hermeneutics.
In Palestinian Judaism the most
distinctive exegetical work in the Hellenistic period belonged to the Qumran
community (c. 130 BC-AD
70), which, believing itself raised up to prepare for the new age of
everlasting righteousness, found in Scripture the divine purpose about on
the point of fulfillment, together with its own duty in the impending
crisis. Biblical prophecies in the Qumran commentaries refer to
persons and events of the recent past, the present, or the imminent
future. The time of their fulfillment was concealed from the prophets;
only when this was revealed to the Teacher of Righteousness, the organizer
of the community, could their intent be grasped.
Rabbinic exegesis was present in
all the varieties of rabbinic literature but is found especially in the
Targumim and Midrashim (plural of Targum
and Midrash). Among the former, special
interest attaches to the early Palestinian Pentateuch Targum; it
preserves, for example, messianic (referring to the expected anointed
deliverer) exegesis of certain passages to which later rabbis gave a
different interpretation because of the Christians' appeal to them. The
earlier Midrashim--those whose contents are not later than AD 200--expound
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy and are almost entirely
Halakhic--i.e., recording legal
interpretations from various schools. The later Midrashim are more
homiletic and include a considerable element of Haggada; i.e., illustrative material drawn from all sources.
Rabbinic exegesis observed rules,
which were variously formulated in the schools. The name of the famous
interpreter Hillel is linked with seven middot,
or norms; (1) inference from less important to more important and vice
versa, (2) inference by analogy, (3) the grouping of related passages
under an interpretative principle that primarily applies to one of them,
(4) similar grouping where the principle primarily applies to two
passages, (5) inference from particular to general and vice versa, (6)
exposition by means of a similar passage, (7) inference from the context.
By the time of Rabbi Ishmael (c. AD
100) these rules were expanded to 13, and Eliezer ben Yose the Galilaean (c.
AD 150) formulated 32 rules, reflecting rational principles of
exegesis, which remained normative into the Middle Ages.
By the beginning of the Middle
Ages the Masoretes of Babylonia and
Palestine (6th-10th century) had fixed in writing, by points and
annotation, the traditional pronunciation, punctuation, and (to some
extent) interpretation of the biblical text. The rise of the Karaites,
who rejected rabbinic tradition and appealed to Scripture alone (8th
century onward) stimulated exegetical study in their own sect and in
Judaism generally: in reaction against them Sa'adia
ben Joseph (882-942), who was the gaon,
or head, of the Sura academy in Babylonia, did some of his most important
work. He adopted as one basic principle that biblical interpretation must
not contradict reason. He translated most of the Bible into Arabic and
composed an Arabic commentary on the text.
The French Jewish biblical and
Talmudic scholar Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo
Yitzhaqi of Troyes, 1040-1105), the most popular of all Jewish
commentators, paid careful heed to the language and rejected those
midrashic traditions that were inconsistent with the plain meaning of the
text. Abraham ibn Ezra, of Spanish birth
(1092/93-1167), in some respects anticipated the Pentateuchal literary
criticism of later centuries. Other important names are Joseph
Qimhi of Narbonne and his sons Moses and David,
the last of whom (c. 1160-1235) commented on the prophets and psalms; his psalms
commentary took issue especially with Christian exegesis.
The great philosopher and codifier
Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, 1135-1204)
composed, among many other works, his Guide
of the Perplexed to
help readers who were bewildered by apparent contradictions between the
biblical text and the findings of reason. Like his younger contemporary
David Qimhi, he classified some biblical narratives as visionary
accounts.
Far removed from the rational
exegesis of these scholars was the mystical tradition, or Kabbala,
which combined with an earlier
mysticism--involving reflection on Ezekiel's inaugural chariot vision --
the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanations.
Adherents of this mystical exegesis found encouragement in the Pentateuch
commentary of the Spanish Talmudist, Kabbalist, and biblical commentator
Moses ben Nahman (c. 1195-1270).
The tracing of mystical significance in the numerical values of Hebrew
letters and words (gematria)
made a distinctive contribution to mystical exegesis. The chief monument
of mystical exegesis is the 13th-century Spanish Sefer ha-zohar ("Book
of Splendour"), in form a midrashic commentary on the Pentateuch. In
the Zohar the peshat (literal) and derash (nonliteral
meanings) types of interpretation are accompanied by those called remez
("allusion"), including typology and allegory, and sod
("secret"), the mystical sense. The initials of the four
were so arranged as to yield the word PaRDeS ("Paradise"), a
designation for the fourfold meaning. The highest meaning led by knowledge
through love to ecstasy and the beatific vision.
Following a line marked out
earlier by the Spanish philosopher and poet Moses ibn Ezra (1060-1139), Benedict
de Spinoza (1632-77) put forward a thoroughgoing reappraisal of the
traditional account of the origin of the Pentateuch in his Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus (1679).
In the following century the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala)
brought a fresh appreciation of the Bible as literature. The pioneer of
the Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn
(1729-86), prepared a German translation of the Pentateuch, which he
furnished (along with Solomon Dubno and others) with a commentary; he also
translated the psalms and the Song of Solomon.
The tradition of orthodox Jewish
exegesis has persisted. In the 19th century the Russian rabbi Meir ben
Yehiel Michael, "Malbin," (1809-79) wrote commentaries on the
prophets and the writings, emphasizing the differences between synonyms.
In the 20th century the traditional values of Judaism were popularly
expounded in Joseph Herman Hertz's
commentary on The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (1929-36) and in the Soncino Books
of the Bible (1946-51). Martin Buber
(1878-1965), the great modern Jewish philosopher, imparted to his many
studies in biblical literature and religion--including his revolutionary
German translation of the Bible (1926 and following), partly executed in
association with the religious philosopher Franz
Rosenzweig (1886-1926)--the qualities of his personal genius that
was influenced by Hasidic (18th-century mystical) piety and an
existential interpretation of life.
In recent decades the most
valuable Jewish exegesis has been in association with the wider world of
biblical scholarship. Journals such as the Jewish
Quarterly Review and the Hebrew
Union College Annual welcome contributions from non-Jewish scholars;
in interconfessional projects such as the Anchor Bible, Jewish scholars
cooperate in the Old and New Testament alike.
The whole field of biblical study,
including exegesis, is cultivated most intensively in Israel. Yehezkel
Kaufmann (1890-1963) produced the encyclopaedic History
of Israelite Religion from Its Beginnings to the End of the Second Temple (8
vol., 1937-56) in Hebrew that pursues a path involving a radical revision
of current biblical criticism and interpretation. Mosheh Zevi Hirsh Segal
(died 1968) dealt with a wide area of biblical and related literature,
maintaining the essential Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch
(supplemented by later editors who worked in Moses' spirit). The most
ambitious enterprise in this field is the "Bible Project" of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which aims
to produce a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible but also fosters a
number of ancillary studies in biblical text and interpretation, mostly
published in its annual report Textus, in which non-Jewish as well as Jewish scholars participate.
The earliest Christian exegesis of
the Old Testament is found in the New Testament, not in the written texts
only but in the oral tradition lying behind them. Some lines of exegesis
are present in so many separate strands of primitive Christian teaching
that they are most reasonably assigned to Jesus,
who began his Galilaean ministry with the announcement that the time
appointed for the fulfillment of prophecy, and the Kingdom of God that was
its main theme, had arrived. If the accomplishment of his ministry
involved his death, that was accepted in the same spirit; he submitted to
his captors with the words: ". . . Let the scriptures be
fulfilled" (Mark 14:49). The church began with the conviction that
Jesus, crucified and risen, was the one of whom the prophets spoke. He was
the prophet like Moses, prince of the house of David, priest of the order
of Melchizedek, servant of the Lord, Son of man, and exalted Lord. If the
prophets themselves were uncertain about the person or time indicated by
their oracles, the early Christians were certain: the person was Jesus,
the time was now. The New Testament writers shared a creative and flexible
principle of exegesis that has regard for the literary and historical
context and traces a consistent pattern of divine action in judgment and
mercy, reproduced repeatedly in the history of Israel and manifested
definitively in Christ. This exegesis is elaborated at times by means of
typology and allegory, as when Paul illustrates the relationship between
law and gospel by the story of Hagar and Sarah, the concubine and wife of
Abraham, respectively (Gal. 4:21-31), or when Israel's tabernacle in the
wilderness becomes the material counterpart to the heavenly sanctuary in
which believers of the new age offer spiritual worship to God (Heb. 8:2
fol.). The writer to the Hebrews, indeed, occasionally relates the old
order to the new order platonically in terms of the earthly copy of an
eternal archetype.
At an early date Christians
developed a line of Old Testament exegesis designed to show that they, not
the Jews, stand in the true succession of the original people of God. This
line is seen in the Letter
of Barnabas, the
apologist Justin's (c. 100-c. 165) Dialogue with Trypho, and
the 3rd-century Against the Jews ascribed
to the North African bishop Cyprian (c.
200-258).
Alexandria had long boasted a
school of classical study that practiced the allegorical interpretation of
the Homeric epics and the Greek myths. This method of exegesis was taken
over by Philo and from him by Christian scholars of Alexandria in the 2nd
and 3rd centuries. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215) and Origen
(c. 185-c.
254) did not completely rule out the literal sense of
Scripture--Origen's Hexapla, a six
column edition of various biblical versions, was a monument to his
painstaking study of the text--but claimed that the most meaningful
aspects of divine revelation could be extracted only by allegorization.
Clement stated that the Fourth Gospel was a "spiritual gospel"
because it unfolds the deeper truth concealed in the matter-of-fact
narratives of the other three. Origen treated literal statements as
"earthen vessels" preserving divine treasure; their literal
sense is the body as compared with the moral sense (the soul) and the
spiritual sense (the spirit). The true exegete, he claimed, pursues the
threefold sense and recognizes the spiritual (allegorical) as the highest.
Later, the Antiochene fathers, represented especially by Theodore
of Mopsuestia (c. 350-428/429) and John Chrysostom (c.
347-407), patriarch of Constantinople, developed an exegesis that took
more account of literal meaning and historical context. But the
allegorizers could claim that their method yielded lessons that (while
arbitrary) were more relevant and interesting to ordinary Christians. (see
also Index: Alexandria,
School of, Antioch, School of)
In the West, the Alexandrian
methods were adopted by Ambrose (c. 339-397), bishop of Milan, and Augustine
(354-430), bishop of Hippo, especially as formulated in the seven
"rules" of Tyconius (c. 380),
a Donatist heretic (one who denied the efficacy of sacraments administered
by an allegedly unworthy priest), which classified allegorical
interpretation in relation to: (1) the Lord and his church, (2) true and
false believers, (3) promise and law, (4) genus and species, (5) numerical
significance, (6) "recapitulation," and (7) the devil and his
followers. There were other Latin exegetes, like Ambrosiaster
(commentaries ascribed to Ambrose) and, supremely, Jerome
(c. 347-419/420), the learned Latin Father, who paid close attention
to the grammatical sense. In the Old Testament Jerome appealed from the
Greek version to the "Hebraic verity" and in such a work as his
commentary on Daniel provided some fine examples of historical exegesis.
Augustine, though not primarily an exegete, composed both literal and
allegorical commentaries and expository homilies on many parts of
Scripture, and his grasp of divine love as the essential element in
revelation supplied a unifying hermeneutical principle that compensates
for technical deficiencies.
As the patristic age gave way to
the scholastic age, the English monk Bede of
Jarrow (died 735) wrote commentaries designed to perpetuate
patristic exegesis, mainly allegorical: thus Elkanah with his two wives (1
Sam. 1:2) is interpreted as referring to Christ with the synagogue and the
church.
In the early Middle Ages the
fourfold sense of Scripture--developed from Origen's threefold sense by
subdividing the spiritual sense into the allegorical (setting forth the
doctrine) and the anagogical (relating to the coming world)--was
increasingly expounded and received its final authority from Thomas
Aquinas (1225/26-74). For Thomas, the literal sense, expressing the
author's intention, was a fit object of scientific study; the figurative
senses unfolded the divine intention.
Medieval exegesis was greatly
influenced by the Glossa
Ordinaria, a digest
of the views of the leading fathers and early medieval doctors (teachers)
on biblical interpretation. This compilation owed much in its initial
stages to Anselm of Laon (died 1117); it
had reached its definitive form by the middle of the 12th century and
provided the exegetical norm of the Summa
theologiae ("Summation
of Theology") of Thomas Aquinas and others.
For all the interest in allegory,
literal interpretation was cultivated in many centres in the West, often
with the aid of Hebrew, knowledge of which was obtainable from Jewish
rabbis. One such centre was the Abbey of Saint-Victor at Paris, where Hugh
(died 1141) compiled biblical commentaries that fill three volumes of
J.-P. Migne's (1800-75) Patrologiae
Cursus Completus (Series Latina) and indicate the commentator's
dependence on Rashi as well as on his Christian predecessors. Of Hugh's
disciples, Andrew, abbot of Wigmore (died 1175), carried on his master's
tradition of literal scholarship, and Richard, the Scottish-born prior of
Saint-Victor (died 1173) pursued a line more congenial to his mystical
temperament. Herbert of Bosham (c. 1180) produced a commentary on Jerome's Hebrew Psalter. Robert
Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln (died 1253), wrote commentaries on
the days of creation and the Psalter that both drew on the Greek fathers
and profited by his direct study of the Hebrew text. Nicholas
of Lyra (c. 1265-c.
1349), the greatest Christian Hebraist and expositor of the later
Middle Ages, compiled postillae, or
commentaries, both literal and figurative, on the whole Bible; he insisted
that only the literal sense could establish proof. Luther ranked him among
the best exegetes: "a fine soul, a good Hebraist and a true
Christian." (see also Index:
Hebrew Bible)
The English theologian John
Colet (c. 1466-1519)
broke with medieval scholasticism when he returned from the Continent to
Oxford in 1496 and lectured on the Pauline letters, expounding the text in
terms of its plain meaning as seen in its historical context. The humanist
Erasmus (c.
1466-1536) owed to him much of his insight into biblical exegesis. By
the successive printed editions of his Greek New Testament (1516 and
following), Erasmus made his principal, but not his only, contribution to
biblical studies.
Martin Luther
(1483-1546) was a voluminous expositor, insisting on the primacy of the
literal sense and dismissing allegory as so much rubbish--although he
indulged in it himself on occasion. The core of Scripture was to him its
proclamation of Christ as the one in whom alone lay man's justification
before God. John Calvin (1509-64), a more
systematic expositor, served his apprenticeship by writing a youthful
commentary on the Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca the Younger's (c. 4 BC-AD 65) De clementia ("Concerning
Mercy"); systematic theologian though he was, he did not allow his
theological system to distort the plain meaning of Scripture, and his
philological-historical interpretation is consulted with profit even
today.
Scientific exegesis was pursued on
the Catholic side by scholars such as F. de Ribera (1591) and L. Alcasar
(1614), who showed the way to a more satisfactory understanding of the
Revelation. On the Reformed side, the Annotationes
in Libros Evangeliorum (1641-50) by the jurist Hugo
Grotius (1583-1645) were so objective that some criticized them for
rationalism.
The modern period is marked by
advances in textual criticism and in the study of biblical languages and
history, all of which contribute to the interpretation of the Bible. The
German theologian J.A. Bengel's (1687-1752)
edition of the Greek text of the New Testament with critical apparatus
(1734), in which he framed the canon that "the more difficult reading
is to be preferred," was followed by his exegetical Gnomon
Novi Testamenti ("Introduction
to the New Testament," 1742): "apply thyself wholly to the
text," he directed; "apply the text wholly to thyself." The
English bishop Robert Lowth's (1710-87)
Oxford lectures on The Sacred Poetry
of the Hebrews, published in Latin in 1753, greatly promoted the
understanding of the poetry of the Old Testament by expounding the laws of
its parallelistic structure. The German philologist Karl
Lachmann (1793-1851) applied his expertise in classical criticism
to editing the text of the New Testament; to him also belongs the credit
of arguing that Mark was the earliest of the Gospels and a main source of
Matthew and Luke (1835). The problem of the source analysis of the
Pentateuch was given what for long appeared to be its final solution by Julius
Wellhausen (1844-1918), who related the successive law codes to the
development of the Israelite cultus. For the period preceding the 9th
century BC, however, he operated in a historical vacuum that Near Eastern
archaeology was in his day only beginning to fill; its subsequent findings
have dictated radical modifications in his reconstruction of Israel's
religious history. In the middle half of the 19th century, New Testament
exegesis was overshadowed by the school of Ferdinand
Christian Baur (1792-1860), which envisaged a sharply opposed
Petrine (Peter) and Pauline (Paul) antithesis in the primitive church,
followed in the 2nd century by a synthesis that is reflected in most of
the New Testament writings. In France, Ernest
Renan's (1823-92) works on early Christianity were helpful
philological and historical studies; the most popular volume, his Vie
de Jésus (1863), was the least valuable. In England, where the
poet and educator Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
endeavoured to find an impregnable moral foundation for biblical
authority, New Testament exegesis received contributions of unsurpassed
worth between 1865 and the end of the century from J.B. Lightfoot, B.F.
Westcott, and F.J.A. Hort.
At the beginning of the 20th
century a new direction was given to Gospel interpretation by the German
scholar William Wrede (Das
Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien, 1901) and the medical missionary
theologian Albert Schweitzer (The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Eng. trans., 1910), who so
emphasized the eschatological orientation of Jesus' mind and message that
New Testament scholarship can never be the same again. The writings of the
biblical scholar C.H. Dodd (The Parables of the Kingdom, 1935; The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments, 1936) stressed
realized eschatology--that the standards of the last times were realized
by Jesus and his disciples--in the preaching of Jesus and of the primitive
church; he has been a leading pioneer of the "biblical theology"
movement. Karl Barth's (1886-1968)
commentary on Romans (1919) launched an existential interpretation of the
New Testament, which has been pursued more radically by Rudolf
Bultmann (1884-1976), under the influence of Wilhelm
Dilthey (1833-1911), according to whom the interpreter must project
himself into the author's experience so as to relive it, and of Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976), whose conception of the truly authentic man
as capable of freedom because he has faced reality provides the
"pre-understanding" for Bultmann's existential theology.
Bultmann's disciple Ernst Fuchs considers the hermeneutical task to be the
creation of a "language event" in which the authentic language
of Scripture encounters one now, challenging decision, awakening faith,
and accomplishing salvation. The chief rival to existential exegesis is
the "salvation-history" hermeneutic espoused by Oscar Cullmann.
Rudolf Bultmann and Martin
Dibelius (1883-1947) pioneered the modern form-critical study of
the Gospels. The form-critical method was fruitfully applied to the Old
Testament by Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) and Sigmund Mowinckel (1884-1965).
Among Catholic scholars, exegetical studies are vigorously promoted by
Jean Daniélou (with his researches into early Jewish Christianity),
the Dominicans of the École Biblique et Archéologique (The
School of the Bible and Archeology) in Jerusalem (to whom one must credit
the Jerusalem Bible), and the Jesuits of the Pontifical Biblical Institute
and others.
The encouragement given by the second
Vatican Council (1962-65) of the Roman
Catholic Church to biblical scholarship, to be cultivated in
association with "separated brethren" and with consideration for
the requirements of non-Christians, is one indication of a new direction
in biblical exegesis, in which this study will no longer be pursued as a
vindication of sectional traditions but rather as a cooperative enterprise
aiming at making widely available the permanent value of the Bible.
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