The unity of the scriptures is recognised to have been a ‘dogma’ among the Fathers. The effect of this on exegesis, however, has not previously been discussed. Yet exegesis cannot but reflect fundamental hermeneutical principles which derive from the larger process of reception and appropriation. This is evident as soon as one articulates the interaction between understanding particular sentences or passages and discerning the perceived overarching plan, plot or argument of a literary work. The one affects the other: if the one modifies or confirms the other, then we may speak not of a hermeneutical circle, but rather a hermeneutical spiral as the whole and parts are brought into meaningful coherence.

Part I shows how the dogma was formed by considering how second-century readers received and read the scriptures; and then how exegesis was slanted by the assumption that the scriptures formed a unity.

The fact that patristic exegesis took for granted principles of interpretation and composition drawn from classical rhetoric has already been hinted at in Part I. Here we examine the way in which the scriptures came to be treated as an alternative body of literature, to be subjected to the same scholarly examination as the Greek classics, and to replace those classics in providing authoritative examples, quotations and allusions for exploitation by Christian orators. Christian culture mirrored classical culture, but its discourse was formed by reference to another set of texts and stories – a novel intertextuality.

This book is an attempt to reconfigure standard outlines of patristic exegesis of the Bible. This it seeks to effect by presenting not a linear argument or chronological account, but something more like a spider's web. Such a web is made up of strands carefully placed in relation to one another. The radiating segments of the web are analogous to the sections of the book: they represent the major themes, each of which is traced in second-century material and then broadened out by consideration of material from subsequent centuries. These segments, however, are interlinked by connecting threads, issues which keep recurring, and which defy simple organisation. Scattered over the web are dew-drops that highlight issues by providing depth of focus through detailed inspection of particular texts. The hope is that by a combination of panoramas and close-ups, new perspectives may emerge as the complete web is contemplated.

It has been suggested that ‘anyone engaged in studies related to the Fathers of the Church has not had readily available any historical outline of patristic exegesis’. The writer of those words, Manlio Simonetti, set out to fill the gap. Certainly, a great deal of the requisite material lies in studies of particular outstanding exegetes or scholarly monographs on the treatment of specific texts. So the translation of Simonetti's work is a useful addition to the introductory literature available in English. It is not my intention to duplicate such an account. Rather my discussion presupposes acquaintance with earlier work.

Given that a Christian reading of the scriptures required the discernment of their overall unity through the provision of a creed like key, and that the interpretation of particular texts was inevitably affected by this emphasis on the unity of scripture, what was the legacy of this in the doctrinal debates of the later period? This will gradually emerge as we embark on a particular case-study, analysing the exegetical aspects of Athanasius' polemic against the Arians. This involves both a chronological jump and anticipation of discussions to be undertaken in other sections of the book, especially those concerned with language, reference, deduction and genre – to that extent the proposals made in this volume are interrelated and cumulative. This chapter is placed here because the overriding conclusion of this case-study follows on from the last: discerning the unitive ‘mind’ (dianoia) of scripture was seen as essential to reaching a proper interpretation.

The writings of Athanasius make it absolutely clear that the Arian controversy was about exegesis. This is especially the case with the De decretis, a letter written about AD 350, and the Orations against the Arians, the date of which is disputed but most probably belonging also to the 350s. The first three orations have generally been treated as genuine, though the authenticity of the third has now been challenged by Kannengiesser. We shall focus on Orations 1 and 11, after first working through the argument of the De decretis.

The use to which a work of literature is put surely influences the way it is understood. Technically speaking, exegesis is the self-conscious extension of translation which seeks to spell out meaning, and so might be confined to scholia, or the more elaborate commentary form. But, in practice, texts are interpreted in the context of polemic or debate, in homily or sermon, in liturgy, and by implication through quotation and allusion in all kinds of literary compositions. Does this make a difference? Is exegesis, especially of literature treated by the exegetes and their hearers as authoritative scripture, affected by the context in which the reading takes place, or by the interpretative genre in which it is incorporated or articulated?

The Bible's principal function in the patristic period was the generation of a way of life, grounded in the truth about the way things are, as revealed by God's Word. Exegesis served this end, whatever the context, and so, perhaps surprisingly, different interpretative genres did not produce distinguishable exegetical strategies. The heart of the matter lay in the many-faceted process of finding life's meaning portrayed in the pages of scripture.

How can God be expressed in human language? Athanasius, we have already observed, insisted that the Arian interpretation of the language about the Son of God was blasphemous. ‘Son’ was not an improper term, strictly speaking misapplied, nor were ‘Word’ and ‘Wisdom’ mere ‘names’ attributed to a son adopted by grace: their sense had to be understood in a manner appropriate to the divine reality to which they referred. By referring these terms to the one true Son, the ‘earthly’ meaning of the human language that scripture uses could be corrected, modified or, as I suggested, ‘elevated’. This mode of interpretation is not literal, but neither is it allegorical. One of the less widely recognised effects of the Arian controversy was to highlight the problem of defining God. So many think of the process of doctrinal formation as a progressive definition of belief, but the argumentation, particularly with the neo-Arians like Eunomius, gainsays that. Gregory of Nyssa developed Athanasius' treatment of religious language, stressing in what can only be described as his theological spirituality the incomprehensibility of the infinite God: with no ‘boundaries’, external or internal, the divine Being was in principle indefinable and therefore unknowable. The Arian insistence on defining God as agennētos and making deductions from that was invalidated from the start.

By now it should be evident that patristic study is most significant for the discovery of the inseparability of theology, exegesis of scripture and spirituality, an integration by no means apparent in the modern world. This is borne out by turning to Augustine and focussing on the theologian as exegete. With Augustine, the quantity of material, both primary and secondary, is formidable: here is just a selective dip into a vast textual deposit. His work provides a fitting climax to this study, and, together with the earlier excursion into the work of Ephrem, allows me the satisfaction of having put the Greek tradition in context between both East and West.

Augustine fascinates, not least by reason of his lifelong intellectual development. It is not really possible to speak of‘his theology’ as if it were a single coherent entity. He was always on an intellectual and spiritual journey, and the later stages of the journey made him see the earlier stages in different perspective. He was capable of changing his mind, of arguing one thing in one context, another in another. So one witnesses a mind at work, a mind increasingly formed by the reading of scripture, especially the Psalms and the Pauline Epistles. Christiaan Beker has argued that in considering Paul's theology, one has to take account of both contingency and coherence, as his thought develops and responds to new situations; much the same can be said of Augustine, and the same kind of questions arise about where the coherence is to be located.

‘Interpretation’ meant much the same as ‘translation’ to the Greek who used the same word, hermeneia, for both. This remark is not irrelevant to the subject of this chapter, for it alerts us to an apparently commonsense feature of language which was taken for granted by the ancients. Language was assumed to refer to something other than itself: hence different verbal expressions might refer to the same things in such a way that words could be translated or interpreted by the substitution of a different form of expression. The meaning of language is in the idea behind the words, the reality to which the language refers.

Such a correspondence between logos and world, ideas and reality, has nowadays become problematic. Language and reality have become dissociated, especially in literary theory, but also in other philosophical movements. George Steiner, in Real Presences, has challenged this development. True, he admits, language is ‘infinite’: you can literally say what you like, and both myth and fiction demonstrate that language is far from merely representational. Steiner wonders, however, whether this infinity is the infinity of chaos or of transcendence, whether there is actually anything in what we say. The ancients recognised that the relationship between language and reality is complex, but without abandoning the connection. You might play something like ‘language-games’ but in the end they symbolised something, the signs were not simply a self-contained system since they signified, and were therefore significant.

The perception that the Jewish scriptures became a substitute set of classics gives us a very different perspective on Christian appropriation of this ‘barbarian’ literature. It meant not just their Christological interpretation, not simply a supersessionary claim in relation to Jews, but potentially a supersessionary claim in relation to all of ancient culture. With astonishing audacity, a small persecuted community of oddly assorted persons with no natural kinship, no historical identity, claims a universality which challenges the most powerful tradition in ancient society, the Hellennic paideia which had taken over the world and colonised other traditions, Latin and Hebrew, Eastern and Western. In the course of this process the very concept of religion was redefined and philosophy reminted. Not only did the Christians prove themselves in the intellectual power struggle, but, to a traditionalist world shaped by unquestioned obligations to a society both human and divine in its constituents (the very word religio reflects that element), they introduced the concept of religion as a particular faith-commitment, truth-claim or ‘-ism’ as we understand it.

Hellēnismos, Ioudaismos and Romanitas were originally terms referring to culture; only in response to Christianity did paganism or Judaism, or for that matter at a later date Hinduism, become a belief-system as distinct from a whole culture. To characterise religion in the ancient world is increasingly recognised as a very difficult task because we approach it with Christianising presuppositions.

Once the biblical literature became established as an alternative body of classics, it would soon be seen as the basis of a new paideia. That Origen is reputed to have established a Christian school with a curriculum embracing the standard subjects of an advanced education is an indication that this development did indeed take place. It would be surprising if this did not mean the adoption of the exegetical practices of Graeco-Roman schools. To demonstrate that Origen's exegesis drew on such standard procedures is the object of this chapter. An initial difficulty, however, is reconstructing what those procedures were.

In the ancient world, secondary literature was much sparser than it is in our world. Sometimes these days it seems that students, especially in Biblical Studies, spend so much time on secondary sources that they rarely read the original texts. It is true that ancient schools also fostered the production of handbooks, compendia and collections of extracts, but the equivalent of our secondary literature was largely oral. Exegesis and commentary went on in class, as indeed to a fair extent it does still. The oral practice of exegesis was so much taken for granted that it is quite difficult to reconstruct exactly how exegesis was done.

A certain amount of material roughly equivalent to our literary criticism has survived among the essays of people like Plutarch, and rhetorical textbooks discuss style and other features of literature. The work of D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom has done much to make such material accessible.

The Speaker's Lectures in Biblical Studies in the University of Oxford for 1992 and 1993 provided the opportunity to draft most of this book. I was assured that I could use the lectures to try something out, and that is what I did. I trust that this version reflects a more mature, and indeed coherent, stage in my thinking: in Oxford, I contested the whole idea of ‘typology’ in 1992, only to restore it in 1993!

Although the original drafts provided the basis for what appears here, none has remained unchanged, not least because the integration of the two sets of lectures has effected an almost total transformation of the original order. In several cases, there has been substantial rewriting, with the inclusion of additional material; in some, the omission of repetitive recapping, which was necessary for a lecture audience; and, in most, a recasting of link paragraphs. Furthermore, one previously published paper has been incorporated in slightly revised form, others plundered at various stages.

I am grateful to Professor Ernest Nicholson and those who elected me to the Speaker's Lectureship for giving me the stimulus to develop this work. Others, for whom I have a great respect, did me the honour of faithfully coming to the lectures and offering encouragement; to these too I would express my thanks, especially Professor John Barton, Professor Christopher Rowland and Dr Sebastian Brock. I hope this version will not disappoint them, or Professor Maurice Wiles, my Cambridge Doktorvater and career-long mentor. To him I dedicate this volume.

By ‘reception and appropriation’ I mean the exegetical process whereby readers make the text their own.

According to scholarly tradition, ‘reception’ of the biblical material in the early Church has been studied through the search for allusion and quotation. Debate has centred on the question whether such material evidences oral tradition or knowledge of particular documents, especially in relation to the reception of Christian-authored texts. If knowledge of particular documents is claimed, then the issue of the status accorded to them becomes important, and so, in the case of Christian-authored documents, the process of reception is associated with the formation of the canon in most modern scholarship. The assumption has been that the canonical process was one in which Christian-authored documents were gradually lifted to the same inspired status as the inherited Jewish ones. The reception and appropriation of the Jewish scriptures has usually been taken for granted. True, questions have been raised about which scriptures, and to what extent they were mediated through memory or testimony-books. But the assumption that Christians inherited a canon to which they then added their own literature meant that there was nothing surprising in Origen's adoption of the Jewish traditions that every jot and tittle mattered, or that inspired texts could be interpreted by means of other inspired texts. Thus, the unity and inerrancy of the Bible, however problematic for modern scholars, have been taken to be, for the early Church, unsurprising dogmas.

According to one broad-brush picture of the history of exegesis, from Augustine to the Reformation,

The ‘sacred page’ ‘bore the imprint of God’, and to get home to God was the goal. So,

However, with the rise of the universities and of Scholastic theology in the twelfth century, there was a shift to ‘sacred doctrine’ (sacra doctrina). Here faith was seeking understanding. Theology took the form of a Summa, rather than a biblical commentary, though interpreting scripture. Then

The account is drawn from an attempt to characterise sixteenth-century commentaries. The conclusion reached is that there was no clear understanding of what constituted a commentary over against annotations, expositions, or paraphrases; but it is possible to distinguish the three styles of interpretation outlined, and to see that commentaries, though similar in being essentially notes on scripture, differed widely according to the manner in which the task was understood.

The fact that education was premissed on the imitation of classics meant that intertextuality was an important feature of ancient literary culture. Allusions and quotations laced the correspondence of the literary élite, as well as public discourse. By the fourth century, Christian leaders such as the Cappadocians, or even The odoret of Cyrus, evidence the same literary culture. But they also quote the Bible. The purpose of this chapter is to explore use of the Bible in a Christianised literary form, namely panegyric, at the point of confluence between cultures that we reached at the end of chapter 3.

In English and French, ‘panegyric’ is associated with eulogy and may therefore be deemed to cover most of what the ancients would have called epideictic oratory. Strictly speaking, of course, it should refer simply to festival orations, but in ecclesiastical literature something of a practical convergence of these forms took place with the development of feast days for saints and martyrs. It is generally agreed that the Cappadocians and John Chrysostom exemplify the adaptation of funerary orations, eulogies and festal declamations to Christian purposes.

What I propose to examine, then, is the use of the Bible in such material.

Introduction

We live in a world surrounded by ethnic conflict. Since the 1960s, ethnic resurgences have occurred between Walloons and Flemings in Belgium; Serbs, Croats and Muslims in Bosnia; Hutu and Tutsi in Burundi and Rwanda; Greeks and Turks in Cyprus; Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims in India; Catholics and Protestants in Ireland; Chinese and Malay in Malaysia; Ibo, Hausa and Yoruba in Nigeria; English and French in Québec; Christian Armenians and Muslim Azerbaijanis in the south of the former Soviet Union; and Sinhs and Tamils in Sri Lanka, to name just a few. At first sight, the appearance of a book on ancient ethnicity might seem like a gratuitous and anachronistic exercise, attempting to impose upon antiquity a subject whose true relevance is more topical. Nothing could be further from the truth. Quite apart from the fact that the separation of past and present tends to be dissolved in the proclamation of ethnic claims and counterclaims (consider the dispute that arose between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia over the so-called ‘Star of Vergina’),the study of ethnic identity in antiquity is nothing new as the remainder of this chapter will demonstrate.

Indeed, from as early as the eighteenth century, classical scholars were interested in examining the fields of art, architecture, music, dress, philosophy, customs and political forms in order to identify the specific ‘character’ of the various ethnic groups which inhabited Greece in antiquity.

I hope it will not seem too perverse to establish, at the outset, what this book is not about. In the first place, its object of study is not a collective Hellenic identity, but rather the plurality of ‘intrahellenic’ identities, of which the Ionians, Dorians, Aiolians and Akhaians are simply the best-known examples. It might be argued that this distinction is simply one of degree and that what we have in Greek antiquity is a situation that is sometimes termed ‘nested ethnicity’, whereby a citizen of a city such as Sparta could subscribe not only to a Dorian ethnicity but also to a Greek identity that was itself constituted by ethnic subdivisions such as the Dorians and Aiolians. That is certainly one way of explaining why Greek myth regarded ethnic eponyms such as Doros and Aiolos as the sons of the Hellenic Urvater, Hellen, though I believe that there is a case to be made for keeping the two levels of identity distinct. Firstly, it is clear that some of these intrahellenic ethnic identities may have existed prior to the emergence of a fully blown Hellenic consciousness which sought to subsume them. Secondly, while the identity of groups such as the Dorians or the Ionians could undoubtedly become politicised, it generally tended to retain (with varying degrees of salience) its ethnic definition. Conversely, although Hellenic identity was clearly envisaged in the sixth century BC as being ethnic in character, there is some evidence that by the fourth century it was conceived more in cultural terms.