Christian Biblical Interpretation Research Articles

Revisiting John Chrysostom’s Interpretation of the Relationship between Abram and Lot and Their Separation in LXX Genesis 12–13

This article revisits and examines more closely John Chrysostom’s (ca. 349–407 CE) characterisation of Lot—specifically his relationship with Abram and their separation in LXX Gen 12–13—as an exemplar to think about early Christian social relations. This study forms part of a larger project investigating Chrysostom’s use of Old Testament exemplars in his preaching and moral instruction. It is shown that the formulation of early Christian social ideals was mediated by means of scriptural exemplars like Lot. Rickett’s (2019) descriptive analysis of Chrysostom’s reconstruction of Lot’s character in Gen 13 is a useful trajectory for this study. However, while Rickett explains in detail what Chrysostom thought about Lot’s separation from Abram (and how this differs or concurs with other interpreters), he does not discuss why Chrysostom reconstructs the character of Lot in the way he does. This is the purpose of this study—to ask more pertinent questions on why Chrysostom wants to safeguard Lot’s reputation and, more generally, why he was such a useful exemplar in early Christian biblical interpretation.

Bogdan Gabriel Bucur. Scripture Re-envisioned: Christophanic Exegesis and the Making of a Christian Bible. BAC 13.

Bogdan Gabriel Bucur. <i>Scripture Re-envisioned: Christophanic Exegesis and the Making of a Christian Bible.</i> BAC 13.

The Book of Tobit in early Christianity: Greek and Latin interpretations from the 2nd to the 5th century CE

This article examines the early Christian reception of the apocryphal book Tobit, focusing on Greek and Latin Christian interpretations from the 2nd to the 5th century CE. The study asks: how did early Christians read Tobit and for what purposes? The article provides an overview of how and why Tobit ended up in the Christian Bible, whether canonical or apocryphal. It then examines how the figures of Tobit and his son, Tobias, function as a moral exemplum in early Christianity, especially related to almsgiving and financial management, burials and the care of the dead, marriage and parenthood, prayer, the suffering and endurance of Tobit, and the role of Tobit in the Christian understanding of angels. The article demonstrates that Tobit had a rich and diverse reception in early Christian biblical interpretation, especially in the Latin church of the West. Contribution: This article investigates the historical reception of the apocryphal Book of Tobit in early Christian thought. The focus is especially on the varieties of thought regarding Tobit. The article provides an overview of how and why Tobit ended up in the Christian Bible, whether canonical or apocryphal. It then examines how the figures of Tobit and his son, Tobias, function as moral exempla.

Patristic and Early Christian Biblical Exegesis: A New Tool for Historians, Theologians, and Philosophers

AbstractThe Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation (2019) should be viewed as a definitive new tool for understanding the contextual concerns, literary genres, and shifting ideological principles that generated Early Christian biblical exegesis. This review essay explains why the new Handbook is distinct among tools of its kind, and highlights some of its major benefits for encountering and engaging the ancient resources of Christian theologies on their own terms. This collection of essays may be fruitfully used to nuance and expand contemporary trends in hermeneutical and analytic theology (This research is made possible by Research Foundation – Flanders [F.W.O.]).

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation. Edited by Paul M. Blowers and Peter W. Martens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xxx + 754 pp. $155.00 hardcover.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation. Edited by Paul M. Blowers and Peter W. Martens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xxx + 754 pp. $155.00 hardcover. - Volume 89 Issue 1

Scripture and Christian Formation in Origen's Fourth Homily on Psalm 77(78)

In order to gain a better understanding of the theology behind early Christian biblical interpretation and preaching, we must go beyond mere intellectual factors, and investigate the phenomena that informed those practices. One such cultural phenomenon that can help us with such endeavors is the use or role of texts within communities. Early Christian biblical exegesis, especially as performed in the act of preaching, was intimately linked to a community's identity formation. Brian Stock employed the term "textual communities" to encapsulate how emerging communities were formed around particular understandings of texts. This paper will apply this theoretical model to Origen's Fourth Homily on Psalm 77(78), in order to determine its utility in understanding Origen's preaching activity. I will show how Origen's concern to alter the behavior of his Caesarean audience informed his interpretation of the "manna" from Psalm 77. In conclusion, this model provides us with valuable insights into Origen's attempt to form a Christian culture in the third-century church.

The Song of Songs and the Fashioning of Identity in Early Latin Christianity by Karl Shuve, and: Out of the Cloister: Scholastic Exegesis of the Song of Songs, 1100–1250 by Suzanne LaVere

Reviewed by: The Song of Songs and the Fashioning of Identity in Early Latin Christianity by Karl Shuve, and: Out of the Cloister: Scholastic Exegesis of the Song of Songs, 1100–1250 by Suzanne LaVere Timothy Robinson (bio) The Song of Songs and the Fashioning of Identity in Early Latin Christianity. By Karl Shuve. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 256pp. $105.00 Out of the Cloister: Scholastic Exegesis of the Song of Songs, 1100–1250. By Suzanne LaVere. Leiden: Brill Publishing. 196pp. $135.00 The central role of the Song of Songs in the history of Christian spirituality and mysticism is well known. The history of allegorical interpretation (Bernard McGinn referred to it as "the traditional reading") has been the subject of much scholarly attention over the last century. Biblical commentators feel compelled to include some kind of survey of this history before turning to their attention to the text itself. The homilies and commentaries of Origen and Bernard of Clairvaux have been the subject of countless studies through the years. More recently Gregory of Nyssa's work on the Song has gained the attention of theologians. E. Ann Matter, Ann Astell, Denys Turner and others have produced widely read surveys of the Song's role in ancient and medieval Christian spirituality, and Bernard McGinn's ongoing multi-volume history of Christian mysticism provides excellent analyses of how many of the individual figures included in his work treated the Song. In recent decades, many feminist and queer Biblical scholars have turned to pre-critical and mystical readings of the Song as, perhaps, offering insights that might produce generative and liberating readings of the text in a post-modern era. In other words, the ancient and medieval commentary traditions—especially from the West—have been fertile fields of study for understanding Christian biblical interpretation, Christian mysticism, monastic spirituality and exegesis, and the role of the erotic in Christian spirituality. One might wonder, given the vast amount of scholarship on this subject, whether this well plowed ground can yield any more harvest. The two books under review here demonstrate that this tradition remains a fertile field. While Karl Shuve and Suzanne LaVere address a commentary tradition that has been well studied, each author challenges some conventional wisdom established in past scholarship regarding the allegorical reception of the Song of Songs in Christian spirituality, and each offers provocative new readings of the material they address. Shuve offers a fresh account of the prominence of the Song of Songs in medieval Christian spirituality by focusing on how ancient Latin writers treated the Song. This approach challenges the widely assumed predominance of Origen's influence on the trajectory of interpretation. Questioning what he characterizes as a reduction of Western Song of Songs interpretation to "a history of the transmission of Origen's thought" (2), Shuve does not deny the great Alexandrian exegete's influence. However, he argues that there were other influences as well, and that many early Latin treatments of the Song did not appropriate the affective / mystical framework that sees the Song as an expression of the passionate love between Christ and the soul that has become the prevailing perception of its history. Instead, they used the Song to establish Christian identity, marking the boundaries of the church in one interpretive thread, and marking the boundaries of the ascetic body in another. One of Shuve's valuable insights is that Song reception scholarship has too often limited itself to formal commentaries on the Song. Since there are few extant [End Page 114] commentaries from the period in question here (the third and fourth centuries), this approach obscures a prominent strain of Song interpretation that was transmitted through numerous citations and allusions in other types of literature: letters, polemical treatises, catechetical works, instructions about liturgy and the sacraments, etc. The authors Shuve treats include Cyprian of Carthage, Ambrose, Augustine, Tyconius, Gregory of Elvira, and Jerome. None of these authors figure prominently—if at all—in the standard roll calls of Song of Songs interpretation history. This approach is significant and welcome in that it makes room for a fuller account of the role of the Song in the history of Christian spirituality, theology...

Christians Preparing for Conversation: Jewish–Christian Relations

This article suggests that Christians need to prepare for Jewish–Christian conversation by cultivating a better knowledge of Jewish traditions and by critically examining Christian doctrine and biblical interpretation to rid Christian language and attitudes of anti-Judaism. To do the latter, Christians do not have to give up core beliefs of the Christian faith.

“Exegetical Torture” in Early Christian Biblical Interpretation: The Case of Origen of Alexandria

This essay engages Page duBois’s work on torture and truth to contextualize a curious logic in Origen of Alexandria’s exegetical method. That logic insisted on “torturing” (Greek, basanos) the text in the style of a forensic investigation. From Thucydides to Galen and Origen, this vocabulary of exegetical torture figured texts as uncooperative witnesses in a situation familiar to ancient readers from the courtroom and in their own households. This agonistic paradigm of torture and truth offers the best interpretative context in which to read Origen’s call for the basanos – a metaphor very much alive in his work and world. The study concludes by connecting exegesis and martyrology as discourses in early Christian literary culture, which share the same fundamentally agonistic rhetoric of cross-examination.

Creation and a Theology of Humanness

This article seeks a Christian biblical interpretation for a theology of humanness based on the two Creation stories and the Garden of Eden narrative in Genesis chapters 1–3. The presentation serves as a corrective to the notion that Creation was perfect and that suffering (or mental illness/disability) is caused by the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The author seeks to develop a theology of humanness which engages Genesis 1–3 with the work of David Pailin's book, A Gentle Touch: From a Theology of Handicap to a Theology of Human Being, and the work of Douglas John Hall in God and Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross. Particular attention will be given to the conditions of Creation addressed by Hall, which are temptation, anxiety, loneliness, and limits—iImplying that to be human is to experience temptation, anxiety, loneliness, and limits. God, however, becomes human in Jesus Christ to embrace humanness. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God restores the relationship God had with Adam and Eve at Creation, so that Christ is present in the Holy Spirit working in the lives of human beings to bring new life out of death.

John Milbank and Biblical Hermeneutics: the End of the Historical‐Critical Method?

It is perhaps ironic that a methodology still convinced of its radical iconoclasm and progressive nature should at the same time be regarded as critically backward, a by‐product of a disappearing philosophy. Such a view of the historical‐critical method is held by John Milbank who argues that because of its dependence upon heretical philosophies that affirm the ontological autonomy of a world without reference to or participation in God, it should be confined to theological history. This essay will argue that Milbank's challenge ought to be taken seriously by Christian biblical interpreters and suggests that historical‐critical study, in the form criticised by Milbank, needs to be rejected. Milbank exposes the philosophical bankruptcy of the method from a Christian perspective; nevertheless, Milbank overstretches himself. His rejection of the historical‐critical method results in a hermeneutic that has no place for a biblical text's historical particularity and sense. Because of this, he is left subsuming historic texts into the regula fidei of his philosophical meta‐narrative, whether they fit such a move or not. This is particularly the case with Milbank's treatment of biblical texts, which, it shall be argued, operates as a refusal of history and a refusal of the particularity and alterity of the text. This highlights the need for an historical hermeneutic for Christian biblical interpretation, based on theological presuppositions, which takes the theological value of both historical particularity and the text seriously.

Paul, the Corinthians, and the birth of Christian hermeneutics

Preface 1. The Corinthian diolkos: passageway to early Christian biblical interpretation 2. The agon of Pauline interpretation 3. Anthropological hermeneutics between rhetoric and philosophy 4. The mirror and the veil: hermeneutics of occlusion 5. Invisible signs, singular testimonies: the agon over interpretive criteria 6. Hermeneutical exhaustion and the end(s) of interpretation Bibliography Index.

John Calvin and the Jews: A Problem in Political Theology

Although John Calvin rejected the angry invective of Martin Luther against the Jews, he nevertheless agreed with him that Christian biblical interpretation was a more reliable guide to the mind of the patriarchs in Genesis than the exegesis of Rabbinic Judaism. The Hebrew Bible was therefore properly understood as Christian Scripture and had always been addressed to the Church as well as to ancient Israel.

Word of God or Witness? Issues in Christian Biblical Hermeneutics

This article gives a historical overview of the main issues and problems facing Christian interpreters of the Bible. The Christian understanding of the Bible is influenced by two main factors. On the one hand, Christians believe that God revealed himself and was present in the life, ministry, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, Jesus is the one Word of God. On the other hand, Christians believe that the Bible is inspired Holy Scripture, containing the revelation of God. There is a tension between these two approaches, as one locates the divine revelation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the other in the Holy Book. The article argues that this tension has been a major creative driving force in the history of Christian biblical interpretation. It traces the main strategies with which Christian interpreters have approached the Bible in order to reconcile these two elements, or in which they have allowed one to overrule the other. This will provide an introduction to the key approaches and methods in Christian biblical interpretation.

Juan Luis Segundo and Australian Theology

This essay falls into two parts. In the first there is a brief discussion of the emergence of Liberation Theology in Latin America in 1960s and 1970s, and its challenge to the European and North American academic theology which has dominated the Christian world. The liberation theologians adopted a different methodology, which they saw to be required by the situations of massive injustice and poverty which they found around them. Juan Luis Segundo presented his understanding of the hermeneutical circle, and showed how commitment to the humanisation of the continent leads to new interpretations of Scripture. In the second part of the essy the application of this method to Australian theology is considered. The situation of Aboriginal people is taken as an example. The effect on Aboriginal people of the coming of white settlers raises challenging questions for Christian theology and biblical interpretation.

A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity (review)

Reviewed by: A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity Philip A. Homan Marc Hirshman. A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity. Trans. Batya Stein SUNY Series in Judaica: Hermeneutics, Mysticism, and Religion Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996 Pp. ix + 179. $16.95. Marc Hirshman, professor of midrash and Rabbinics at the University of Haifa and specialist in the study of the Midrash on the book of Ecclesiastes, has written a book which will serve the growing appreciation of scholars for the pre-critical biblical interpretation of the Rabbis and Church Fathers. In this book of fewer than two hundred pages, Hirshman raises the question of “mutual influences and patterns of cross-fertilization” between the Rabbis and Fathers on their interpretations of scripture as well as on the literary forms those interpretations took. Hirshman argues that, although the literary forms in which they communicated their exegeses and the reasons they studied scripture to begin with, differed, the Rabbis and Fathers were not only aware of each other but influenced the ways in which the other read certain biblical texts. Before demonstrating mutual influences in specific rabbinic and patristic texts, Hirshman claims that polemics contributed to the Jewish and Christian study of scripture and asks why the Rabbis and Fathers were polemical and how they were polemical. In chapter one, Hirshman claims that the Rabbis and Church Fathers had not only to contend with pagans as well as with gnostics in their midst but had also to defend against each other their own understanding of the Old Testament. Furthermore, they did so in different forms. The Rabbis confined themselves to the midrashic form of commentary, while the Fathers took advantage of all the forms of Greco-Roman culture available to them. In chapter two, Hirshman describes the reasons for the complexity of the hermeneutical controversy between the Rabbis and the Fathers, who fought over the inheritance of biblical Israel and the Old Testament, including Christianity’s rapid spread among the nations and consequent adoption of numerous languages and literary forms. In chapter three, he briefly treats the implications of the rhetorical characteristics of patristic interpretation in contrast to the midrashic form of rabbinic exegesis, and he sets the methodological parameters for his investigation of specific texts in the rest of the book. Hirshman limits his study of patristic texts to those by the Fathers writing in or near Palestine during the writing of the Mishnah and the Palestinian Talmud. In chapter four, he raises two issues in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, which explicitly quotes Jewish interpretations of scripture. Justin criticizes the Jews’ observance of the commandments; since the elements of nature do not cease on the Sabbath, he claims, God does not observe the commandments. In chapter five, the author examines the rabbinic response in Genesis Rabbah to the kind of questions raised by Justin Martyr. The Rabbis claimed that even God ruled nature within the guidelines set by the Jewish law. In chapter six, Hirshman takes up the second issue in the Dialogue, Justin’s reading the Old Testament as [End Page 316] a prophecy of Christ, by comparing the interpretation of Exodus 17:11, Moses’s guarantee of Israel’s victory over the Amalekites, in the Dialogue to its interpretation in the Mekhilta, a legal midrash on the book of Exodus. The respective interests of the Fathers and Rabbis can be seen clearly in these interpretations, since Justin attributes Israel’s victory to Moses’ making the sign of the cross of Christ, while the Rabbis attribute it to Moses’ pointing to the God who gave Israel the commandments of the Torah. In chapters seven and eight, Hirshman turns to Origen, the compiler of the Hexapla, who also cites Jewish biblical interpretations, but without the polemical overtones of Justin. Origen’s knowledge of Hebrew allows him to perceive deeper meanings in the scripture as well as more easily to interpret one verse in light of another, a method common to the Rabbis. In his homilies on the book of Exodus, he equates the bitterness of the water at Mara in Exodus 15:23–25 with the...

Producing Descent/Dissent: Clement of Alexandria's Use of Filial Metaphors as Intra-Christian Polemic

In the second century, Christians vied with each other to produce an authoritative discourse on Christian identity. Some early Christians deployed historically- and culturally-specific notions of procreation and kinship in their struggles with each other over claims to represent the truth of Christian biblical interpretation, practices, and doctrine. The extant writings of the late second-century Christian author Clement of Alexandria offer a generous range of contexts for exploring the nuances of this practice. This study comprises one facet of a larger investigation into early Christian use of procreative and kinship imagery in discourses about Christian identity in the second century CE.

Nag Hammadi Texts and the Bible: A Synopsis and Index

This volume places in synoptic form parallel texts from Nag Hammadi and from the Bible. This will enable scholars of Coptic Gnosticism, as well as scholars concerned with early Christian biblical interpretation, to make the comparisons necessary to determine relationships and what dependence, if any, there may be between these two bodies of material. This volume should facilitate the discussion concerning the origin, antiquity, and relationship of Gnosticism to Christianity. The volume also contains an extensive bibliography of materials relevant to this topic. Finally, a Scripture index will make it possible for the reader to find quickly any desired passage.