Chapter 8
A Brief History of Biblical Interpretation

Though the perennial goals of biblical interpretation are very lofty, Scripture commentators and scholars throughout the ages have had their virtues and deficiencies.

Biblical interpretation throughout the centuries has depended on many things: predominant philosophies of the time, Church controversies, intellectual traits of both individuals and peoples, and societal changes.

For instance, in their study of scriptural texts, Philo and other Hellenistic Jews of Alexandria in the second century B.C. tried to incorporate the more philosophical and allegorical systems of Greek scholars into a more literal understanding of the text.

In the first century A.D., the Pharisees had a very strict and legalistic way of viewing the sacred texts, particularly the Torah, whereas the Sadducees were very literalist in interpreting some texts but lax with others.

Beginning in the first century A.D., and establishing themselves more in the second century when the rabbinical school of interpretation began, Palestinian Jews developed two principal forms of commentary to Scripture: the Talmud and the Midrashim.

The Talmud (both Babylonian and Palestinian) consisted of extensive commentaries on the texts of the law, with a strong use of casuistry or the posing of cases.

The Midrashim were commentaries on the Torah and other texts from two points of view: what needed to be done in the legal sense (halaka) and what needed to be lived or believed, along with the history of the people (haggada).

The first apostolic fathers and apologists of Christianity would quote from Scripture in order to show that Christ was indeed the Messiah, to refute heresies, or to increase the faith and devotion of the people. St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, and St. Clement of Rome incorporated Scripture very integrally into their preaching and writings.

As the years went by, two great Christian schools of biblical interpretation were founded, which were centered in Alexandria and Antioch. The Alexandrian was the older of the two, dating to around 150 A.D.

Origen was the greatest teacher and scholar of this school, with his strong Platonic tendency to emphasize the spiritual meaning over the more literal or historical meanings of texts. To look for a mystical or spiritual meaning is certainly a valid approach to the Bible given its divine authorship, but in Origen’s writings this approach sometimes appears to downplay the literal meaning of a text, or even deny that it exists.

This allegorical method became exaggerated when writers of the Alexandrian School would look for symbolic or mystical meanings in small details in the Bible (e.g., whether or not the portholes of Noah’s ark, a type of the Church, signified the sacraments.) Among the great representatives of this school were St. Athanasius and St. Cyril of Alexandria.

The school of Antioch was more interested in the literal meaning of texts and paid much attention to exact words, facts, and dates. It was founded by Lucian in c. 260 A.D. and was opposed to the allegorical system of interpretation championed by Alexandria, though it did admit a prudent application of the typical sense in what Antiochene scholars called theory.

This school included Saint John Chrysostom, one of the greatest preachers of all time and the author of commentaries on Matthew and John that are still relevant to our own times. Unfortunately this school - perhaps because it did not stress a higher or deeper meaning to Scripture, or lost the connection of texts with apostolic tradition - also produced some confusing ideas, such as the Christological interpretation of Theodore of Mopsuestia, which seemed to posit the existence of two persons in Christ, and which ultimately led to the heresy of Nestorius in the fifth century.

Other great Greek and Latin Fathers tried to combine the valid insights of both schools in their writings. Saint Augustine, for instance, applied the allegorical method in his homilies, but in his theological writings he adhered to the literal meaning. Saint Gregory of Nyssa also used both methods.

Because of the barbarian invasions, the late fifth through ninth centuries were mostly characterized by the preservation of the biblical texts and the greatest earlier commentaries, owed in great part to the monks of Ireland who carefully copied and stored them for future generations.

Running commentaries, called catenae, or "chains," made up of quotes from the Fathers, were placed after biblical texts. There were, however, some noted commentators during this period, such as Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Isidore of Seville, and Saint Bede - all of whom wrote reflections on both Old and New Testament texts.

The scholastic period of interpretation was characterized by interest in establishing the correct Latin version and the systematic categorizing of the various senses and meanings of the texts at hand.

The scholastic commentators divided the sacred writings into parts and tried to demonstrate the meanings of distinct sentences and their logical relationship to one another. Using the consequent sense of Scripture, they would derive theological conclusions from given texts and verses.

Saint Albert the Great normally followed the literal meaning of the text, but he did not reject the allegorical meaning. Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote commentaries on the prophets and on Matthew and John, along with a running commentary on all four Gospels called the catena aurea (lit. the chain of gold) , which consists of excerpts from the exegetical works of different Fathers of the Church. Saint Bonaventure, the great Franciscan theologian and mystic, wrote commentaries on the Wisdom Books , in which he used both the literal and typical meanings of texts.

The 15th century onwards began a new period in biblical interpretation, as the knowledge of Greek language and culture became more accessible for scholars. New editions and commentaries based on ancient Greek and Hebrew manuscripts began to appear, most notably the Greek New Testament of Erasmus (d. 1536) and Cajetan (d. 1534).

But of more profound influence was the beginning of Protestantism, with its insistence that the Bible was the only source of faith. Protestant writers, having rejected the Vulgate, chose to return exclusively to the Greek and Hebrew texts. Their commentaries were voluntarily cut off from the tradition of the Church, and the analogy of faith.

This caused a tremendous revolution in the way the Bible was considered, which endures to this day - though, ironically, many of the Protestants' interpretations of Scripture were at first not that different from those of Scholastic commentators.

As a result of the Protestant challenge, a great flowering of Catholic exegesis occurred from the years 1560 to 1650. Specific advances in the critical editing of texts, treatises on biblical geography and archeology, and extensive commentaries on the Old and New Testaments were finished by such famous authors as the Jesuits Saint Robert Bellarmine and Cornelius a Lapide, and the Capuchin Saint Lawrence of Brindisi.

With the pervasive influence of rationalism from the 17th century onwards, biblical studies began to decline in spiritual depth and became more empirical.

In great part this trend was marked by the denial of the historicity of many miracles in Sacred Scripture, and of Scripture’s divine authorship and authority. The books of the Bible were considered to be merely profane documents, written by different groups of people with their own political or personal goals.

Baruch Spinoza (d. 1674) was the first to apply some of these ideas to the Old Testament, and Hermann Samuel Reimarus (d. 1768) to the New Testament. Ferdinand Bauer, David Friedrich Strauss, and Ernst Renan were proponents of the rationalist system in the 19th century.

Each had his own theory, but the ultimate conclusion of them all was that the Bible contained either falsified history or edifying myths, and that we can really know very little about what Jesus Christ really said and did.

At the same time, many theorists from the famous Tübingen school in Germany argued that the composition of the Gospels should be set back to the middle of the second century A.D., in order to allow time for ideological and mythical accounts about Christ to be formed.

At the turn of the century, John Weiss and Albert Schweitzer promoted the idea that Christ and His immediate disciples had a mainly eschatological purpose - that is, they were expecting the end of the world very shortly.

The Catholic writer Alfred Loisy was very much affected by these ideas. Related to these theories were the ideas of Wilhelm Wrede, who maintained that Jesus was mainly a charismatic figure who did not want to form any permanent or stable Church, but simply inaugurate a system of personal morality.

Other authors such as Adolph von Harnack argued that Jesus only gradually came to the realization that He was the Messiah, a position echoed by more contemporary writers.

A few years earlier, Julius Wellhausen and his pupils had applied certain literary and historical premises to the study of the Old Testament, particularly the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible).

Having noted such things as different names for God in the Pentateuch (e.g., Yahweh and Elohim), changes in language style, and the repetition of narrations, they proposed that the Pentateuch was not the work of the one man Moses (which had always been held by both Christians and Jews), but the result of different traditions, written by different groups of men over a period of five centuries with specific religious, political, and social goals.

The description of the progressive development of texts has some relation to the theory of evolution, which was also very influential in the late-19th century.

This theory of the authorship of the Pentateuch is called the four-source theory, denominated by the letters J (Jahwist), which is said to have originated in the southern kingdom of Israel in the ninth century; E (Elohist), said to have originated in the northern kingdom in the eighth century; D (Deuteronomist), said to have originated in Jerusalem in the seventh century; and P (Priestly), said to have originated in Judea after the sixth century, B.C.

The analytical system of these men, and others who begin with the same premises, has often been called “higher literary criticism” or the “historical critical method”; it was quickly applied to all the books of the Old and the New Testament, in order to investigate the origin of biblical texts from a strictly historical or critical point of view - without regard to any deeper meanings behind the texts, nor to the interpretative traditions of the believing community, whether Jewish or Christian.

Without endorsing these four sources in particular, the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1948 did accept the possibility of various sources for the composition of the Pentateuch, while positing the substantial influence of Moses as legislator and writer.

Many modern scholars, including Catholics, have gone on to propose the existence of various traditions and sources, not only for the Pentateuch but also for the prophetic and sapiential books.

Such theories would need to be well integrated with the Magisterium and previous biblical scholarship; to prevent considering Scripture as a simple evolutionary process of merely human traditions, one would also have to affirm a unique inspirational role in the chain of traditions for the final author, who judges this material to be suitable and, moved by the Holy Spirit, puts them into their final written form.

Many Protestant scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century tried to correct the rationalist and often polemical basis of historical criticism by stressing more doctrinal and religious elements in the study of Scripture. Most notable among these were Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann, trying to preserve the dignity of the Bible against historical criticism, began to speak of a distinction between what he called the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.”

According to this theory, which has been very influential in the twentieth century, including among some Catholic writers, the New Testament contains a series of myths about Jesus invented by the Christian communities of later years. These pious stories were meant to arouse and preserve the faith of the people in supernatural happenings and in the salvation offered by Christ.

Bultmann believed the biblical researcher should "demythologize" these stories in order to discover the difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, and to make them more acceptable to modern man. Given his strong existentialist and Lutheran background, Bultmann stresses the importance of faith in Jesus (sola fides), while downplaying the need to know the actual historical events of Jesus’ life.

Pope St. Pius X already warned of the danger of this approach in 1905, as we stated before, because it divides the life and message of Christ in an artificial way, between the concepts "Jesus of faith" and "Jesus of history," thus opening the door to a confusing subjectivism.

One of the most radical results of the historical critical method - when divorced from the living tradition that accompanied the Gospels from the first - is the so-called "Jesus Seminar," which began in 1985.

Begun by R. Funk and J.D. Crossan, the seminar consists of 50 to 100 scholars who meet regularly and write papers about what they think the historical Jesus really said and did. With a definite bias against miracles and supernatural happenings, it has been notorious in denying the authenticity of Christ's words in the Gospels - claiming that He did not say fifty percent of the words attributed to Him.

Though rejected by many Scripture scholars today, the claims of the Jesus Seminar have been greatly propagated by the secular media.

Derivations of the historical-critical method sought to refine and describe more accurately the actual composition of texts throughout the centuries.

Most noted among these is the sitz im leben research of Hermann Gunkel, which tried to situate a text in its original historical or liturgical setting, the formegeschichte of Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann which studies the inter-relation of literary forms and their development, and finally the redaktionsgeschichte, the critical study of the process of editing and the theological influences involved.

The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, published by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1993, studies these various approaches and assesses their advantages and drawbacks. It endorses the historical-critical method as a valid and even necessary way to begin the study of a biblical text nowadays, but cautions against any rationalist or historicist bias that could be implied in it.

For this reason, the commission stresses the importance of both a diachronic study of a text (its development from previous sources and traditions, as far as can be known) and a sychronic study (the text in its final form).

It also surveys other more modern biblical methods of analysis such as the rhetorical, narrative, and semiotic (study of the inner structure of textual meanings and their relationships), along with certain sociological and psychological methods. It notes the influence of political and social movements on biblical studies, such as liberation theology and feminism.

This 1993 document discerns the positive elements of all these systems, while pointing out some obvious limitations; it is most harsh in its criticism of fundamentalist interpretation, which does not take into account the complexity of biblical texts.

Though it does not explicitly mention it, another biblical problem at this time is that of "inclusive language" - namely, the attempt to change some of the translations of original texts to make them more acceptable to certain groups of people. This has led to great controversy, especially when these groups desire to change the original meaning of biblical texts, particularly those that refer to God as Father.

Many of the magisterial documents, mentioned in the previous sections, were written to guide the work of Catholic scholars in light of the above movements. The need for advanced textual and historical scholarship, the study of literary forms, and, above all, the connection with the living tradition of the Church and her Magisterium have been stressed in many different ways, but very few works in our time have really integrated the above approaches with a biblical theology that is both profound and useful for the life of the Church.