Can Catholicism Validate Jewish Biblical Interpretation?

Jon D Levenson

doi:10.6017/scjr.v1i1.1357

Abstract

This article analyses the Pontifical Biblical Commission's 2001 study, The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible and its significance for Christian-Jewish relations. While praising the study for addressing a large and complex issue, the essay raises some questions about particularity and relativism, elements of supersessionism, and inter-textuality.

Highlights

The document on The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, issued by the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC) in 2001,1 which John R
Childs, who speaks of “the discrete testimony of the Old Testament” and “the discrete testimony of the New Testament” within “theological reflection on the Christian Bible.”[18]. To my mind, untutored in Catholic theology, this does not seem very different from what the PBC proposes in the document under discussion, to be sure, but it does remove the implication that biblical texts can exist and be interpreted in the absence of a larger hermeneutical framework, with various meanings “really present” in the text itself or “hidden there.”
When Christian theology is projected onto the Hebrew Bible, as it is to a large degree in the PBC document, that dialogue can only be stillborn

Summary

Introduction

The document on The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, issued by the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC) in 2001,1 which John R. Childs, who speaks of “the discrete testimony of the Old Testament” and “the discrete testimony of the New Testament” within “theological reflection on the Christian Bible.”[18] To my mind, untutored in Catholic theology, this does not seem very different from what the PBC proposes in the document under discussion, to be sure, but it does remove the implication that biblical texts can exist and be interpreted in the absence of a larger hermeneutical framework, with various meanings “really present” in the text itself or “hidden there.”. Larger question of how the various legitimate senses of scripture are related to each other—a very nettlesome issue for both communities and for anyone, religious or secular, who does not want pluralism to degenerate into relativism If both Jews and Christians can authentically derive spiritual meaning from an understanding of the text that is not peculiar to their own traditions, surely we are entitled to speak of the Tanakh/Old Testament as constituting to a limited degree a bond of commonality between the two communities. Go further and note that the contact is especially strong between Judaism and Roman Catholic Christianity in that both affirm traditio alongside scriptura as a source of truth and must deal with the tension that inevitably results

Projecting Christian Categories onto Judaism

Israel’s Chosenness and the Church’s Particularity

28 This translation is taken from Tanakh

Is Full Validation of the Other’s Interpretation Possible?

Conclusion