During the initial stage of biblical interpretation, the interpretation was marked almost exclusively by a Jewish interpretation comprising of the rabbinic Judaism (e.g., Rabbi Hillel), Hellenistic Judaism (e.g., Philo’s allegorical interpretation) and the Qumran community (e.g., pesharim),[1] while the apostolic period (ca. 30-100 CE) marks the transition from Jewish to early Christian interpretation. During this period, “Jesus’ literal fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy was their fundamental hermeneutical principle.”[2] In other words, the Old Testament was understood christologically. Besides, they also used a typological interpretation. Such an interpretation anticipates God’s activity or events, objects and ideas to repeat later in history.[3]
Among the early church fathers (ca. 100-590 CE), different methods of interpretation are evident.[4] However, the most popular interpretive approach was ‘allegorical interpretation.’[5] Such an interpretation concerns about what the interpreter is thinking rather than what the author is trying to say.[6] For instance, Clement of Alexandria, in support of the allegorical interpretation, considers the scriptural meaning to be hidden behind the literal sense (like the soul is hidden behind the body), while (his successor) Origen similarly states that “the wise interpreter of Scripture must move from the events of a passage (its literal sense) to find the hidden principles for Christian living (its moral sense) and its doctrinal truth (its spiritual sense).”[7] The Antiochene School of thought (e.g., Theophilus of Antioch, Lucian Samosata) also contended that the spiritual sense was in no way separable from the literal sense.[8] However, they are different “in their single-minded concern to preserve the integrity of history and the natural sense of a passage.”[9]
Interpreters during the Middle Ages (ca. 590-1500 CE) saw a multiplicity of meanings in the Bible. Therefore, interpretation could be multiple including literal, allegorical, moral, or anagogical. For instance, ‘Jerusalem’ was interpreted in different ways. It could refer to “the literal city in Palestine. Allegorically it could mean the church. Morally (tropologically) it would refer to the human soul. Anagogically ‘Jerusalem’ refers to the heavenly city.”[10] While the literal is plain and evident, the moral instructs a person what to do, the allegorical tells what a person is to believe and the analogical centers on what Christians are to hope for.[11] One of the major figure of this period was Thomas Aquinas who “defended the literal sense as the basis for all the other senses of Scripture.”[12]
The reformers insisted on the literal meaning as the only way of doing exegesis,[13] whereby disregarding the allegorical interpretation. Whoever leaves the literal meaning is considered as going out of the way. Luther therefore argues: “Origen’s allegories are not worth so much a dirt,” for “allegories are empty speculations … the scum of Holy Scripture.”[14] His interpretation was rather centered on Christ, and the Bible became the supreme and sole authority. It was therefore important that an exegete balances the literal or grammatical sense with the spiritual depth of meaning. However, the Catholic tradition of biblical interpretation during this period “upheld the authenticity of the Vulgate and forbade anyone to interpret Scripture out of harmony with church doctrine.”[15]
The post-reformation period (17th and 18th centuries) saw a great attempt to determine the original text of the Bible. Scholars began to classify and evaluate the New Testament manuscript materials to decide which variant to be the best. As a result, there began to circulate grammars and lexicons of Hebrew, and Greek; while historical backgrounds of the biblical accounts also came in for deeper study. Pietism that began in the 17th century (Germany) sought to react to the intellectual dogmatism of Protestant scholasticism and the formalism of Protestant worship services. Its aim was to “revive the practice of Christianity as a way of life through group Bible study, prayer and the cultivation of personal morality.”[16] Accordingly, a German Pastor Philip Jacob Spener preached the need of personal conversion and an intimate/personal relationship to God. He emphasizes on the devotional and practical study of the Bible. To do this, a careful grammatical study of both the ancient Hebrew and Greek texts with an aim to get devotional and practical implications, are considered important.[17] Meanwhile, the spirit of the Renaissance also gave birth to the importance of intellectual movement called rationalism. A Jewish philosopher Bernard Spinoza, accordingly, argued for the primacy of reason in the interpretation of the Scripture. Scripture was studied like any other book by using “the rules of historical investigation” which denied God’s direct intervention in Israelites history. Miracle stories are considered to be a simple way to persuade ignorant people to obedience.[18] Thus, post-reformation period brought fragmentation of approaches to biblical interpretation between pietism (emerging from reformation) and rationalism (emerging from renaissance).
During the nineteenth century, there was a great attempt to find out how various books of the Bible were written, whereby confidence in historical criticism greatly grew.[19] Scholars who were teaching in Germany sought to approach the Bible through scientific means. In effect, the historical-critical method, “an interpretive method guided by several crucial philosophical presuppositions,”[20] was born. This method “inherited the rationalistic assumption from its seventeenth-century intellectual ancestors, that the use of human reason, free of theological limitations, is the best tool with which to study the Bible. So scholars treated the Bible as they would any other literature, not as God’s special revelation to humanity.”[21] They sought to explain everything in terms of natural laws and excluded the possibility of supernatural intervention. Rather than seeking to discern what the text meant, they sought to focus on discovering the sources behind it; thus, giving rise to the birth of source criticism. F. C. Baur and his disciples were those who applied critical human reason to study the New Testament during this period.[22] By this time, biblical ideas (during this period) are considered time-bound truths (the Bible records what people thought at the time) rather than a timeless revelation.[23]
The field of biblical interpretation underwent dramatic changes in the twentieth century with the development of literary criticism and science. The new literary method called form criticism aims “to determine the specific cultural life-setting in which each [biblical passage] originated.”[24] Accordingly, Rudolf Bultmann applied the method to Gospels and classified them into various literary types which include miracle story, pronouncement story, and so on. He also suggests an original setting for each of this literary type.[25] In mid-1950s, redaction criticism emerged as a complementary discipline of form criticism which seeks to understand “the distinctive theological and thematic emphases that the individual biblical writers or editors gave their materials. It assumes, for example, that … each context or book reflects the editorial design of its author/editor, a design that aims to emphasize certain theme.”[26] It first appears in the studies of the Gospels of Luke and Mark. Examples can be given as H. Conzelmann’s The Theology of Saint Luke (1961) and W. Marxsen’s Mark the Evangelist: Studies on the Redaction History of the Gospel (1969).[27] Many other new methods which emerged during this period are new hermeneutic, canon criticism, new literary criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction.[28] Sociological approaches and liberation hermeneutics have also attracted many. Notable sociological interpretation on the New Testament and early Christianity has been carried out by a variety of scholars (see 3.2 below), and their study is concerned mostly with “the social status of the early Christians, the question whether the early Christian movement was sectarian and millenarian, and the social function of early Christian religious language, to mention just a few broad concerns.”[29] However, the study of Malina and Neyrey has been identified with cultural-anthropology (see 3.2.3.1 below).
Ideological criticism emerges as yet another recent addition to late-twentieth-century New Testament interpretation which seeks “to expose in both texts and communities of interpretation those ideas about the social order that express and reinforce the interests of a dominant group at the expense of some other group(s) or class(es) in society.”[30] The most developed forms of ideological criticism in New Testament studies today are the hermeneutics of liberation theology, feminist criticism, and critiques of anti-Judaism (cf. Rosemary Radford Ruether) in the New Testament. While liberationist hermeneutics sought to show that the New Testament contains a “liberating content, including critiques of oppression and its hidden mechanisms”; ‘feminist criticism’ aims to unearth the andro-centrism of traditional interpretation. [31] It is also to be noted that sociological criticism has given rise to contextual hermeneutics in developing countries like India, Africa and Latin America. Notable contextual hermeneutics in India include Dalit, postcolonial and tribal reading of the Bible in India.[32] Such contextual approaches have been considered ‘postmethodological’ by Stephen D. Moore[33] because they move beyond a method/methodology. Taking ‘contextual hermeneutics’ like cultural, postcolonial, Queer and masculinity studies as example, Moore argues that they are in a somewhat different boat than the methodology proper of literary criticism (such as deconstruction and reader-response criticism that developed in the 1970-1980s) because they contributed “little in the way of identifiable methodologies or even general strategies of reading.”[34] They constitute a possible means through which an interpreter can move ‘beyond’ a method (in contrast to the established modes of reading in biblical studies) with “no manifestos to herald it.”[35] Such a postmethodological approach is more interested in the ‘objects of analysis’ than its ‘analytical procedures’ as in the case of cultural studies.[36]
[1] Cf. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., “A Short History of Interpretation,” in An Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics: The Search for Meaning, edited by Walter C. Kaiser and Moisés Silva (Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994), 213-15.
[2] William W. Klein, Craig L. Blomberg, and Robert L. Hubbard, Jr., Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1993), 29.
[3] The other apostolic approaches are that of literal-contextual interpretation which “interpreted OT Scriptures according to their normal meaning,” and principle/application which interpreted the OT “by applying its underlying principle to situation different from, but comparable to, the one in the original context.” Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 29-30.
[4] Occasionally, they use ‘typological interpretation’ to relate the Old Testament to the New Testament, especially with regards to the teaching of Jesus. At times the early church fathers also employ a ‘midrashic interpretive approach’ similar to the rabbis and the Qumran sectarians (i.e., pesharim), and also consider ‘traditional interpretation’ of a biblical passage as a correct interpretive method. However, the drawback of such an approach is when it keeps church tradition almost equal to the Scripture. Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 32-3.
[5] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 32.
[6] A. Berkeley Mickelsen, Interpreting the Bible (Michigan: Eerdmans, 1984), 28. Such allegorical interpretation considers the ass in the triumphal entry to represent the letter of the Old Testament, while the colt or foal of an ass (which was gentle and submission) is taken to mean the New Tesament. Likewise, the two apostles who brought the animals to Jesus are “the moral and spiritual senses. Mickelsen, Interpreting the Bible, 32.
[7] Cited in Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 34.
[8] “Literal here means the customarily acknowledged meaning of an expression in its particular context.” Mickelsen, Interpreting the Bible, 33.
[9] Kaiser, “History of Interpretation,” 221.
[10] Mickelsen, Interpreting the Bible, 35.
[11] A. C. Blackman, Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1957), 111, cited in Mickelsen, Interpreting the Bible, 35.
[12] Cf. Kaiser, “History of Interpretation,” 223-24.
[13] “The Holy Ghost” declares Luther “is the all –simplest writer that is in heaven or earth; therefore his words can have no more than one simplest sense, which we call the scriptural or literal meaning.” Frederic W. Farrar, History of Interpretation, Bampton Lectures, 1885 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1961), 329, quoted in Kaiser, “History of Interpretation,” 225.
[14] Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, in Luther’s Works, vols. 1-3, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1958-61), comments on Gen. 3:15-20, cited in Kaiser, “History of Interpretation,” 225.
[15] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 41-2.
[16] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 42.
[17] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 43.
[18] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 43.
[19] Mickelsen, Interpreting the Bible, 44-7.
[20] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 44.
[21] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 44.
[22] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 45.
[23] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 44.
[24] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 45.
[25] Cited in Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 47.
[26] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 49.
[27] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 49.
[28] Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 50-1.
[29] Charles H. Cosgrove, “A History of New Testament Studies in the 20th Century,” Review and Expositor 96 (1999): 376-377.
[30] The term “ideology” has been defined as “those ruling ideas in a society that serve the interests of power elites and are thus a mechanism of oppression…Especially important to ideological criticism is the question of the social location of the interpreter(s).” Cosgrove, “History of New Testament Studies,” 376-377.
[31] “Though it is not academically right to qualify contextual hermeneutics as a continuation of sociological reading of the New Testament, there are many solid links and theories that enable the readers to contextualize the meaning of the New Testament.” Cosgrove, “History of New Testament Studies,” 34.
[32] Cf. Goerge M. Soares-Prabhu, The Dharma of Jesus (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2003); James Massey, The Gospel According to Luke, Dalit Bible Commentary, vol. 3 (New Delhi: Centre for Dalit/Subaltern Studies, 2007); Renthy Keitzar, “Tribal Theololy in the Making,” in Tribal Theology: A Reader, edited by Shimreignam Shimray (Jorhat: TSC, 2003), 212-224; A. Wati Longchar, ed., Encounter Between Gospel and Tribal Culture (Jorhat: TSC, 1999); K. Thanzauva, Theology of Community (Aizawl: Mizoram Theological Conference, 1997).
[33] Stephen D. Moore, Bible and Theory: Critical and Postcritical Essays, SBL 57 (Atlanta: SBL, 2010); cf. Stephen D. Moore, “A Modest Manifesto for New Testament Literary Criticism: How to Interface with a Literary Studies Field that is Post-Literary, Post-Theoretical, and Post-Methodological,” Biblical Interpretation 15 (2007): 1-25.
[34] Here deconstruction is taken as “a highly pliable strategy of reading” which was also “an eminently repeatable strategy of reading.” For instance, Derrida’s deconstruction, as a proper methodology, functions in “two successive phases, ‘reversal’ and ‘reinscription.’” Similarly, “Aram Veeser’s encapsulation of New Historicism … as an analytic strategy” moves through “five successive ‘moments:’ anecdote, outrage, resistance, containment and autobiography. Moore, Bible and Theory, 369-71.
[35] Moore, Bible and Theory, 370.
[36] Moore, Bible and Theory, 368.
LAI-LEENG 