Lecture 9: The History of Interpretation: From Midrash to Augustine

The lecture, section by section

1. The rulebook you already have

   Hermeneutics, most simply, is how you interpret Scripture: your rules, whether you have ever examined them or not. The session sets three terms in order: interpretation is the process by which the Scriptures are understood by the reader; hermeneutics is the theory, the rulebook, governing that process; and exegesis is the discovery of the original meaning by studying the text according to the author’s intent in its historical and grammatical context. The opposite of exegesis, drawing meaning out, is eisegesis, reading meaning in: going to the text to find what your theology already needs it to say. And one bracing orientation governs everything: nothing in the Bible was written to you. Every book was addressed to other people in other places, which is why exegesis asks what it said to them before interpretation asks what it means for us.

2. The historical grammatical method in outline

   The method the course commends, sometimes loosely called literalism, seeks the author’s original intent by studying the text in its original historical and grammatical setting, then compares Scripture with Scripture and with tradition, reason, emotion, and experience, then extracts the timeless principles, and only then applies them to today. The teachers add the note that frames the whole session: this is the very ground on which academic theology now works, for no one debates what the text says; the debate is over what the text means by what it says, and how the New Testament handles the Old is its sharpest case.

3. The ancient Jewish hermeneutic: zeal without context

   How was Scripture read in the world Jesus entered? By interpreters passionately committed to inspiration, shaped by the exile to guard the word of God, and determined to make every detail apply to their people. Because the text was God’s, the rabbis presupposed many meanings in every text: every incidental detail carried significance, and Rabbi Akiva in the first century extended this to every repetition, figure of speech, synonym, word, letter, and even the shapes of the letters. It is the God-side approach pressed to the point of neglecting the human side altogether, and the teachers pause on the pastoral motive: these were preachers who feared that if the historical setting did not yield application, the text’s value was lost, and so they went hunting for hidden application everywhere. One rabbinic saying captures it: as a rock splits into many splinters, so one verse contains many teachings.

4. Midrash: literalism and letterism

   The dominant Palestinian method was midrash, the contemporizing of the text: meanings assigned without regard to context, texts chained together because they share a word, obscurities mined for hidden reasons. Within it, literalism took the text at straightforward value, which by itself is no vice, but pressed to extremes it bypassed the theological point for legalistic application: the law of the rebellious son in Deuteronomy 21 read so woodenly that parents maimed in the hand could not apply it, since they could not lay hold of him, nor the lame, who could not bring him out, nor the mute, who could not say this is our son. Letterism went further, ignoring context, history, culture, and even grammar to find significance in isolated words and letters. Jesus’s woe in Matthew 23 lands on this whole world: tithing mint, dill, and cumin while neglecting the weightier matters, the comfort of a checklist purchased at the cost of the point.

5. Pesher: it is fulfilled in us

   A third method, pesher, flourished at the Dead Sea community of Qumran, the separatists who had abandoned the cities to keep Judaism pure. In pesher, every text carries immediate eschatological significance for the interpreting community, understood through divine revelation: the Messiah texts speak of our teacher of righteousness, the end-times texts describe our persecution, and the reading is delivered not as a possibility but as a certainty: this is being fulfilled in us. The teachers note how durable the move is: fringe communities across church history, from radical splinter groups of the Reformation era onward, have sold everything and climbed the mountain on exactly this hermeneutic, and versions of it flourish today whenever a congregation is told that an ancient text is definitely about them.

6. Allegory: the hidden soul of the text

   Among the Hellenistic Jews of Alexandria a fourth method reigned: allegory, born among the Greeks as a way to clean up the embarrassing stories of their own gods by reading nobler stories underneath them. Applied to Scripture, allegory seeks the hidden meaning behind characters, places, events, and numbers. Philo of Alexandria, the most influential Hellenistic Jew of the first century, said the Scriptures are like a man with body and soul: the body is the literal meaning, the soul the hidden one, and the interpreter’s goal is the soul. The literal is not denied; it is merely demoted to a vehicle. This method, the teachers warn, will plague the church for centuries, and it is coming up next.

7. How the New Testament uses the Old

   Roughly a tenth of the New Testament quotes, paraphrases, or alludes to the Old, so the apostles’ own hermeneutic is on full display, and it is not one thing. They read Christ as the fulfillment of the Old Testament, often by straightforward literal fulfillment of genuine prophecy. They also used typology, reading historical events as foreshadowings: Jonah’s three days in the fish prefiguring the Son of Man’s three days in the earth, Adam answered by the second Adam, though Jonah, read historically, predicts nothing. And they used pesher: Jesus himself declares, today this Scripture is fulfilled in me, reading every prophecy Christocentrically, and he alone had the right, for the resurrection vindicated the claim. The whole of Scripture is Christocentric, the history of redemption centered on the person and work of Christ; but a Christocentric typology verified by Scripture is one thing, and a license for us to find types of ourselves, our churches, or our nations is another. Notably, no New Testament writer employs the allegorical method; even Paul’s allegory in Galatians functions as an unusually strong typology, not a method of interpretation.

8. The hard cases: Rachel’s weeping and the son called from Egypt

   Two texts force the question. Jeremiah 31:15, read historically, describes Rachel weeping for Israel’s children killed or marched past Ramah into Babylonian exile: a description, not a prediction, and fulfilled, if prophetic at all, within a generation. Yet Matthew writes that Herod’s slaughter of the children fulfilled what Jeremiah spoke. Hosea 11:1, read historically, is God remembering the Exodus: out of Egypt I called my son. Yet Matthew finds it fulfilled when the child Jesus returns from Egypt. This is pesher: taking a text that was not predictive in its context and declaring it prophetic. Even Paul’s argument from seed rather than seeds presses the wording in a way pesher often did. The teachers refuse to soften the difficulty, and they refuse the easy exits.

9. Was the apostles’ hermeneutic inspired?

   The options are laid out with unusual candor. Either Matthew interpreted wrongly and inspiration fails, which no one in the room will accept; or pesher is a good method we should all use, which the teachers reject as hopelessly subjective and untestable; or, the common evangelical view, pesher is legitimate only in the hands of inspired writers, who alone can declare by revelation that a text was prophetic after all; or, Patton’s own view, offered with the warning that some will call it liberal: Matthew used the ordinary, imperfect hermeneutic of his day, as a writer may use imperfect grammar, and God carried and blessed the result so that what was written is true. On either of the last two views the practical conclusion is identical, and it is the session’s hinge: what Matthew wrote is true, the fulfillments are real, and you and I still may not use pesher, because we are not inspired, and church history is littered with the wreckage of those who thought they were.

10. The early church: from encouragement to authority

    The earliest Christian writers continued the Christocentric reading with a functional, pastoral hermeneutic: as Abraham was strong in faith, so you be strong. Justin Martyr wielded typology apologetically, showing the Jews Christ prefigured across the Old Testament. Then the Gnostics arrived claiming a secret teaching handed down from Christ, and the church answered secrecy with publicity: the traditional or authoritative hermeneutic of Irenaeus and Tertullian, appealing to the public teaching handed from the apostles through the bishops. The rule of faith, the regula fidei, became the interpretive umbrella: interpret as you like beneath it, but any reading that contradicts the creed is wrong. The teachers quote the scholar David Dockery’s observation that heresy thus produced a hermeneutical circle: tradition was created by the interpretation of Scripture, and interpretation was then governed by tradition, a circle that is sound exactly as long as the first step, tradition drawn from Scripture, holds. And they note we still do this: every reader today carries a theology that steers what the text is allowed to mean.

11. Alexandria against Antioch

    Two schools then contended. Alexandria, heir of Philo, made allegory the royal road: Clement of Alexandria and Origen taught that Scripture has body, soul, and spirit, a literal, a moral, and a hidden spiritual meaning, with the hidden meaning the prize. Origen’s treatment of Lot in Genesis 19 shows the method at full stretch: Lot as the rational mind or the law, his wife as the flesh or Israel’s rebellion, his daughters as vainglory and pride, or Jerusalem and Samaria, delivered not as suggestion but as the meaning. The intention was devout, Christ read into everything and difficulties cleaned up, but the teachers state the verdict plainly: a text that can mean everything means nothing. Antioch rejected all of it. The Antiochene school held that the text has one meaning, discovered through history and grammar according to the author’s intent, with spiritual application corresponding directly to the literal sense, as soul to body. Theodore, its great exegete, read the Song of Solomon as a real marriage poem rather than an embarrassment to be allegorized, and honestly distinguished genuinely predictive prophecies from texts like those Matthew cites, wrestling with the same problem this session raised. Many Protestants say that had Antioch prevailed, no Reformation would have been necessary; instead its reputation fell when Nestorius, Theodore’s student, was condemned, unjustly by the teachers’ lights, and the fun of hidden meanings outbid the labor of history and grammar for a thousand years.

12. Augustine’s rules, and Augustine’s practice

    The session closes in the West with Augustine’s principles, remarkable for their mixture. Genuine faith is required of the interpreter. The historical and literal sense is to be held in high regard. Scripture has more than one meaning, and allegory may be used to find the second, the concession that undid the rest. Numbers carry significance, as when he read the water jars of the wedding at Cana as figures of the Trinity and the ages of men. The Old Testament is a Christian book, to be read in the light of Christ. The interpreter must derive meaning from the text rather than force preconceptions into it, a principle allegory cannot survive. The analogy of faith, the church’s creed, must guide the reader. No text may be torn from its context. Doctrines must not be built on obscure passages, a rule the teachers illustrate from history: an entire communal movement founded for four centuries on two descriptive verses in Acts about holding all things in common, and Rome’s packing of the papacy into the admittedly obscure keys of Matthew 16, a move Augustine’s own principle forbids and Augustine’s own church made. And the Spirit is no substitute for diligent study. The teachers’ summary is affectionate and blunt: perhaps the greatest Christian writer since Paul, magnificent in doctrine, and in his commentaries he practiced chiefly his worst principles. Next session: the medieval church, the Reformation, and the rise, at last, of the historical grammatical method.

1. The teachers say everyone has a hermeneutic, examined or not, and that your theology quietly steers what you allow a text to mean. What are the actual rules you follow when you open your Bible, and where did they come from?

2. The session insists that Matthew’s fulfillments are true while forbidding us the method he used. Are you satisfied by the distinction between inspired and uninspired interpreters, or does Patton’s candid alternative persuade you more, and why does the practical conclusion not change either way?

3. Origen meant well: he wanted Christ in everything. Yet a text that can mean everything means nothing. Where does your own reading drift toward finding hidden messages for yourself, and what would the Antiochene discipline of one meaning, historically discovered, cost you and give you?