To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Fourth-century Antioch was an outstanding centre of biblical scholarship and of ecclesiastical confusion. The leading figures of the Antiochene school of biblical scholarship in the fourth century were staunch upholders of the faith of Nicaea. Diodore was the leading figure of the school in the middle of the century and bishop of Tarsus from 378. Theodore of Mopsuestia draws a distinction between the office of the exegete and that of the preacher in the introduction to his Commentary on John. For Theodore, the primary author of all scripture was the Holy Spirit. His work of commentary on the Psalms and on the minor prophets led him to pay more attention than the majority of early writers to the precise nature of inspiration. His judgement on New Testament commentaries is based wholly on the suitability of the sense of the disputed reading. Theodore's commentaries on the Old Testament show him as a scholar capable of acute historical observation.
In the field of New Testament textual criticism, a great change of approach and method has taken place in the course of the present century. The method owed much to the work of the great nineteenth century philologist Karl Lachmann, who worked in the fields of the manuscript tradition of Latin classical texts, the New Testament and medieval German poetry. One of the greatest exponents of the study of documents a generation after Westcott and Hort was Kirsopp Lake. He wrote some words which express the ideal for the textual critic working on this aspect of the field. The majority of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are of Byzantine production, and most of these post-date the Iconoclastic controversy and the invention of minuscule. The Byzantine text has many readings which appear conflate, and many evident rationalisations of cruces.
Origen was the kind of person, regrettably rare in Christian history, who appears to have been capable of entering into genuine dialogue with Jews. The obvious common ground for such debate was the Old Testament. He did not undertake any major study of the New Testament text of the kind which he carried out in the case of the Old Testament. The ancient Latin version of the passage quoted from the Commentary on Matthew makes him say that he would not dare to do such a thing; but the remark does not occur in the Greek text and cannot therefore be accepted with any confidence as genuine. The Holy Spirit was the real author of scripture. This fact guaranteed neither the stylistic quality nor the absolute historicity of the scriptural record. Modern scholarship has tended to draw a firm line of distinction between typological and allegorical interpretations of the Old Testament.
This chapter considers the terms that are used to describe the canonical writings and the definition of canonisation and canonicity within the relevant period. It discusses the evidence for acts of canonisation by which the several sections, and the collection as a whole, came to be recognised as canonical. The chapter describes the relation between canonical and non-canonical literature. A famous passage in Josephus provides both a descriptive terminology and a definition of the nature of the Canon as it was understood in his time. The discovery of the book of the Law in the Temple at Jerusalem in the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah led to a decisive development in the emergence of the Canon. The Greek-speaking Christian Church took over the Septuagint, which contained other works and in which, moreover, some of the canonical books included additional sections.
Augustine's achievements as a biblical scholar and exegete can be appreciated only in relation to his childhood and general education. The African Council of Carthage of 397, at which Augustine was present, recognised an Old Testament Canon which included the books of the Apocrypha and a New Testament Canon which included Hebrews and Peter. The actual text of scripture upon which Augustine exercised his exegetical talent varied during the course of his life. Augustine's own views on scriptural exegesis are set out in the treatise De Doctrina Christiana which appeared in its final form only in 427, and which may therefore be regarded as representing his mature opinion. Augustine's approach to scriptural exegesis is first and foremost that of a pastor, designed to instruct his congregation in the doctrine of the Church and to stir their minds to greater warmth of devotion.
The exegesis of the primitive Christian Church was a direct and unselfconscious continuation of the type of exegesis practised by ancient Judaism in its later period. The discovery of the Qumran literature has opened to another type of Jewish exegesis, the list of proof-texts. The greater part of Christian exegesis for a hundred and fifty years after the resurrection is of course exegesis of the Old Testament. One of the most important new features in all Christian exegesis from the end of the second century onwards is the acceptance by the Church of the Fourth Gospel as fully authoritative. The Western tradition of exegesis showed its conservatism and caution, however, in another direction, and that is in its treatment of eschatology. The Christian gospel was being transposed from a basically Jewish frame of reference and form to a basically Greek frame of reference.
The discovery of more than half a million documents spanning the period of the Old Testament enables a comparison to be made between the various contemporary literary forms in use within the ancient Near East. The Assyrian and Babylonian scribes of the first millennium employed scrolls of papyrus or leather for Aramaic inscriptions. The varied and numerous documents and writing materials presuppose persons skilled in writing. From 3100 BC in Mesopotamia, and thereafter in Egypt, Anatolia and Elam, scribes were at work in the principal cities and centres of government. In Mesopotamia and Israel the overriding cultural factor was the concept of law and authority which ensured the vitality, stability and continuity of a highly developed civilisation. The Hebrew Proverbs are closest to the precepts or instructions which range from the Old Kingdom writings of the Egyptian sages to the New Kingdom collections and are scattered throughout the literature.
The Canon of the New Testament was the result of a long and gradual process in the course of which the books regarded as authoritative, inspired, and apostolic were selected out of a much larger body of literature. During the apostolic age the Christian Bible consisted of the Old Testament alone, not that the Old Testament was precisely defined, but the main outlines were quite clear. The Church was experiencing severe exegetical difficulties toward the middle of the second century. Many Gnostics were able to provide esoteric interpretations of Pauline epistles and of the gospels as well. Among the most important documents in the history of the New Testament Canon is the 'Muratorian' fragment, so called because it was published by L. A. Muratori in 1740. Origen provides one of the best examples of the way in which literary criticism was being brought to bear on questions of authorship in relation to canonicity.
This chapter discusses the nature and purpose of midrash and focuses on some biblical passages which foreshadow and prompt the discipline of exegesis. The most famous of the scribes was Ezra, and it is in connection with him that scripture interpretation as such is first mentioned in the Bible. The public recitation of scripture which was part of Temple worship became the essential feature of synagogal liturgy already in pre-Christian times and appears in the New Testament as a well-established custom. Palestinian Jewry was divided, from the second century BC to the end of the Second Temple, into separate and rival groups each of which slanted its interpretative system to justify the biblical authenticity of its beliefs and way of life. Beyond any immediate exegetical assistance, midrash is by nature provides the closest historical link with Old Testament tradition itself.
The discoveries at Qumran show that in the first century BC the text of Isaiah, for example, was faithfully transmitted; the widely varying interpretations that might be placed on the text by Jews as well as later by Christians. Christian literature began with the interpretation of the Old Testament in the light of Christian experience. The literature of the earliest Church, from the New Testament, is with two exceptions what might have been predicted from its Jewish origins: the sacred books of Judaism and some interpretations of those books in the light of Christian experience. In Jewish copies of the Greek versions of the scriptures it was usual for the name of God, Yahweh, to be written in Hebrew letters. Christian culture and education were bookish through and through; reliance on the book, initially a legacy from Judaism, was soon a weapon of the Church in its fight against paganism.