Two Thousand Years of Readers

The history of Christian interpretation does not begin with Christians. It begins inside a Jewish world that was already arguing about how to read, and the New Testament writers were formed by those arguments before they were formed by any of ours.

At Qumran, the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls read the prophets as a code about themselves. Their method has a name from their own vocabulary: pesher, interpretation, from the recurring formula pishro, its interpretation is. The Habakkuk commentary, 1QpHab, quotes a line of Habakkuk and then states that it concerns the Teacher of Righteousness, or the Wicked Priest, or the Kittim, figures from the community's own recent history. Most striking for our purposes is the claim the commentary makes about Habakkuk himself: God told the prophet to write what was coming but did not make known to him the consummation of the era, which was disclosed instead to the Teacher of Righteousness. Set that beside 1 Peter 1:10-11, where prophets inquire into the person and time their own words indicated, and you can see that the question of whether a text means more than its author knew was live in Judaism before the church asked it.

In Alexandria, Philo, a Jewish contemporary of Jesus writing in Greek, read the Torah allegorically on a large scale, finding in Abraham's journeys the soul's progress toward virtue and in the details of the law a philosophical anthropology. Philo is usually named as the villain of allegory, which is unfair to him in one important respect. He did not abandon the literal sense or the practice of the commandments, and in 'On the Migration of Abraham' he attacks those who, having found the deeper meaning, treat the actual observance as dispensable. Philo held both. His heirs did not always manage it.

In the rabbinic tradition, interpretation became a discipline with stated rules. Seven middot, measures or principles, are attributed to Hillel and preserved in early rabbinic sources, including qal wahomer, the argument from lighter to heavier, and gezerah shavah, verbal analogy, which licenses reading two passages together because they share a word. Rabbi Ishmael's school expanded them to thirteen. Midrash, from a root meaning to search out, developed as the art of reading closely and imaginatively to derive law (halakhah) and to expound narrative (aggadah). Later medieval Jewish interpreters distinguished peshat, the plain or contextual sense, from derash, the searched-out sense, and the acronym PaRDeS eventually gathered four levels: peshat, remez (hint), derash, and sod (secret or mystical). Rashi, in eleventh-century France, is the great champion of peshat, and it will matter in section three that a Christian friar read him closely.

Two things to carry forward. First, the rules were an attempt at discipline, not a licence for invention; a rabbi who could not show his move was not taken seriously. Second, the New Testament writers use several of these techniques. When Paul argues in 1 Corinthians 9:9-10 from a law about muzzling an ox to the support of apostles, he is doing something a rabbinic reader would have recognised immediately.

The first great Christian argument about method ran between two cities, and it is usually taught as a cartoon: Alexandria allegorised everything and Antioch read literally. The truth is more interesting and more useful to you.

Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 to c. 253) shaped Christian reading more than any interpreter after the apostles. Take that as a judgement offered rather than a fact reported, since you could mount a case for Augustine or for Luther instead. In 'On First Principles', book four, he sets out a threefold sense corresponding to the parts of a person: the body of scripture, its plain narrative; the soul, its moral sense; the spirit, its higher or mystical sense. He held that some passages have no bodily sense at all, placed there so that the reader would be forced upward, and that the difficulties and offences in scripture are deliberate stumbling blocks put in the way of a lazy reader. That is the Origen everyone knows. The Origen fewer know produced the Hexapla, a six-column edition comparing the Hebrew text with several Greek versions, which is the most ambitious work of textual criticism in antiquity. The greatest allegorist of the early church was also its greatest textual scholar, and any account of him that misses this has misunderstood what he thought he was doing. Origen did not despise the letter; he thought it was a threshold.

Antioch objected, and its objection was not flat literalism. Diodore of Tarsus, who died around 390 and led the Antiochene school, wrote a treatise whose title alone tells you the issue: on the difference between theoria and allegory. Theoria, contemplation or insight, is the perception of a higher or future reality in and through the historical sense, in such a way that the history is not dissolved. Allegory, as the Antiochenes used the word, replaces the history with something else. As a working question this is the most useful thing the section has to give you: a reading is theoria if the literal event still stands and still matters after you have seen the further meaning, and it is allegory in the objectionable sense if the event has become a code that could be discarded once decoded.

Now the dissent, because this lesson would be dishonest without it. The tidy contrast of theoria against allegory is contested, and not only at the edges. The word appears sparsely in what survives of Diodore and Theodore, Diodore's treatise on the difference is itself lost and known largely by report, and a substantial body of patristic scholarship argues that the neat Antioch-against-Alexandria polarity is partly a modern reconstruction laid over a messier reality. Frances M. Young's 'Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture' (1997) argues that the standard contrast is overdrawn and that the real difference between the schools lies somewhere other than literal reading against allegorical reading. John J. O'Keefe's article 'A Letter that Killeth', in the Journal of Early Christian Studies in 2000, reassessed Antiochene exegesis on the Psalms in terms distinctly unflattering to the received picture. This course cannot report where the balance of that scholarly argument currently rests, and says so rather than asserting. Use theoria as a question to put to a reading. Do not carry it away as a settled fact about two fourth-century cities.

Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350 to 428) pushed the historical reading furthest, and he is commonly reported to have accepted only a small handful of psalms as directly messianic. That rigour cost him; he was condemned posthumously in the sixth century in the controversy over the Three Chapters, for christological reasons entangled with his exegesis. John Chrysostom, the most read of the Antiochenes, applied the same instincts pastorally, attending closely to what a writer was actually arguing and to the situation of the audience, and he made much of divine condescension, the idea that God speaks in language scaled to human capacity. Theodoret of Cyrus held a more moderate line, and his case is a lesson in separating a man from his books. He was restored to his see at Chalcedon in 451 after anathematising Nestorius, and he is venerated as a saint in the Eastern churches; a century later, at Constantinople in 553, his writings against Cyril were condemned as one of the Three Chapters. The person was rehabilitated. Part of the output was not.

So the two schools were not arguing about whether scripture has depth. Both believed it does. They were arguing about whether the historical sense constrains the deeper one. That is still the argument, and you will have it in your own congregation the first time someone tells you what the four rivers of Eden stand for.

Augustine's 'On Christian Teaching', written across nearly thirty years from 397, is the first real textbook of biblical interpretation in the West, and it frames the whole enterprise as a problem about signs. A sign, for Augustine, is a thing that makes us think of something beyond the impression it makes on the senses. Scripture is made of words, which are signs; some of its signs are unknown to us and some are ambiguous, and the interpreter's craft is the disciplined handling of both. This is why book two sends the reader to the biblical languages, to textual comparison, and to knowledge of the natural world, on the ground that you cannot understand a sign whose referent you know nothing about.

The other half of Augustine's account is the criterion he gives for a right reading, and it is not what a modern reader expects. Scripture, he says in book three, enjoins nothing but love and condemns nothing but its opposite; a passage that seems to command cruelty or forbid love is therefore figurative, and you have not yet understood it. And in book one he goes further in a way that still unsettles people. Someone who draws from a passage a meaning that builds up love, but not the meaning the writer intended, is not deceived in a damaging way and is not a liar. Augustine's image is of a traveller who leaves the road and crosses a field but arrives at the same city. He does not leave it there, though: such a reader is to be corrected and shown that keeping to the road is better. Hold both halves. The rule of love is a real constraint, and it is not a licence.

Out of this grew the medieval fourfold sense, the quadriga. The literal or historical sense reports what happened. The allegorical sense finds what you are to believe, typically Christ and the church. The moral or tropological sense finds what you are to do. The anagogical sense finds what you are to hope for, the last things. A Latin mnemonic, attributed to Augustine of Dacia around 1260, fixed it for generations of students: littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia. The letter teaches what happened, allegory what you are to believe, the moral sense what you are to do, anagogy where you are heading. The stock example is Jerusalem: the city in Judea, the church, the faithful soul, and the heavenly city.

The quadriga is easy to mock and it was not stupid. It is a way of asking four questions that a congregation genuinely needs answered. Its danger was that with four licensed senses available, a determined preacher could find almost anything, and the literal sense became the least interesting of the four. Thomas Aquinas addressed exactly this danger. In the 'Summa Theologiae', part one, question one, article ten, he grants the four senses and then puts a fence round them: all the senses are founded on the literal, and an argument can be drawn only from the literal, not from the others. He adds that nothing necessary to faith is contained in the spiritual sense which scripture does not also state literally somewhere. Aquinas also expanded what the literal sense includes: when scripture speaks in metaphor, the metaphorical meaning is the literal sense, because that is what the author was saying. That single clarification removes most of the confusion that still attends the word literal.

One more medieval figure earns his place here. Nicholas of Lyra, a Franciscan writing in the early fourteenth century, produced a commentary on the whole Bible that pressed the literal sense hard and drew openly on Jewish exegesis, Rashi above all. His work was printed early and read widely, and there is a Latin jingle that if Lyra had not played his lyre, Luther would not have danced. It overstates a real debt.

The Reformation's hermeneutical slogan is sensus literalis, the literal sense, and understanding what the Reformers meant by it is worth more than any other single fact in this lesson, because it is routinely misunderstood in both directions.

William Tyndale put it as bluntly as anyone, in 'The Obedience of a Christian Man' (1528): scripture has but one sense, which is the literal sense. Luther, who had used allegory freely in his early Psalms lectures, turned on it with the vehemence he reserved for things he had once loved, calling allegories empty speculations and, in one memorable phrase, the scum of scripture. His positive claim was that the Holy Spirit is the plainest of writers and that his words have one simple sense. Calvin's statement of the same principle is the most quotable in the tradition. In the dedicatory letter to his Romans commentary he says that the interpreter's almost only task is to unfold the mind of the writer whom he has undertaken to expound, and he made lucid brevity his stated aim. Commenting on Galatians 4, where Paul himself uses the word allegory, Calvin turns on Origen and insists that the true meaning of scripture is the natural and simple one.

Now the two corrections. First, sensus literalis never meant flat literalism. It meant the sense the words bear according to their language, genre and setting, which includes every figure of speech, every parable, every poem. Calvin's commentaries are full of metaphor handled as metaphor. Aquinas had already made this point and the Reformers did not reverse it.

Second, and more awkwardly, the Reformers did not stop reading the Old Testament christologically, and any account of them that implies they did is false. Luther read the Psalms as the voice of Christ. Calvin's commentaries find Christ throughout the prophets. Luther went further than most would now go in the other direction: in his 1522 preface to James and Jude he ranks the books of the New Testament by whether they urge Christ, and on that basis he is openly cool toward James. So the literal sense in the hands of the Reformers is not a neutral historical method. It is the plain sense of a book they were certain was about Christ, read within a creedal framework, with the analogy of faith and the rule that scripture interprets scripture doing real work. Whether that is a stable position or a compromise that later readers had to resolve is one of the genuine disputes in the history of interpretation, and both sides of it are argued by serious historians.

The Reformers also handed on two commitments with lasting consequences. Scripture in the vernacular, which put the text in the hands of people with no training and no supervision. And perspicuity, the clarity of scripture in what is necessary for salvation, which was a claim about that necessary core rather than about every verse. Read the sentence in the Westminster Confession carefully and the qualification is right there: not all things in scripture are alike plain, yet what is necessary to be known for salvation is set out so clearly that the unlearned may attain a sufficient understanding of it in the due use of the ordinary means.

In 1670 Spinoza published the 'Theological-Political Treatise', and chapter seven made a proposal that changed everything downstream: the method of interpreting scripture is no different in kind from the method of interpreting nature. Gather the history of the language, collect what each book says, establish the circumstances and character of each author, and do not import doctrine to settle a question of fact. He also argued, following hints in Ibn Ezra, that Moses did not write the whole Pentateuch. Richard Simon, an Oratorian priest, made a related source argument in 1678 and had his book suppressed. Jean Astruc in 1753 noticed that the divine names in Genesis cluster and proposed underlying documents. Johann Salomo Semler in the 1770s distinguished the scriptures from the word of God and argued that much in them was local and temporary. In 1787 Johann Philipp Gabler, in an inaugural lecture at Altdorf, separated biblical theology, a historical discipline describing what the writers believed, from dogmatic theology, which states what the church should believe. That distinction created the modern academic study of the Bible.

The nineteenth century built the edifice. David Friedrich Strauss's 'Life of Jesus' (1835) applied the category of myth to the Gospels and ended his academic career. F. C. Baur and the Tübingen school reconstructed early Christianity as a conflict between Petrine and Pauline parties. Julius Wellhausen's great synthesis, published in 1878 as the first volume of a history of Israel and retitled 'Prolegomena to the History of Israel' for the second edition in 1883, gave the documentary hypothesis its classic form and its sequence of sources; a reader chasing the citation will meet all three dates, since the English translation is 1885. In England, Benjamin Jowett's essay in 'Essays and Reviews' (1860) issued the programme in one sentence: interpret the scripture like any other book. Then Hermann Gunkel shifted the question from documents to genres, asking what kind of speech a psalm or a saga is and in what setting in life it functioned, and Rudolf Bultmann carried form criticism into the Gospels and then proposed demythologising their world picture to recover their address.

Be exact about the gains, because they are permanent and you use them daily. Textual criticism, which is why your Bible's footnotes exist. Grammar and lexicography of Hebrew and Greek on a scientific basis. Genre, which is why nobody now reads Job's speeches as transcript or the Psalms as doctrine in propositional form. The whole ancient Near Eastern context, recovered from actual excavation: the Babylonian creation and flood accounts, the Ugaritic texts, the Code of Hammurabi, the archives at Mari and Nuzi, which let a reader see what is conventional in Genesis and what is startling. Add the practical machinery you touch every week: critical editions of the Hebrew and Greek, concordances, lexicons and grammars a village pastor can now open for nothing, and the Septuagint recovered as a witness the New Testament writers themselves quoted. Every conservative commentary on your shelf runs on that apparatus, and none of it is reversible. Most fundamentally, the insistence that the text meant something to somebody before it meant anything to you. That is not a liberal principle. It is the Antiochene principle with better tools.

Be equally exact about the costs. Method carried assumptions: a great deal of the scholarship ruled out in advance, as a condition of being scholarship, the kind of event the texts report, so the conclusion was contained in the premise. Assured results kept being unassured, and a student who anchored his faith to the consensus of 1890 lost it in 1930. The books fragmented into layers until nobody could preach from them, and the congregations that funded the universities got nothing back. And the most damaging critique came from inside: Albert Schweitzer, in 1906, surveyed a century of lives of Jesus and showed that each one had produced a Jesus in its author's own image, which is a devastating thing for a discipline claiming objectivity to have demonstrated about itself. Karl Barth, in the preface to his Romans commentary after the First World War, complained that the critical scholars stopped exactly where the work should begin, having established what the text said without ever asking what it says.

So the twentieth century turned twice. First to the text as literature: Erich Auerbach's comparison of Homer and Genesis in 'Mimesis' (1946), Hans Frei's argument in 'The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative' (1974) that modern reading had lost the ability to take a narrative as a narrative, then Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg on biblical narrative art, narrative criticism of the Gospels, and Brevard Childs asking what it means to read these books as a canon rather than as excavation sites. Then to the reader: liberation theologians in Latin America reading Exodus from a base community, Phyllis Trible and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza on the texts about women and the history of their interpretation, African, Asian and postcolonial interpreters asking whose interests the standard European readings had served. Alongside that, a movement for the theological interpretation of scripture went back deliberately to the fathers and the Reformers, on the grounds that premodern readers knew something the moderns had forgotten.

Here is the point of the whole lesson. You did not choose your reading instincts from a menu. If you flinch when someone allegorises the Song of Songs, you are an Antiochene and you inherited it. If you assume that every Old Testament sermon must arrive at Christ, you are standing where Origen and Luther both stood, for different reasons. If your first question of a passage is what it meant to its original audience, that habit reached you through Spinoza and Gabler, whatever you think of them. If your first question is what it says to your own people in their situation, you are working in a tradition that runs from Qumran through the base communities. None of these instincts is disreputable and none is self-evident. They are all positions in an argument two thousand years old, and a teacher who does not know which position he occupies cannot tell when he is defending it and when he is merely obeying it.