Benjamin Jowett's Pauline Commentary: An Atonement Controversy

Abstract

When Essays and Reviews was published in i860 it generated extensive, and often heated, theological debate throughout the English-speaking world.2 One of the most controversial articles in the collection was that by Benjamin Jowett (fellow and later Master of Balliol College, Oxford), whose essay ,On the Interpretation of Scripture' shocked contemporary orthodoxy by suggesting the Bible be interpreted 'like any other book'.3 Much has been written about the Essays and Reviews furore and Jowett's part in it, but the background to his essay has been largely ignored by theologians and historians alike. It is the contention of this paper that Jowett's essay must be understood within the context of the response to his Pauline Commentary five years before, which was met with a torrent of negative criticism. Jowett's subsequent essay 'On the Interpretation of Scripture' should be read as a riposte to these critics. The account of the turmoil surrounding Jowett's commen tary given by Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, his friends and first biographers, is sketchy, partisan, and littered with errors.4 Subsequent writers, however, such as Geoffrey Faber and Peter Hinchliff, have tended to rely on Abbott and Campbell's version of events.5 A fresh analysis of the episode is therefore necessary. In his Life of Thomas Arnold, issued in 1844, A. P. Stanley (future Dean of Westminster) noted Arnold's intention of under taking a 'Rugby edition' of Paul's Epistles,6 and shortly afterwards he and Jowett began to work together on the New Testament in