Christian Exegetes Research Articles

Origen's Sources of Exegetical Authority: The Construction of an Inspired Exegete in the Pauline Lineage

AbstractIn this paper, I examine several sources of authority to which Origen laid claim as he set about the task of interpreting scripture. On occasion, in both his commentaries and his homilies, Origen provided accounts of his access to three different, though connected sources of authority that contributed to his self-presentation as an expert interpreter. These sources are as follows: 1) participation in the lineage of the apostles, particularly his exegetical role model, Paul. The second source of authority is a result of the first: 2) direct communication from the Logos, whom he understands to be Christ himself, and 3) angelic assistance and engagement with his pastoral exegetical project. In some instances, Origen even claimed to be on par with two of these sources of authority; he can be found claiming to have exegetical abilities similar to Paul's and, on some rare occasions, to have reached the same epistemological level as the angels. This analysis provides us not only with a case study of the kind of self-fashioning and authorising strategies used by elite scriptural exegetes in the first few centuries of the common era, but it also allows us to shift our focus away from exegetical methods towards the figure, personality and social position of the exegete him or herself. From this shift of focus we gain a better appreciation of a topic to which exegetical authors themselves dedicated considerable energy: just who it was that could occupy the office of authoritative Christian exegete and why.

The Absence of the Jewish Usurer Trope in Andalusī Written Sources

ABSTRACT Starting in the twelfth century, usury became one of the immoral activities attributed to the Jews in Christian anti-Jewish propaganda. Jews became so commonly associated with usury in the Latin-Christian world that the word “Jew” itself became a synonym for “usurer”, mainly in the texts of Christian exegetes. However, although this trope spread geographically and over time, it does not seem to have existed in al-Andalus. In Islamic texts, while some examples associate ribā (usury) with Jews, it is equally attributed to Christians. Moreover, the practice of usury does not seem to have been used as an argument against the Jews in Muslim polemical literature. This article focuses on the Andalusī context, showing how the trope of the Jewish usurer did not take root in Muslim Iberia as it did among the Christians of the Peninsula. Of special interest are developments that took place in the Naṣrid kingdom, where several legal opinions (fatāwā) issued between the eighth/fourteenth and the ninth/fifteenth centuries reveal a concern among the population about loans at interest issued by Jews. The Naṣrid jurists, however, appear to have tolerated these interfaith activities.

The Waters above the Firmament: An Exemplary Case of Faith-Reason Conflict

The Waters above the Firmament: An Exemplary Case of Faith-Reason Conflict

Melchizedek and the Eucharist? Rediscovering Eucharistic interpretations of the bread and wine in Genesis 14

The strange Melchizedek pericope in Gen 14:18–20 garners much attention from scholars seeking the function of the enigmatic priest of the Most-High God. Most scholars brush past the mention of the bread and wine Melchizedek gives to Abram and overlook the early Christian exegetes of Genesis 14 who consider this bread and wine as a preview of the Eucharist found in the body and blood of Christ. This essay seeks to illuminate three of these early Christian authors’ exegeses of Gen 14:18–20 as integral to the historical understanding of the Eucharist. Moreover, this essay seeks to situate Gen 14:18–20 as part of the traditional understanding of the Eucharist and proposes that it should be rediscovered by Baptists.

Explanationes in Esaiam of St. Jerome. The Outline of its Genesis and Method

The article surveys Explanationes in Esaiam of St. Jerome. The circumstances of the genesis of such a work, as well as the analysis carried out on it confirm – as customary to St. Jerome – the great veneration towards the Bible, especially in its original language. His exegetical approach is featured by a detailed and keen linguistic analysis; by a careful interpretation of the text; by a clear and consistent hermeneutics and by a reconstruction of its history. A striking element is represented by a strong resemblance to the exegetical methods carried out nowadays, highlighting the value of the inspired text and maintaining its historical and semantic dimensions. St. Jerome aimed at creating an exegetical as well as theological and cultural patrimony for future Christian exegetes.

Origen the Sophist: Anti-Sophistic Polemic in Porphyry’s Contra Christianos

Abstract Making use of Beatrice Wyss’ “pattern of the disparagement of sophists” for heuristic purposes, this paper argues that the depictions of Christian exegetes and scholars in a fragment of Porphyry’s lost work Contra Christianos (fr. 39 Harnack/fr. 6F. Becker) contain literary elements of ad hominem attacks which were used in Greek anti-sophistic polemic. Porphyry’s allusive language allows for the conclusion that he aimed specifically at casting Origen in the role of a sophist. This hitherto unnoticed component of Porphyry’s polemic against the Christians sheds light on how Platonists in the third century viewed Christian intellectuals through a Platonic lens in order to secure their identity against a stereotypical opponent which had ultimately been created by Plato himself. Thus, in Porphyry’s view, Christians are, as it were, new foes with old familiar faces.

Book Review: Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference edited by Ryan Szpiech

Ryan Szpiech, ed. Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean , New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. 329. $55; ISBN 978-0-8232-6462-9. Ryan Szpiech’s volume contains thirteen essays on different aspects of medieval exegesis in the context of religious disputation, polemic, and co-existence. Some essays focus on the points of intersection between exegetical traditions, others on specific polemics, and still others on individual authors’ strategies in negotiating conversion, disputation, or coexistence. The essays are grouped into four thematic sections. The first section, “Strategies of Reading on the Borders of Islam,” contains essays on individual Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors writing in the Islamicate world and how they negotiate the relationship between the three exegetical traditions. Sarah Stroumsa, in “The Father of Many Nations: Abraham in al-Andalus” (29-39), presents two Andalusi views of Abraham as a paragon of the scientist. Both draw on material from outside the religious tradition of the author; the Muslim Ibn Masarra uses ideas from Jewish mysticism of Abraham as a bearer of special knowledge, while the Jew Maimonides borrows Islamic historiographical traditions of Abraham as a man of science. Sidney Griffith’s “Ibn al-Mahrumah’s Notes in Ibn Kammunah’s Examination of the Three Religions : The Issue of the Abrogation of Mosaic Law” (40-57) is a fascinating study of a polemic study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam authored by a Christian exegete and glossed by a Jewish scholar. They provide two different views (Jewish and Christian) on the question of the abrogation of Mosaic law as a basis for Christian theology. In “Al-Biqa’i seen through Reuchlin: Reflections on the Islamic relationship with the Bible” (58-70), Walid …

Annaeus Cornutus et la tradition allégorique stoïcienne : signification, sources et impact

The Roman Stoic Cornutus, who lived in the age of Nero, is the heir of an ancient and rich Stoic allegorical tradition applied to all aspects of traditional religion: literary myths, cultic epithets and attributes, and even iconographical representations of deities. Allegoresis (allegorical exegesis) was applied in antiquity to culturally and religiously authoritative texts. It was mainly practiced by “pagan” philosophers like Stoics and Middle and Neoplatonists and by philosophically minded Hellenistic Jewish and Christian exegetes, who read Scripture allegorically.Cornutus offers an excellent example of mythological allegoresis in his handbook of Greek theology. For each divinity, from Ouranos to Hades, Cornutus provides an allegorico-etymological interpretation of its names and epithets, its attributes, aspects of its myths and rituals, etc. Physical allegory (Zeus represents the ether, Hera the air, etc.) is prevalent, although there are also examples of ethical and historical exegeses. Special attention is demanded by Cornutus’ programmatic assertion—analysed below—that “The ancients were not people of no account, but they were also able to understand the nature of the cosmos and had the ability to philosophise on it by means of symbols and enigmata” (35). The ancient were nothing less than philosophers, since they were endowed with the understanding of the cosmos, of what exists. What they expressed allegorically are philosophical truths. Philosophical allegoresis interprets their expressions and finds philosophical tenets therein. Cornutus was strongly influenced by Chrysippus, Apollodorus of Athens, and Crates of Mallus, while Seneca, who was a Stoic but no allegorist, probably polemicised with Cornutus.Stoic allegoresis, as practiced by the Stoics Cornutus and Chaeremon roughly at the same time, later influenced not only the so-called Middle Platonists, but also the Christian Platonist Origen. Origen seems to have applied allegoresis not only to the Bible, like Philo and Clement before him, but also to Plato’s dialogues and myths. All these allegorisers aimed at finding deeper meanings and philosophical truths in traditional accounts, thereby rescuing them from accusations of superficiality or impiety. The goal was to find in ancient poets and other expressions of traditional religion, as well as in Scripture, meanings “worthy of the divine.” Remarkable structural similarities between the Stoic allegorical tradition inherited by Cornutus and Origen’s allegoresis will be pointed out.

“Let the Waters Be Gathered Together, and Let the Dry Land Appear”: Sixteenth-Century Exegeses of Genesis 1.9–10 in Context

Building on both Christian scriptures and Aristotelian notions of the four elements, many patristic, medieval, and sixteenth-century Christians held that water could and perhaps should cover the whole earth. Christian and Jewish exegetes from Basil the Great and into the sixteenth century discussed the dry land’s existence in their commentaries on Genesis 1.9–10, arguing that its existence was either natural, preternatural, or a supernatural act of God. Analyzing patristic, medieval and sixteenth-century exegeses of these biblical verses, this article explores how these Christian and Jewish exegetes categorized water’s failure to flood the earth. It argues that the possibilities for characterizing water’s behavior expanded greatly in the sixteenth century. Whereas patristic and medieval authors tended to claim that the natural order God had established during the process of creation could account for water’s failure to submerge the earth, sixteenth-century exegetes offered a wide variety of categorizations, arguing that water’s behavior was natural, preternatural, supernatural, a wonder, or even a miracle. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on sixteenth-century cosmographical models, this paper argues that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sea voyages and encounters with people living in the Southern Hemisphere might have led these sixteenth-century exegetes to reexamine the categories as they did.

Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI and Thomas Aquinas by Matthew J. Ramage

Reviewed by: Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI and Thomas Aquinas by Matthew J. Ramage Christopher T. Baglow Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI and Thomas Aquinas by Matthew J. Ramage (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), vii + 303 pp. Fifty years ago, the German Jesuit and exegete Norbert Lohfink bemoaned the rumor that the fathers of the Second Vatican Council were considering removing the cursing psalms from the breviary, asking if such a move “might not be throwing the baby out with the bath water.” His fear was confirmed when Psalms 58, 83 and 109 were omitted from the psalter cycle because of “a certain psychological difficulty.”1 Despite the specification of the doctrine of inerrancy as pertaining to truth “for the sake of our salvation” in Dei Verbum §11, as well as the doctrinal commitment of Dei Verbum §12 to the necessity of a holistic reading of the biblical text in the light of Sacred Tradition, this pastoral decision regarding the Divine Office seems to indicate a lack of magisterial confidence that a proper interpretation of these psalms could be readily put into practice among those praying the official prayer of the Church. [End Page 707] This gap between conciliar teaching and application has become a hallmark of post-Vatican II biblical interpretation, which has been marked, on the whole, by a radical instability in which the use of modern methods of analysis and the hermeneutic of faith are rarely integrated. Current attempts at interpretation often swing wildly from one to the other, from historical-critical homilies that never seem to reach the point of preaching to strained attempts to domesticate the Bible by reference to one or more controlling concepts that promise to “unlock” it as a perspicuous sourcebook for faith and morals. In this confusion, the really difficult, even demoralizing, passages in the Bible are very often simply overlooked, so much so that Benedict XVI felt it necessary, in his apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini, to encourage scholars and pastors to avoid neglecting these “dark passages” and even “to help all the faithful” to understand them “in the light of the mystery of Christ” (§42). In response to this call, Matthew J. Ramage undertakes an encounter with the “dark passages” of the Bible and does so with candor, depth, and profound attention to the Catholic tradition of reading Sacred Scripture. His work, the published version of his doctoral dissertation, comprises a thorough synthesis of historical-critical exegesis and dogmatic interpretation that greatly respects and draws upon both approaches, bringing them into a fruitful synthesis that he applies, with great benefit, to some of the most unsettling passages of Sacred Scripture. Ramage introduces his work by expressing his goal: “to elucidate a theology of Scripture” that remains true to Catholic doctrine, but at the same time, contains an “inductive dimension” in which theory is confronted by reality in the historical-critical analysis of “the most difficult texts of Scripture” (3). To this end, he endeavors to wed the perspective of “Method A” exegesis—the patristic and medieval approach that emphasizes the unity and harmony of Sacred Scripture—with the practice of “Method B” exegesis—the unsparing scientific approach of the modern historian that seeks not to unite texts, but to distinguish them as products of unique human authors writing in specific historical and cultural situations. The product of this union is “Method C exegesis,” which Ramage hopes can synthesize such perspectives by relating unique texts through attention to development in light of the Catholic Faith, understood as the mature fruit of this development, never compromising, but carefully nuancing the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy. These doctrines serve the Method C exegete not as rigid confines that commit the exegete to obscurantism, [End Page 708] nor as a substitute for encountering the Bible as a historian. Instead, they comprise the modus vivendi that enables the Christian exegete to have the courage and confidence to be unsparingly historical, to deal honestly with imperfect and even demoralizing passages as representing not themselves, but as one stage of a movement toward Christ. In the words of Benedict XVI, quoted by Ramage...

Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts by Susanna Drake (review)

Reviewed by: Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts by Susanna Drake Carly Daniel-Hughes Susanna Drake Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 Pp. 173. $55.00 Slandering the Jew traces the production of a stereotype: the sexually degenerate Jew. In this revised dissertation, Drake analyzes representations of Jews as sexually perverse, effeminate, and dangerously sexually aggressive as a “topos” that featured in Christian writings from the first to the fifth centuries (2). A lucid and sophisticated study, this work builds on recent discussions of how early Christian discourses of alterity and deployments of sexual slander contributed to Christian self-definition. Drake follows other late antique historians (notably Daniel Boyarin and Virginia Burrus) in applying post-colonial theories—in this case hybridity and stereotype—to explore Christian representations of Jews as an assertion and repetition of difference precisely where “border-lines” were least secure. Drake argues that sexual slander, with its imagery of “permeability, penetration, and adulteration” (54), enabled Christians to figure Jews as Other, thereby shoring up Christian subjectivity. Perhaps her most important contribution is establishing how this discursive production intensified when Christian claims to Jewish scriptures coupled with their assertions of ascetic identity. Chapter One begins with Paul, who contributes indirectly to the stereotype that she outlines. It is not the sexual predilections of Jews, but of Gentiles, that he uses to enjoin sexual purity on his Christ-believing audience. Informed by New Paul scholars like Stanley Stowers and Caroline Johnson Hodge, Drake reads Paul as utilizing Jewish stereotypes about licentious nations, in combination with Greek and Roman moral discourse, to construct his virtuous community. Later Christian writers, she argues, reworked Paul’s rhetoric of sexual in combination with his dichotomy between flesh and spirit to support their supersessionist claims to Jewish scripture (83). Drake completes the chapter with a survey of second-century materials to demonstrate that, while attested (e.g., the Dialogue with Trypho), sexual slander was neither inspired by Paul nor a regular feature of anti-Jewish polemic in this period. Origen of Alexandria—the subject of Chapter Two—did utilize Paul’s rhetoric, however, to advance the image of a sexually deviant and hermeneutically challenged Jew. The “Jew” provided a foil by which the church father authenticated both the allegorical reading practices of early Christians and their ascetic identity. Helpfully, Drake does not attempt to reconcile Origen’s characterization of Jewish interpretation with his congenial interactions with Jewish scholars themselves, as others have done. Guided by post-colonial approaches, she argues that the “Jew” in Origen’s texts occupies an ambivalent place, at once “desired and disavowed” (8; 57). For Origen, the “Jew” indicated the constant presence of the literal (and with it the carnal) that threatened to undermine the ascetic Christian exegete. Chapter Three treats early Christian interpretations of the book of Susanna as it appears in the Greek version by Theodotion. Drake maps a hermeneutical trajectory of early Christian readings that begins with Hippolytus’s Commentary on [End Page 589] Daniel, includes visual representations of the narrative from the Catacombs, and focuses primarily on Origen’s Letter to Africanus. In these readings the lascivious elders commonly stand in for the Jews, and Susanna, the chaste maiden, for the Christians. Drake argues that early Christians seized upon gendered implications of this story to establish Jewish-Christian difference. For Origen, the narrative offered another opportunity to fuse chaste sexuality with allegorical interpretation, and perverse sexuality with literal reading. This study closes with an analysis of John Chrysostom’s eight homilies Adversus Iudaeos, with their imagery of Jews as pseudo-men and prostitutes, and of Judaizers (those who attend synagogues and observe Jewish festivities) as predators who easily beguile Christian women. Relying on Homi Bhabha’s conception of stereotype, Drake argues that Chrysostom’s construction of the licentious Jew and Judaizers represents an “anxious” repetition of difference (97), revealing (and perhaps also supporting) the instability of Jewish and Christian identities and communal borders in late antique Antioch. Drake’s conclusion asks us to consider Christian violence enacted on Jews in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries as a “material effect” of...

Straight Reading: Shame and the Normal in Epiphanius’s Polemic against Origen

Straight Reading:Shame and the Normal in Epiphanius’s Polemic against Origen Blossom Stefaniw Epiphanius was a vociferous advocate of a totalized, univocal, and normative version of Christianity. How does his agenda of defining and adjudicating the order of things unfold when applied to questions of reading and interpretation? His sexualized polemic against Origen and Origenist textuality shows that a debate that is ostensibly about hermeneutics mobilizes notions of shame and deviance in order to define legitimate imaginings of where truth is and what sort of meaning can be found in the Bible. The textualities of Epiphanius and Origen manifest fundamentally conflicting notions of how truth relates to the text of Scripture, to the physical world, and to bodies. For Origen, Scripture refers to an intelligible realm outside of time and beyond sense experience and the limits of embodied reason or the written word. For Epiphanius, however, the religious truth founded in Scripture can and should be connected to human bodies, and to the physical world. It is within range of common sense and plain language. Arguing between poles of the normal and the deviant, Epiphanius attacks Origenist textuality on three fronts. In the Panarion, Origen is represented as sexually deviant. The deviance of his textuality follows from that. Epiphanius also affirms a textuality that he portrays as normal and commonsensical. He reads in an imagined world where human bodies remain intact and consistent. He therefore cannot accept the indeterminacy of the body suggested by Origen’s discussion of the resurrection. Epiphanius valorizes physical reality and rejects interpretations oriented to a higher noetic realm as a perversion of the text. Describing this conflict in terms of literal vs. allegorical interpretation fails to account for the ideological aspect of exegesis. Instead, this article argues that what Epiphanius promotes is straight reading. [End Page 413] Origen of Alexandria lived from 185 to 254. In this period, the state did not recognize Christianity as a legitimate and legal religion and persons discovered to be Christians were intermittently subjected to torture, execution, or disenfranchisement. The communities of Christians spread throughout the Roman Empire described themselves as belonging to a third race or as having their citizenship in heaven. Because of their limited numbers and because of finding themselves at odds with the law and with standards of decency and good comportment, Christians self-identified as aliens, transforming the stigmatization of their identity through public ordeal into ecstasies of martyrdom.1 Epiphanius of Salamis, born roughly three generations after Origen’s death, was among the first cohort of citizens to grow up in a world where Christianity was legal and the emperor himself was a Christian. Dying in 403, however, he did not live to see a world in which the apparatus for exercising coercive force in order to define and impose adherence to doctrines established as constituting right belief had reached its zenith. Epiphanius strongly favored efforts toward the totalization of Christianity and contributed to them significantly through his writings.2 In the Panarion in particular, Epiphanius undertook to make a comprehensive survey of what exactly everyone else was doing wrong. Since Christian doctrine necessarily had to be argued from Scripture, efforts at resolving and defining right doctrine in a manner conducive to totalizing ambitions required a hermeneutic that could be relied upon to produce clear and unambiguous evidence for one doctrinal position and against another. When Epiphanius, in the Panarion and elsewhere, turns his attention to the first great Christian exegete, Origen, he is confronted with a hermeneutic that is entirely unsuited to totalizing efforts. Origen’s way of interpreting Scripture allows for things to remain unknown. It accepts flux and ambiguity both in the text and in human embodiment, and is not much invested in the physical world. Thus Epiphanius’s drive for a form of Christianity that is sorted, which is univocal and totalizable, is offended, and, given the strong and growing heritage of Origenist textuality in his own day, he [End Page 414] must undermine Origen as a legitimate authority as well as undermining the legitimacy of his way of reading. From Exegesis to Textuality Late fourth- and fifth-century debates about what constitutes correct exegesis might be understood as...

Philo as Origen’s Declared Model: Allegorical and Historical Exegesis of Scripture

After on overview of Origen’s relations to Rabbinic exegesis, I turn to the relations between Origen and Hellenistic Judaism. I investigate how Philo and Origen use the instrument of allegory to read the Bible in the light of philosophy, but both of them react against a sheer allegorization of Scripture, which existed both in the Jewish allegorizers who preceded Philo and in ‘Gnostic’ Christian allegorizers. Even Philo and Origen, however, thought (unlike subsequent Rabbinic and Christian exegetes) that the Genesis account of creation had a special status and required to be interpreted not literally, but only allegorically. I argue for a Platonic influence on this conception and point out how Origen emphasized the Jewish antecedents to his own philosophical allegoresis of Scripture. For Origen, Philo the Jew was a much better exegete and theologian than the Christian “heretics” were.

Inspiracje judeohelleńską egzegezą Filona Aleksandryjskiego w pismach św. Hieronima

Jerome, like most of the early Christian exegetes (Origen, Didymus the Blind, Hilarius of Poitiers, Ambrose, Augustine), respected Philo of Alexandria as a spe­cialist in the field of spiritual exegesis of the Old Testament and called him vir doctissimus Iudaeorum. In his letters and biblical commentaries Jerome used the knowledge on the liturgical vestments of the high priest and their symbolism that can be found in the writings of Philo. However, Jerome probably didn’t use direct­ly his biblical commentaries, but took their content through the works of Origen, in which Philo's ideas have been christianized. The admiration for the person and work of Philo, which can be compared only to that showed in the East by Didymus the Blind, resulted in St. Jerome a certain lack of criticism. In De viris inlustribus Jerome too hastily considered Philo as a thinker deserved for the development of Christianity and attributed to him the works of which he was not the author.

Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians Throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer (review)

Reviewed by: Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians Throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer Zev Garber Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians Throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer, edited by Franklin T. Harkins. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 476 pp. $50.00. Transforming Relations is a collection of insightful essays that speak on the interaction between Jews and Christians in antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern era. It honors the important work of Michael A. Signer, the Adams Professor of Jewish Thought and Culture at the University of Notre Dame from 1992 until his death in 2009. The chapters treat various aspects of the Jewish-Christian relationship through the centuries, including the centrality of and departure from scriptural law in antiquity, reflections on Christianity in the Talmud and Midrashim, medieval Christian hermeneutics and Hebraism, and the appreciation of Judaism in modern Christianity. The essays focus on issues that permeate Signer's own scholarly work, namely, that shared scriptural texts and commentary serve simultaneously as a point of convergence and divergence for Jews and Christians, and that meaningful contemporary interfaith Jewish-Christian dialogue recognizes similarity and difference by participants who draw from separate but equal streams of monotheistic traditions. To honor the memory and work of Michael Signer, editor Franklin T. Harkins has assembled a cadre of friends and colleagues, admirers all of the honoree and his contribution to scholarship. The book's front matter contains [End Page 162] a dedicatory poem in memory of Michael by Cyril O'Regan, a foreword by John van Engen, and an introduction by Franklin T. Harkins on Signer's study of historical Jewish-Christian exegesis. The volume is divided in two parts. Essays in Part One ("Ancient and Medieval Perspectives: Exegesis, Polemic, and Cultural Exchange") begin with Arnold Band's personal reminiscence of the professor-student relationship and the seeds of textual methodology planted at UCLA in the early 1960s. David Novak focuses on the centrality of Torah from Sinai and its historical role in the parting of the ways and dialogical healing between Pharasaic Judaism and Pauline Christianity; and Israel Jacob Yuval speaks of the merits of "parallelmania," not polemics and apologetics, when early Christian texts mix with rabbinic literature. The next essays deal with personalities and schools of Jewish and Christian exegetes and teaching in twelfth-century northern France. Grover A. Zinn discusses the multiple ways that Psalms affected the spiritual life and theological education affecting the canons of the Parisian Abbey of St. Peter. By dissecting the theoretical framework of Hugh of St. Victor, Dale Coulter shows interpretive similarities (plain meaning, history connected to narratives affixed to events, word and syntax interpretation) between Victorines and their Jewish counterparts. Likewise, Boyd Taylor Coolman and Franklin T. Harkins engage in similar activity in researching Hugh's students, Richard of St. Victor and Andrew of St. Victor, respectively. All three chapters reflect pivotal texts that exemplify borrowing, polemics, and advancement. Deborah L. Goodwin contrasts the literal and allegorical approaches of Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) and Peter Comestor in reading the narrative of Rebekah's children, Esau and Jacob (Gen 25-27) Rashbam's commentaries on Lamentations and the Song of Songs is the focus of Sara Yapet's chapter. E. Ann Matte elaborates on the overlapping eschatological layers of the Wandering Jew in medieval Christianity (killers of the Lord, testifiers to his Second Coming and fulfilled in ecclesiastical conversion). Leslie Smith concludes that the Postilla in totem bibliam (commentary on the whole Bible) is the collaborate scholarship of the Dominican master and administrator Hugh of St. Cher's and Mendicant scholars. Arjo Vanderjagt posits that the mastery of Hebrew by Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489) was not for dialogue but for the conversion of Jews and to enhance piety and devotion by Christians to Jesus. Finally, Jeremy Cohen probes a story narrated by Solomon ibn Verga in his Shevet Yehudah that speaks of the nefarious charge of blood libel in sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal; the price to overcome was separation in body, space, and Jewish-Chritian scholarly encounter. Part Two presents a variety of ways that Jews and Christians encounter and entangle in...

The Book of Leviticus Interpreted as Jewish Community

This article addresses an essay, published in 2001 by John Van Engen, entitled "Ralph of Flaix: The Book of Leviticus Interpreted as Christian Community.” Ralph’s voluminous commentary, composed and published in the mid-twelfth century, aimed, in Van Engen’s words, at “refuting Jewish arguments” about the biblical book and the nature of the levitical law, particularly as these arguments might influence young Christian clerics who were “fascinated and troubled by a close reading of the biblical text.”The present article examines three rabbinic commentaries on Leviticus roughly contemporary with Ralph, those of Rashi, Rashbam and R. Joseph Bekhor Shor. Through examining the “close reading” through which these three exegetes interpreted specific biblical texts, the article considers whether or not they presented what might be considered as “the Book of Leviticus Interpreted as Jewish Community” and as such conveyed what may have been the types of arguments with which Ralph was in conversation.The article does not attempt to provide a direct correspondence between specific Jewish and Christian exegetes. Rather, the article suggests that the content and form of 12th century Jewish and Christian biblical exegesis bespeak a type of conversation among those using the literary genre of “commentary writing,” and that it is possible to gain an understanding of the contours of that conversation through analysis of the commentaries they wrote. Additionally, the article examines ways in which medieval Jewish exegetes may have advanced arguments in their commentaries that were intended to sustain the Jewish community in their observances and belief structures in the presence of Christian hegemony.

Interpreting the Bible as Bible

Abstract Modern historical criticism has disengaged understanding of the Bible from the long Christian tradition of interpretation, severing the bond between text and reader, between Scripture and the living church tradition. As a consequence, patristic and medieval interpreters are dismissed as serious commentators on the Holy Scriptures. This essay offers examples from classical Christian exegetes that illustrate how reading the Scriptures from within rather than against tradition deepens our understanding of the Bible.

Interpreting the Bible as Bible

Abstract Modern historical criticism has disengaged understanding of the Bible from the long Christian tradition of interpretation, severing the bond between text and reader, between Scripture and the living church tradition. As a consequence, patristic and medieval interpreters are dismissed as serious commentators on the Holy Scriptures. This essay offers examples from classical Christian exegetes that illustrate how reading the Scriptures from within rather than against tradition deepens our understanding of the Bible.

Otredad, alterización y apropiación en el discurso cultural del primer Cristianismo: Ambrosio de Milán y la “reescritura” cristiana del Tanaḵ

This paper identifies and analyses the cultural dynamics behind the conscious appropriation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanaḵ) by the first Christian exegetes. To this end, it carefully examines a valuable and surprisingly «modern» testimony, provided by Ambrose of Milan (Expositio psalmi CXVIII 21, 10-12), together with other complementary texts from both the Christian and the Jewish sides (Augustine of Hippo, Midraš Pesiqta Rabbati, etc.). Finally, it proposes a general model of interpretation for the complex relationships of Christianity to its two cultures of origin (Jewish and Greco-Roman). This model is based on the key concepts of otherness, otherization and appropriation, which are suggested to be crucial for our understanding of early Christianity and Late Antique culture.

Calvin's Commentary on the Psalter: Christian or Jewish?

This article explores John Calvin's debt to preceding Jewish exegetes on the Psalter and seeks to determine how explicitly Christian his interpretation of the Psalms was. To assist in meeting this aim, use is made of the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi as a conversation partner. A survey of Calvin's commentary on the Psalms helps to clarify his method of approach with respect to earlier Christian and Jewish exposition of the Psalter. When it came to Jewish exegesis of the Psalms, Calvin was neither uncritical nor hypercritical. Comparison with the exegetical efforts of Rashi shows that Calvin was no prisoner to Jewish opinion. Nor did he accept a view just because it was that of a Christian exegete. The detection of a messianic connection required some trigger, one trigger being apostolic use of a psalm. Calvin's focus on the historical context of the psalms was not something derived from Jewish exegetes but the result of his humanist training and inclination. His first impulse was to relate a psalm to its historical setting (usually the life experience of David) derived from clues in the psalm itself. On the other hand, Calvin saw no difficulty in a psalm having reference to David and at the same time being a prediction of Christ.