Method and Meaning: A new collection of essays on New Testament interpretation

[Method and Meaning is available from SBL Press here; this is an extract from the Introduction]

There has never been a more diverse set of possibilities for understanding the  canonical texts of the New Testament, other early Christian literature, and the history  of the emergent Christian movement that was to become the Church.

Diversity in methods of reading the New Testament is of course as old as or  older than the texts themselves. The first few generations of Christians struggled  with basic questions of method and meaning in their own attempts to read and  respond to the scriptures of Judaism. These attempts, various elements of development,  interpretation and controversy, are documented both in the processes of  composition as well as in canonization; without them the New Testament itself  would not exist. 

If the New Testament documents are themselves inscribed efforts at understanding  the Jewish scriptures as well as the person and teaching of Jesus, they  quickly became the objects of renewed interpretive debates, and the catalyst for  further literary production. From arguments over esoteric and philosophically  ambitious interpretation such as that of so-called Gnostics in the second century,  through the methodological differences between the Alexandrian and Antiochene  schools in the fourth century, the key doctrinal and other disputes that characterized  ancient Christianity were centered on just how to read Christian and Jewish  scripture.

Fundamentalisms, casual or assertive, are  never more vulnerable than  when faced with the pluriformity of canonical scripture itself. While theological  debates both mirrored and fueled the ways Christian social formations developed,  the emergent institutional and cultural divisions between Churches were manifested  not only in preference for distinct interpretive methods, but in decisions  even about the actual canons to which those methods are to be applied. 

Debates over the extent and content of scripture reflected contention over the  authentic borders of Christianity itself. This can be seen as when Marcion championed  a Gospel without supposed accretions, or when “Montanists” claimed the  ongoing reality of the Paraclete outside as well as inside the written word. From  the ancient divisions between groups aligned with Chalcedonian Christology  on the one hand, and others such as Armenian, Ethiopian, and Egyptian Christians  on the other, through the millennial schism between eastern and western  Churches, and on to the Reformation, each large and enduring division has been  accompanied by the entrenchment of discrepancies between canons. Those discrepancies  as well as the subtler, more diffuse, but equally profound cultivation of  differences in how to read those books accepted has lead to a lively debate. 

Modern scholarship has added to these dilemmas, not only because of the  increased awareness of cultural and canonical diversity through more immediate contact with different cultures and peoples, but also as a result of the discovery  and publication of new sets of ancient documents pertaining to, or even purporting  to be, scripture.  The Dead Sea Scrolls have raised unprecedented but unresolved problems  in the presentation of extra-canonical Psalms interspersed with the familiar  ones. The appearance of Ben Sira in Hebrew both there and in the documents of the Cairo geniza has forced new perspectives. The Nag Hammadi codices shed  remarkable light on the ways scripture could be re-written in the process of being  read, as well as providing the now-famous Gospel of Thomas. 

Despite the differences just noted, the varied Christian traditions of the late antique and medieval periods had in common tendencies to weave biblical  traditions organically into their complex liturgical, spiritual, and doctrinal  constructions. They continued to use earlier methods such as allegorical interpretation,  if in new ways and with a new sophistication, tending at times to  sophistry. They continued to use biblical texts for devotional practices such as  lectio divina, and in the communal settings of eucharistic and other liturgies.  The Reformation brought the Bible to a quite new centrality in the West, via  the principle of sola scriptura and the explosion of biblical translations, exemplified  in the King James Version published four-hundred years before this volume, and provided its own layer of complexity to canonical issues. While an accompanying  emphasis on “plain sense” of scripture was common, the exposure of  the Bible to the light both of the resources of emergent humanism such as that  of Erasmus and of new emphases on evidence and rationality also heralded the   arrival of modern critical scholarship, whether undertaken in pursuit of new  theological wisdom, skepticism, or intellectual curiosity. 

Like any other aspect of western thought, understanding of the New  Testament and biblical literature generally was impacted profoundly by the Enlightenment and its successors such as Romanticism. Figures such as Spinoza  and Hobbes noted issues that later scholars were to pursue more systematically.  For the Hebrew Bible this was often the problem of Pentateuchal sources or the  authenticity of Isianic prophecies; the equivalent seed-bed for New Testament studies was the Synoptic problem and the closely related issue of the historical  Jesus. 

To a significant extent this volume reflects the current state of the modern  biblical scholarship that emerged in the West from that time forward. This has  come to include an array of technical and hermeneutical processes sometimes  worked out of as distinct “criticisms” but in fact often overlapping and interdependent. These have been used to establish the textual detail, as well as the  canonical scope, of the New Testament; to consider its sources, literary composition,  influences, and historicity; and to examine it in its ancient social, cultural,  and religious contexts. This set of interdependent disciplines constitute classical  biblical criticism, which, while not necessarily a complete set of tools for considering  the significance of the ancient texts in the modern world, cannot be  dispensed with by any serious reader. 

Before the mid-twentieth century, critical New Testament scholarship as a  tool for exegetical and hermeneutical purposes was a largely Protestant phenomenon,  enabled or allowed by the diffuse authority structures of those religious  traditions but not universally accepted. The arrival of Roman Catholic scholarship  in this modern sense was heralded by the encyclical Divino afflante spiritu, which  affirmed the use of philological, historical, and literary studies to support faithful  reading and understanding. This and other developments in scholarly ecumenism  have meant that debates in the academy around biblical interpretation often  have little correlation with expected confessional loyalties, and that even in New  Testament studies the contributions of Jewish and secular scholars can and must  have their acknowledged place, based on criteria of adequacy applicable in any  discipline. 

The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence not only of  additional methods, but also of approaches that generally assumed and often  acknowledged established critical scholarship, yet sought to go beyond it. One  broad set of methods has emerged from more recent philosophical and literary  theory, wherein the literary character of the text has been reasserted not merely  as historic artifact for genre analysis, but as a dynamic reality whose life is interdependent  with the act of contemporary reading. There have also been renewed  calls for theological engagement, in particular with the canonical text, with what  has been termed a “second naivety” that acknowledges the results of critical study  without reducing the text to them.  Scholars and readers have also become more aware of what was culturally  specific and historically conditioned in pursuit of method, even in studies  undertaken with “scientific” rigor and intent; that the assumptions of western  modernity were not absolutes, and that the reality of Churches and academies  dominated by white males was not irrelevant to the limits of scholarship or to its  future prospects. The relationship between such new readings emphasizing diversity  and liberation and what has been termed classical scholarship is not always  clear, and their interaction along with debate continues. 

 This volume in its  collective voice suggests that careful attention  to questions of method in interpretation offers possibilities for fruitful readings  of the texts themselves, and insights into other unavoidable issues for any who  would read with understanding.  More than this, it suggests that interpretive method is not simply an issue  that arises after the text, when as in every period individuals and communities  have considered and contended about proper ways to read; rather, the individual  writings and the canon of scripture are actually the products of such interpretive  questions, and cannot be adequately understood except with attention to them.


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