The critical study of biblical literature: exegesis and hermeneutics

The development of biblical exegesis and hermeneutics in Christianity

The Reformation period

The English theologian John Colet (c. 1466–1519) broke with medieval scholasticism when he returned from the Continent to Oxford in 1496 and lectured on the Pauline letters, expoundingthe text in terms of its plain meaning as seen in its historical context. The humanist Erasmus (c. 1466–1536) owed to him much of his insight into biblical exegesis. By the successive printed editions of his Greek New Testament (1516 and following), Erasmus made his principal, but not his only, contribution to biblical studies.

Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a voluminous expositor, insisting on the primacy of the literal sense and dismissing allegory as so much rubbish—although he indulged in it himself on occasion. The core of Scripture was to him its proclamation of Christ as the one in whom alonelay man's justification before God. John Calvin (1509–64), a more systematic expositor, served his apprenticeship by writing a youthful commentary on the Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca the Younger's (c. 4 BC–AD 65) De clementia (“Concerning Mercy”); systematic theologian though he was, he did not allow his theological system to distort the plain meaning of Scripture, and his philological–historical interpretation is consulted with profit even today.

Scientific exegesis was pursued on the Catholic side by scholars such as F. de Ribera (1591) and L. Alcasar (1614), who showed the way to a more satisfactory understanding of the Revelation. On the Reformed side, the Annotationes in Libros Evangeliorum (1641–50) by the jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) were so objective that some criticized them for rationalism.

The modern period

The modern period is marked by advances in textual criticism and in the study of biblical languages and history, all of which contribute to the interpretation of the Bible. The German theologian J.A. Bengel's (1687–1752) edition of the Greek text of the New Testament with critical apparatus (1734), in which he framed the canon that “the more difficult reading is to be preferred,” was followed by his exegetical Gnomon Novi Testamenti (“Introduction to the New Testament,” 1742): “apply thyself wholly to the text,” he directed; “apply the text wholly to thyself.” The English bishop Robert Lowth's (1710–87) Oxford lectures on The Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, published in Latin in 1753, greatly promoted the understandingof the poetry of the Old Testament by expounding the laws of its parallelistic structure. The German philologist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) applied his expertise in classical criticism to editing the text of the New Testament; to him also belongs the credit of arguing that Mark wasthe earliest of the Gospels and a main source of Matthew and Luke (1835). The problem of the source analysis of the Pentateuch was given what for long appeared to be its final solution byJulius Wellhausen (1844–1918), who related the successive law codes to the development of the Israelite cultus. For the period preceding the 9th century BC, however, he operated in a historical vacuum that Near Eastern archaeology was in his day only beginning to fill; its subsequent findings have dictated radical modifications in his reconstruction of Israel's religious history. In the middle half of the 19th century, New Testament exegesis was overshadowed by the school of Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), which envisaged a sharply opposed Petrine (Peter) and Pauline (Paul) antithesis in the primitive church, followedin the 2nd century by a synthesis that is reflected in most of the New Testament writings. In France, Ernest Renan's (1823–92) works on early Christianity were helpful philological and historical studies; the most popular volume, his Vie de Jésus (1863), was the least valuable. InEngland, where the poet and educator Matthew Arnold (1822–88) endeavoured to find an impregnable moral foundation for biblical authority, New Testament exegesis received contributions of unsurpassed worth between 1865 and the end of the century from J.B. Lightfoot, B.F. Westcott, and F.J.A. Hort.

At the beginning of the 20th century a new direction was given to Gospel interpretation by theGerman scholar William Wrede (Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien, 1901) and the medical missionary theologian Albert Schweitzer (The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Eng. trans., 1910), who so emphasized the eschatological orientation of Jesus' mind and message that New Testament scholarship can never be the same again. The writings of the biblical scholar C.H. Dodd (The Parables of the Kingdom, 1935; The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments, 1936) stressed realized eschatology—that the standards of the last times were realized by Jesus and his disciples—in the preaching of Jesus and of the primitive church; he has been a leading pioneer of the “biblical theology” movement. Karl Barth's (1886–1968) commentary on Romans (1919) launched an existential interpretation of the New Testament, which has been pursued more radically by Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), under the influence of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), according to whom the interpreter must project himself into the author's experience so as to relive it, and of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), whose conception of the truly authentic man as capable of freedom because he has faced reality provides the “pre-understanding” for Bultmann's existential theology. Bultmann's disciple Ernst Fuchs considers the hermeneutical task to be the creation of a “language event” in which the authentic language of Scripture encounters one now, challenging decision, awakening faith, and accomplishing salvation. The chief rival to existential exegesis is the “salvation-history” hermeneutic espoused by Oscar Cullmann.

Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius (1883–1947) pioneered the modern form-critical study of the Gospels. The form-critical method was fruitfully applied to the Old Testament by Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932) and Sigmund Mowinckel (1884–1965). Among Catholic scholars, exegetical studies are vigorously promoted by Jean Daniélou (with his researches into early Jewish Christianity), the Dominicans of the École Biblique et Archéologique (The School of the Bible and Archeology) in Jerusalem (to whom one must credit the Jerusalem Bible), and the Jesuits of the Pontifical Biblical Institute and others.

The encouragement given by the second Vatican Council (1962–65) of the Roman Catholic Church to biblical scholarship, to be cultivated in association with “separated brethren” and with consideration for the requirements of non-Christians, is one indication of a new direction in biblical exegesis, in which this study will no longer be pursued as a vindication of sectional traditions but rather as a cooperative enterprise aiming at making widely available the permanent value of the Bible.