It is assumed in much anti-theistic polemic that the Bible has traditionally always been interpreted literally. A lot of criticism of believers is based on how irrational, impossible and anti-scientific such a reading of the Bible has to be and how the current literalism of many fundamentalist Christians simply reflects how the Bible has always been read, with non-literal interpretations simply a modern rear-guard attempt to reconcile the Bible with current understandings of the world. But this is not true. In fact, fundamentalist Biblical literalism is a very recent, mostly Protestant and largely American affair. Historically, things were much more complex.

In a departure for History for Atheists, this month’s article is a guest post by Lee Clarke. Lee is studying for a doctorate in Philosophy at Nottingham Trent University. He holds a B.A. in History and Philosophy from the same institution and also a M.A. in Theology and Religion from the University of Birmingham. Lee is an agnostic who shares many of my concerns about the way many atheists distort history and he offered to write this detailed article because the history of Biblical exegesis is a focus of his research. He notes that when he uses “literalist” he is referring specifically to to modern Christians who take every word of the Bible as true and historically accurate. And when referring to “atheists” in this article he is talking about the anti-theistic New Atheists who are the focus of History for Atheists, not atheists generally. Here is Lee’s article:

Literalism and the New Atheists

Today, a large number of religious believers think that, as the literal words of God, their scriptures should be read literally. For example, in a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Centre, 31% of adults of all faiths that were surveyed believed that this was true. The percentage of people in this category rose or fell depending on which faith or denomination was asked. For Evangelical Protestants, for example, the amount of literalist believers rose to 55%, Catholics, 26%, Jehovah’s Witnesses, 47%, Orthodox Christians, 22%, Muslims 42% and of mainline Protestants, 24% of people thought that their scriptures should be read literally. In a 2017 Gallup Poll, only 24% percent of Americans believed that the Bible was the literal word of God, the lowest in 40 years. Whilst the number of literalist believers appears to be going down, it is still quite a large number of people who think that their sacred texts are literally true word for word. Apart from polls, we have all seen videos, interviews or protests where believers, try to influence society to align more with their beliefs. For example, some American Christians want to stop the teaching of the theory of evolution and to replace it with “Intelligent Design”, but the phenomena is by no means specific to the U.S., or to Christianity for that matter. We have also seen terrorist groups who, reading their scriptures literally and with no regard for interpretation or context, believe that they have to kill non-believers.

Due to the visibility of these groups, a lot of people – atheists, as well as believers – make the mistaken assumption that this is how religious groups have always read their scriptures. In order to fight back against literalists, the New Atheists in particular attempt to point out within scriptures the contradictions, actions and stories that are considered immoral or unethical, as well as doctrines and beliefs that don’t conform with modern science, and try to persuade literalists that their view of things is wrong. Sam Harris for instance in his book Letter to a Christian Nation, says the following:

You probably think the Inquisition was a perversion of the ‘true’ spirit of Christianity. Perhaps it was. The problem, however, is that the teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries.

(Harris, p. 11)

Christopher Hitchens for his part, after going through some of the more controversial stories of the Hebrew Bible and citing Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion in his book God is not Great writes:

This critique of wish-thinking is strong and unanswerable, but it does not really deal with the horrors and cruelties and madness of the Old Testament. Who – except for an ancient priest seeking to exert power by the tried and tested means of fear – could possibly wish that this hopelessly knotted skein of fable had any veracity?

(Hitchens, p. 103)

Richard Dawkins in his well-known book, The God Delusion after a critique of the story of Noah’s Ark writes:

Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we don’t take the book of Genesis literally anymore. But that is my whole point! We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories…In any case, despite the good intentions of the sophisticated theologian, a frighteningly large number of people still do take their scriptures, including the story of Noah, literally.

(Dawkins, p. 269)

What all these statements seem to imply is that the contradictions and immoral events within religious scriptures have been missed or ignored by all those stupid, irrational religious people throughout the centuries who were enslaved to a literal readings of their scriptures, until the bright, saving light of the Enlightenment and reason brought them to light to reveal how utterly stupid and wrong they really were. That is the normal narrative anyway. Dawkins’ quote in particular implies, in saying that the “irritated theologians” don’t take Genesis literally “anymore”, that until recently that is what just what they did. In fact, surprisingly, the opposite is true. Completely literal interpretation of both the Bible and the Koran, only arose within the last couple of centuries – for the Bible, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular. Up until then, for most of history from late antiquity, right through the Middle Ages to the early modern period and modern era, a “literal” interpretation was only one of the multiple “senses” of scripture: only one of the ways in which a verse or story could be read and interpreted. Even then, the “literal” reading was a far cry away from modern fundamentalist views.

The main way the Bible (and Koran) was interpreted was indeed allegorical, but far from being a quick “pick and choose” as Dawkins says, it was part of a long, rich tradition of hermeneutical exegesis that went back to antiquity and was influential on Judaism, Christianity and later Islam. There were also other forms of interpretation unique to each faith tradition. Contrary to what Harris and Hitchens say too, contradictions and the issue of historical context were also noted by exegetes. I am not saying that every single Jew and Christian prior to these centuries interpreted their scriptures non-literally prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Firstly, the vast majority could not read in the medieval era; that ability and the ability to interpret the text properly belonged only to the privileged educated classes. Amongst them, some did indeed take a more literal stance as we will see, but as I have said, literalism in the eras I will discuss was only one form of interpretation, it was hardly ever the only one used and hardly ever the same as modern literalism.

What I will seek to do is give a decent snapshot of how the Bible was interpreted from antiquity onwards through to the Middle Ages. Of course, this is a very big topic, so I will just be covering enough to give people a decent idea and to disprove the idea that believers have always interpreted their scriptures in a completely literal manner, as well as to show the rich tradition of scriptural interpretation that may be unknown to believers and atheists alike. I hope to correct distortions of history and I hope that people maybe even learn something new from reading this.

The Origins of Biblical Hermeneutics – Jew meets Greek

As already stated, the principal mode of exegesis that was applied to the Bible was allegorical in nature. It is essentially the idea that there is some ‘hidden meaning’ that is present within the text that differs from what the author actually wrote. It is defined by Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck as:

… explaining a work, or a figure in myth, or any created entity, as if there were another sense to which it referred, that is, presuming the work or figure to be encoded with meaning intended by the author or a higher spiritual authority.

(Copeland and Struck, 2010, p.2

Allegorical Interpretation arose in the context of Classical Greek culture, principally to interpret the epic poems of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. As Jörg Rüpke points out in his book on Roman religion, Pantheon, (p. 171) , allegorical reading was originally used to reconcile “contradictions and offensive elements” with status as an authoritative work. If it was read that the gods did something in the poems that could have been deemed morally or religiously offensive to the reader, the passages in question were deemed to actually mean something else that was hidden beneath the surface meaning of the words. Reading Homer in this way meant that offensive verses could be effectively explained with the poems still retaining their authority and not having to be changed. This was the original context of allegory. Starting from the 330s BC, Alexander the Great swept through Asia and the Near East, creating an empire that stretched from Greece to India. Alexander’s conquests had the effect of spreading Greek culture in his wake, as the areas he conquered were populated by Greek-speaking colonists. With Greek culture, came Greek philosophy and with that came allegorical interpretation. After his death in roughly 323 BC, his empire was divided up between his generals beginning the Hellenistic Era. Relevant for our purposes, Egypt was taken by Ptolemy I Soter who started the Ptolemaic dynasty of Greek monarchs. Alexander had founded the city of Alexandria in Egypt after reportedly having had a dream in which Homer told him to build it. Alexandria would become one of the most important cities of the ancient world and a cultural and intellectual powerhouse. The city was a multicultural metropolis where Greek, Egyptian and more mixed and influenced each other. Scholars flocked to the city and soon it became famous across the Mediterranean for its scholarship and learning.

Also present in Alexandria was a large and influential Jewish community. Many Jews both in the city and outside it became Hellenised, that is influenced heavily by Greek culture. One in particular, known as Philo of Alexandria  (20 BC-50 AD) who lived at the time of Jesus, was the first to really apply allegorical interpretation to the Hebrew Bible and successfully fuse Greek and Jewish culture in this way. Philo was a follower of the Greek philosopher, Plato, as well as a devout adherent of his Jewish faith and he readily applied Plato’s ideas to the Hebrew Bible in an ingenious way to many events and figures that recast the Biblical text, like Homer’s poems, as having within it concealed truths that had to be brought to light.

For example, Philo comments on the idea that God created the world in six literal days as follows in his Legum Allegoriae (Allegorical Interpretation):

It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time; because all time is only the space of days and nights, and these things the motion of the sun as he passes over the earth and under the earth does necessarily make. But the sun is a portion of heaven so that one must confess that time is a thing posterior to the world. Therefore, it would be correctly said that the world was not created in time, but that time had its existence in consequence of the world.

(p. 25)

Philo also took issue with other events in Genesis, such as the idea that God had literally created Eve from Adam’s rib. He claims that what this is actually supposed to represent is the powers of Adam’s mind:

The literal statement conveyed in these words is a fabulous one; for how can anyone believe that a woman was made of a rib of a man, or, in short, that any human being was made out of another? And what hindered God, as he had made man out of the earth, from making a woman in the same manner?…’He took one of his ribs’, he took of the many powers of the mind, namely that power which dwells in the outward senses. And when he uses the expression ‘ he took’, we are not to understand it as if he had said ‘he took away’ but rather as equivalent to ‘he counted, he examined …

(p. 40-41).

It is important to note that Philo did not have access to the modern methods of biblical scholarship and his interpretation did not mean he did not actually believe what the Bible said. He did believe in the historicity of the Biblical stories and that they had occurred historically, but he did also believe that they could be read and understood in an allegorical light. Philo’s methods would go on to have a massive influence on subsequent biblical interpretation, including that of Christianity. After all, this can be seen in the very fact that we have his works extant, they were preserved by Christian scholars and monks in Latin translation: Philo of course, originally wrote in Greek. 

Whilst Philo was the first Jew to apply Greek modes of interpretation to the Bible, he was of course, not the first Jew to interpret the text. Judaism had its own, unique way of reading the scriptures that would become known as midrash. Decades before Philo was born, there lived a Jewish sage named Hillel the Elder ( traditionally 110 BC-10 AD). According to a story, a pagan once approached Hillel and promised that, if he could recite the entire Torah to him whilst standing on one leg, he would convert to Judaism. While the man stood on one leg, Hillel said “What is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow-man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go, learn it”. (B Shabbat, 1975 p.65) The Pagan, it is said, converted. Whilst Hillel had obviously not engaged in textual exegesis as did Philo, he had interpreted the text down to a single commandment. Thus, Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Bible was going on before Philo and as we will see, it went on after him as well.

Jewish interpretation – Midrash

After the Ptolemies and within the lifetime of Philo, the Greek dynasty fell with the death of Cleopatra and Rome took its place as the imperial power of the Near East, including both Egypt and the Jewish homeland of Judea. In 66 AD a Jewish revolt broke out against Roman rule and after four years of brutal fighting, it was crushed by the Roman legions. Significantly, the Romans also destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, until then the focal point of the Jewish faith. Not all Jews had supported the revolt against Rome however and according to tradition, the Pharisee leader Yohanan Ben Zakkai managed to survive the fighting and escaped the besieged city. He went to see the Roman general Vespasian who he predicted would one day become emperor. When this prediction came true, Vespasian allowed Zakkai to create a centre for Jewish learning in the city of Yavneh. At Yavneh, the priests, rabbis and scribes that assembled there tried their best to preserve the traditions and rituals that had taken place at the temple in the hope that it would once again be rebuilt as it was after its destruction by the Babylonians. At the start, the academy, which most likely was a group of scholars taught by a master in group study rather than a formal and recognised institution, was led by Rabbi Yohanan and his students, Eliezer and Joshua. Eventually, they would be succeeded by Ishmael and the brilliant Akiva.

As well as spirituality, the rabbis created a new form of uniquely Jewish biblical interpretation that became known as midrash. Scripture, as Karen Armstrong says, was not seen as something that was or could ever be completed by these Jewish interpreters. The meaning of the text was not immediately clear, it had to be searched for. It had multiple meanings and was seen as inexhaustible, it revealed something new with every interpretation. Far from being enslaved to the literal meaning of the text, these Rabbis constantly reinterpreted it to meet the needs of their own time, as Armstrong stresses, any scripture that could not assist in solving new problems was useless. (See Armstrong’s The Lost Art of Scripture pp. 187-194 and The Bible: A Biography, pp. 79-101. See also Martin Goodman’s A History of Judaism pp. 261-288) A primary form of exegesis within midrash, originally started by Rabbi Johanan interpreting a verse from the book of Hosea, was known as forming a horoz or “chain”. This entailed taking completely unconnected passages of scripture, sometimes from different books, and linking them together to form a new unified meaning. Some readers may protest that this is completely distorting and misreading the text: modern biblical scholars would certainly think so – verses are yanked out of context and completely twisted to mean something different than what they were written to mean. In a way this is true, however, the Rabbis, again, had no access to modern methods of biblical criticism and they were not trying to interpret the verse from an historical point of view. The Bible to them was not just an ordinary book, it was of course divine revelation and so they saw no real contradiction with reading it in this way. All of it was connected in some way or another, ‘horoz’ merely revealed these connections. As biblical scholar John Barton says of midrash in his book A History of the Bible: The Book and its Faiths, the idea of horoz was as follows:

Any passage in scripture can aid in the interpretation of any other passage, since scripture forms a kind of interlocking web of texts…that is, are all interrelated irrespective of date or authorship.

(pp. 332-333)

Rabbis saw no problem with actively changing the wording of scripture to suit a new interpretation. For example, Rabbi Meir was engaged in a discussion about a verse in the book of Deuteronomy (21:23) that said that a hanged criminal must be buried before night as he was “a curse (kilelat) of God.” Meir turned this verse on its head saying to change the word “curse” (kilelat) to “distressed” (kallani) so that the verse now read that the criminal was not cursed by God, but instead caused him distress:

Rabbi Meir said: The phrase “for he that is hung is a curse [kilelat] of God” should be understood as follows: When a man suffers in the wake of his sin, what expression does the Divine Presence use? I am distressed [kallani] about My head, I am distressed about My arm, meaning, I, too, suffer when the wicked are punished.

(Sefaria, Mishna Sanhedrin 6)

Rabbi Akiva was, it is said, one of the best at this form of interpretation and became famous for it. A story in the Babylonian Talmud claims that his skill was so advanced, that word of it reached Moses himself in Heaven. Moses went to one of Akiva’s classes to see what all the fuss was about and sat down behind the other students to listen. He was upset when he realised that even he could not understand what Akiva and his students were discussing, even though they were supposed to be discussing interpretation of the revelation that he had received. It was only when Akiva explicitly said that what he was teaching had been revealed to Moses, that Moses himself felt better. (Sefaria, Menachot 29b). Akiva’s interpretations were not without controversy and some accused him of crossing a line, however his methods were the most popular for the simple reason that they, as Armstrong writes, “kept scripture open” (The Bible: The Biography, p. 86) and practically addressed the issues that were being faced. Akiva himself though would meet a tragic end. In 132 AD, there was a second Jewish uprising against Rome led by Simon bar Kokhba. Akiva supported Kokhba and proclaimed him to be the Messiah. For this backing, Akiva was tortured and killed by the Roman authorities.

The rabbis and exegetes at Yavneh even went so far as to directly challenge God himself. As a story in the Bava Metzia relates, Rabbi Eliezer was involved in a debate on a legal ruling (halakha) and was trying to convince the other rabbis that his opinion was correct, but they did not believe him. Eliezer then asks for a series of miracles to prove his point. He asks for proof from a carob tree, which then uproots itself. The rabbis are still not convinced. Eliezer then asks for the support of a stream, which subsequently starts to flow backwards, and then from the very walls of their study hall which proceed to shake and lean inward. But the rabbis, despite seeing the miracles for themselves still do not accept his opinion. Apparently getting increasingly annoyed, Eliezer asks for the support of God himself, whose voice comes down from heaven saying:

 Why are you differing with Rabbi Eliezer, as the halakha is in accordance with his opinion in every place that he expresses an opinion?

Incredibly, even this does not persuade the rabbis that they are wrong. Rabbi Yeshoshua fires back with part of the verse of Deuteronomy 30:12 “It is not in Heaven”, meaning that, since the revelation was already given at Sinai to Moses, they do not trust the divine voice as a decent means of support!  Since Eliezer had still not managed to convince the majority of other rabbis to support his position, he loses the debate. God, in reaction to just being rebuked by one of his followers smiles and says proudly “My children have triumphed over me, my children have triumphed over me”. (Sefaria, Bava Metzia 59b)

These stories provide further evidence that religious believers did not always interpret their scriptures literally. Even if they were believed to have occurred historically, do these stories –  Moses knowing less and feeling inferior to Rabbi Akiva and his students, scripture being deliberately and clearly changed and even God himself being beaten in an argument by his own followers – really sound like they were made by believers who read scripture literally with little to no interpretation involved? I would even go so far as to say that some of these stories, especially the one about God being argued against, as well as the practice of horoz would be considered heretical by modern fundamentalists. Although, like Philo, we can reasonably make the assumption that the rabbis believed in the Bible historically, but they clearly did not read and interpret is as such and as we have seen, they had no qualms about wrenching verses from their original context and joining together parts of the text that previously had no connection. And, again, they saw no issue with consciously changing the words of their scripture to better fit their own views. This is about as far from modern fundamentalist literalism as it is possible to get.

We have seen that Judaism has a long history of biblical interpretation, developed from both Greco-Roman traditions of allegorically reading the epic poetry of Homer, most notably personified by Philo of Alexandria, and from their own native Jewish tradition of midrash. In both cases, Jews were able to create sophisticated and well-thought out systems of interpretation for reading their scriptures that went way beyond simply taking the text at its word and leaving it at that. This should be a serious rebuttal to the view expressed by both believers and atheists that religious believers have always read their scriptures in a literal manner, or have just accepted what scripture said without question, because it was considered divinely inspired. Biblical interpretation and exegesis did not end with Judaism however and it would continue with its daughter faith, Christianity, the founder of which, as we have already noted, lived at the same time as Philo. Whilst midrash would remain a mainly uniquely Jewish form of exegesis, it was influential on Christian readings of both the Hebrew Bible and what would eventually become the New Testament. Allegorical reading though, as employed by Philo, would have a far greater impact on Christian exegesis, and as we will see, it was the main but not only, form of interpretation that Christian thinkers devised. But the system that they did end up with, inspired, like Philo’s by the Greco-Roman culture surrounding them, would leave its mark for over a thousand years.

The Patristic Era – The Church Fathers

The first few centuries of Christianity’s existence in the Roman Empire, before and to some extent after it was made a licit, and then the official religion of the empire, is known as the Patristic Era. This era was the one in which lived the Church Fathers; some of the most influential Christian philosophers and theologians that influence Christianity to this day. Obviously, there were a vast number of Church Fathers, so we will focus on two of the most famous and influential, and their views on scriptural interpretation. Those two will be Origen of Alexandria (184-253 AD) and St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD). Many scholars have studied the Church Fathers over the centuries and modern ones have all come to the conclusion that completely literal interpretation of scripture, especially in a modern sense, was not something the Fathers endorsed or agreed with.

As Ken Parry, a specialist in Ancient History in Macquarie University, Sydney, writes in his introduction to The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Patristics:

While scriptural knowledge is fundamental to patristic thought and authorship, it is far from biblical fundamentalism in the modern sense of the term. This is often missed by commentators not versed in historical theology who imagine that modern biblical fundamentalism can be applied to pre-modern theological thought. The authority of scriptures was paramount to the fathers and inseparable from tradition, but it was not their only source of authority.

(p. 7-8)

David Bentley Hart, a noted American philosopher and theologian who has extensively studied this area, echoes these comments in his book Atheist Delusions:

The Ancient and Mediaeval Church has always acknowledged that the Bible ought to be read allegorically in many instances, according to the spiritual doctrines of the church, and that the principal truths of scripture are not confined to its literal level which often reflects only the minds of its human authors.

(p. 63)

Origen of Alexandria

The first (and arguably most important for our purposes) patristic author we will examine is Origen of Alexandria (184-253 AD). Origen was born in 184 AD in Alexandria, Roman Egypt. He was born to Leonides, a professor of literature and a Christian. When he was a teenager, the Roman Emperor, Septimius Severus started to persecute Christians and Origen’s father was imprisoned. Origen reportedly wanted to martyr himself along with his father but was stopped from doing so by his mother who hid his clothes. Too embarrassed to leave the house naked, Origen, thankfully for both his mother and for us, did not manage to achieve his desire. Origen became a philosopher and teacher and over the years achieved much fame and prestige, becoming known throughout the empire. He travelled widely and wrote prolifically including one work of apologetics in about 248 AD, Contra Celsum (Against Celsus), in which he defended the Christian faith against the pagan philosopher, Celsus. The work is still regarded as one of genius and thankfully can still be read in its entirety today. Due to a conflict with the local bishop of Alexandria, Demetrius, he moved to the city of Caesarea Maritima in Palestine and opened a school there which was very successful and attracted many students. His reputation reached such an extent, that the mother of the Roman Emperor Severus Alexander, Julia Avita Mamaea invited him to teach her philosophy. In the year 250 AD, a plague broke out for which Christians were blamed by the Emperor Decius. Origen was imprisoned and severely tortured by the authorities who tried to make him reject his faith which he vehemently refused. He survived but was very weakened by the ordeal and he sadly passed away a few years later from his injuries.

Like Philo before him, Origen also advocated an allegorical approach to reading scripture. His methods of exegesis became so well known that today his name is almost synonymous with the practice. It is unknown if Origen was directly influenced by the Jewish midrashic interpretation that we examined in the last section. Martin Goodman in his book A History of Judaism however says that a Jewish rabbi, Rabbi Hoshaiah, lived in third century Caesarea with his disciples at the same time as Origen, who, as mentioned, moved there and set up a school after a dispute with the Alexandrian bishop, Demetrius. Hoshaiah though, Goodman notes, does not seem to have been directly affected by Origen’s ideas. (p. 268). This does not mean however, that Origen was not influenced by Hoshaiah, that is if they ever met. Growing up in multicultural Alexandria, which retained its Jewish community well into the Christian period, it is very possible, maybe even likely, that Origen met and maybe studied scripture and midrash with Jews in his youth; it is known that he learned at least some Hebrew. Since Origen never explicitly states that he had learned Jewish exegetical methods in any of his extant writings though, it will have to remain speculation for the time being. Origen’s allegorical reading was mainly expounded in his On First Principles which he wrote whilst still living in Alexandria in the 220s-230s AD and which we will look at later. His approach can still be found though in his later works.  In his Contra Celsum, for example, in response to a criticism of Celsus’ that Christians did not use reason to support their beliefs, Origen writes the following:

For in the Christian system also it will be found that there is, not to speak at all arrogantly, at least as much of investigation into articles of belief, and of explanation of dark sayings, occurring in the prophetical writings and of the parables in the Gospels and of countless other things, which either were narrated or enacted with a symbolical signification.

(p.41)

Part of his attitude to scripture can also be seen in the way he reportedly taught it to his students. What Origen actually taught in the school he set up in Caesarea was not religion per se, but philosophy. Our notion of “religion” or even of a separation and clear demarcation between philosophy and religion had not yet taken root in Origen’s time. As scholars such as Pierre Hadot, in the edited version of his writings Philosophy as a way of Life (p. 126-144) and Winrich Löhr in his 2010 article “Christianity as Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives of an Ancient Intellectual Project”, Christian philosophers, like their pagan counterparts, regarded philosophy, not as an academic subject to be studied, but a way of life to be lived. “Spiritual exercises”, as Hadot calls them, were regular parts of what pagan philosophers did to achieve a state of inner tranquillity (eudaimonia), philosophical practice was supposed to achieve in the student a transformation in their very being. When Christianity came on the scene, it was more regarded by some as a philosophy – a way of life that had to be practiced rather than a religion to be simply believed – and Origen was no different. One of Origen’s students, Theodore, a young man from Asia Minor, stopped off in Caeserea for a holiday before continuing on to Berytos (modern Beirut in Lebanon) to study Roman law. He ran into Origen and instead of staying in Caeserea for a couple of weeks, he stayed for five years and was taught philosophy by Origen. As Löhr writes in his article (p.163-164). philosophical schools in antiquity were not the same as modern-day universities and were often a small affair. Whilst a philosophical education would greatly enhance one’s social standing, there was no agreed standard curriculum, exams or qualifications as there is today. Remarkably, we have an extant document from Theodore, who after his education with Origen, did in the end go onto study law, in which he thanks his teacher and, more importantly, says what it was he was taught. Origen had evidently created his own sort of curriculum for his students, as Löhr writes:

First he was taught dialectics in order to enable him to distinguish true from specious arguments. Then he was instructed in the natural sciences, astronomy and geometry, in order to transform the irrational wonder about the universe into a rational admiration for the maker of the universe. After physics followed ethics, whose goal is to acquaint the soul with itself and to perfect the disciple in the virtues, not only the four cardinal virtues of wisdom, temperance, prudence and fortitude, but also patience and as the mother of all virtues piety. The curriculum reached its climax with theology which was meant to explore the ultimate cause of the universe. Here first the opinions of Greek philosophers and poets were subjected to close scrutiny before the master gave access to true theology by explaining the oracles of God and his prophets as contained in scripture.

(p. 165)

What this reveals is both interesting and important. Firstly, it is a rebuttal of the common and worn-out New Atheist cliché that Christians hated and “destroyed” pagan culture which Tim has addressed very well in his article about the supposed “loss of ancient learning” apparently (according to various atheists) suffered by classical culture at the hands of evil and intolerant Christians. As both Tim shows, and as Origen shows here, that notion does not stand up at all to any kind of historical scrutiny. Far from “hating” pagan culture, as we can see here, Origen taught his students Greek philosophy and (rudimentary) natural sciences first before he taught them the Bible. He obviously considered pagan learning of some worth (he was, like Philo, a Platonist) or he would not have taught it to his students. The fact that he taught this before he taught them scripture, shows that he must have thought a student needed education in other forms of “truth” before being able to study the ultimate truth contained in the Bible. In other words, the Bible for him was not the only source for truth or learning. He did not think one could just rely on the text Bible for learning about the world like some literalists do today, which is another piece of evidence that the Bible has not always been read in this manner.

Origen was part of the Christian school of thought known as the Alexandrian School, which according to the Anglican theologian and scientist, Alister McGrath in his book Historical Theology (pp. 22-53) was focused much more on the notion of Jesus as saviour and that being “redeemed by him” meant “being made divine” or “taken up into the life of God”. God had become man in the person of Jesus and so, the Alexandrians argued, man could in a way share in the nature of God. The Alexandrian School relied heavily on Greek philosophy and, like Origen, were prone to allegorical interpretation of scripture. Here is a good place to remind ourselves however, that although Origen’s allegorical interpretation was the main and most influential form of exegesis during his time, it was not the only one and Christians in different places had other views of how the Bible should be read. One of these other schools of interpretation was the rival school of thought to Alexandria, the Antiochene School, based in the city of Antioch in modern day Turkey and which included such theologians as Theodore of Mopsuestia, Diodore of Tarsus and John Chrysostom. The Antiochene school focused more on moral concerns than soteriological in their theology and made less use of Greek philosophy than the Alexandrians. Unlike the Alexandrians, they also preferred a more historical, literal approach to the scriptures. This should not be thought of a case of literal (especially the modern version) versus allegorical – things were more complicated than that. As Barton says:

It has become usual to say that the Antiochenes rejected allegorical reading in favour of literalism. They tend to avoid messianic interpretations in favour of prophetic and psalmic texts, preferring to see them – as do Jewish commentators – as fulfilled in Jewish history, and so not still awaiting fulfilment in Christ…But at other times their interpretation can seem just as allegorical as Origen’s and they owed him a great debt…The Antiochene concern was that the text should be read as morally and spiritually edifying, and not collapse into symbols. It somewhat resembles Jewish reading, not in being non-allegorical but in sharing the Jewish concern for ensuring that the text had something to say about halakhah, that it was relevant to everyday life.

(p. 351)

We have now seen some ways in which Origen thought about the Bible and how he taught it to others. Now it is time to get into his actual hermeneutical methods. Scripture for him had three senses based on Platonic models known as “the body”, “the psyche” and “the spirit”, also called the literal, moral and allegorical. To demonstrate examples of these senses to his readers, he said that the three books of the bible known as wisdom literature – the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs – were perfect examples of them. As Karen Armstrong writes in her book The Lost Art of Scripture:

Proverbs represented the body of scripture and expressed the literal sense of the text; it was essential to master this thoroughly before attempting anything further. Ecclesiastes worked at the level of the psyche, the natural powers of mind and heart; its author taught us to see the vanity of earthly things. And showed us how futile it was to place all our hopes in the material world. By teaching us how to behave, it represented the moral sense of scripture. Only a Christian who had been through this preliminary initiation could advance to the spiritual or allegorical sense.

(p. 211)

On the same page, she goes onto say that the Song of Songs represented the allegorical sense for Origen. The first line for example – “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” – literally was a bride longing for her groom. Morally, the bride represented all Christians who longed to return to their original state of being in God. Allegorically, the bride was a symbol of the people of Israel who had received the “dowry” of the Hebrew scriptures, but were waiting for the Word to fulfil them. Applied to an individual person, Armstrong says, the line represented the hope that the soul would be enlightened by the visitation of the Word. (Jesus).

This was the interpretation of merely the first line of the Song of Songs and one can see that Origen’s use of allegory was not careless cherry picking but, like the Jewish interpreters with Midrash, was incredibly sophisticated and well-thought out. One can also see from Armstrong’s summary that, as I said earlier, Origen did not dismiss the literal sense of the text but viewed it as a very important part of his entire exegetical method. As she says, a student had to master this sense and absorb it before moving on to the others. In his exegesis, Origen combined both Greek and Jewish methods of interpretation into a coherent new method. As historian Tom Holland says of Origen’s methodology in his book Dominion:

Contradictions hinted only at hidden truths. The challenge for the reader was to access them. Scripture was like a mansion with an immense number of locked rooms, and an equal number of keys, all of which lay scattered about the house. This haunting image, so Origen declared had been suggested to him by his Hebrew teacher; and yet in his own efforts to track down the keys, to open the locked doors, he relied on methods that derived from a very different source. In the great library of Alexandria, scholars had long been honing methods for making sense of ancient texts: treating their subject matter as allegory, and their language as an object of the most methodical study. Origen in his own commentaries, adopted both techniques. Jewish the great mansion of the Old Testament may have been but the surest method for exploring it was Greek.

(p. 103)

Finally, the best way to get a good idea of what Origen himself thought about scripture and how he used his hermeneutical method, is to read a passage from another one of his own works. In Book IV of his already mentioned On First Principles he explains his view of the creation narrative in book of Genesis and is dismissive view of those who read it completely literally:

Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate, that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars — the first day even without a sky? And who is found so ignorant as to suppose that God, as if He had been a husbandman, planted trees in paradise, in Eden towards the east, and a tree of life in it…No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that some mystical meaning may be indicated by it…It is very easy for anyone who pleases to gather out of holy Scripture what is recorded indeed as having been done, but what nevertheless cannot be believed as having rea­sonably and appropriately occurred according to the historical account….And many other instances similar to this will be found in the Gospels by anyone who will read them with atten­tion, and will observe that in those narratives which appear to be literally recorded, there are inserted and interwoven things which cannot be admitted his­torically, but which may be accepted in a spiritual signification.

(Book IV, Verse 16)

Given this quite forceful and explicit dismissal of literalism, which may be quite surprising to some readers considering the authoritative status the Bible holds within Christianity, what would Origen think if he could see that millions of people today read the Bible in exactly the way he dismissed as “silly” and “ignorant”? As Diarmaid MacCulloch writes in response to this quote:

Origen might be saddened to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly. He would try to tell them that such things were true, because all parts of the scriptures were divinely inspired truth but they should not be read as if they were historical events, like the rise and fall of Persian dynasties.

(p. 151)

Origen’s methods of interpretation and especially his idea that there existed different “senses” of scripture  was massively influential on Christianity and would dictate how the Bible was read and understood (with a couple of changes) for over a thousand years, from his time right through the Middle Ages. He might be dismissed by both fundamentalists and even some atheists as not a “true” Christian for how he interpreted the text, but this assertion would not only be a brilliant example of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, but also extremely unfair. Despite his relatively privileged status as a member of the educated, Hellenised, Greek-Speaking elite of Alexandria, he was above all passionately devoted to his faith, wrote an entire book defending it and in the end, died after vehemently refusing to abandon it, even in the face of torture. He is considered today one of the greatest scholars the early Church ever produced and in my opinion thoroughly deserves this reputation. He also raised Christianity up to a position of intellectual respectability within Greco-Roman society that it did not enjoy beforehand. Christianity before he came along was considered a faith for the stupid, poor and uneducated who were taken in by Christianity because they did not know any better; these being some of Celsus’ criticisms. After Origen, no one could ever say that again.

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) is possibly the most influential Christian thinker in the Western tradition and continues to influence Christianity, and Western thought in general to this day. Augustine is more well-known for being a philosopher and theologian than just a biblical exegete, though this did feature strongly in his thought. I will therefore principally focus on Augustine’s attitude to scripture and only venture into his theology when and if necessary for the wider point about biblical interpretation. Augustine was born in Roman North Africa, modern day Algeria, into what would become the last days of the Western empire, though he obviously did not know it at the time. He was born to Monica, a devout Christian and Patricius, a pagan man who converted to Christianity on the day he died. He received his education in rhetoric and also acquired an interest in philosophy. Though he was raised Christian by his mother, he converted to Manicheism, a Persian religion, and remained one for a number of years. He later gained a highly prestigious post of professor of rhetoric in Milan at the age of only 30 and searched for a religious path as he was beginning to lose interest in Manicheism. He later met Ambrose, bishop of Milan and a friendship developed between the two with Ambrose informing Augustine more about Christianity. At the age of 31, Augustine famously converted to Christianity after hearing a child’s voice say “tolle, lege!” meaning “Take it up and read!” He opened a copy of Saint Paul’s letters lying near him and read Romans 13:13-14 and from that moment on, he became a Christian. After writing many brilliant works of theology and philosophy including City of God and Confessions (which is how we know about his early life) and being involved in theological  controversies such as that of the Donatists and the Pelagian controversy, Augustine passed away in 430 AD at the age of 75 in Hippo, where he was bishop. His passing came at the very moment the Vandals were besieging the city.

At the outset, it should be said that Augustine was not a complete allegorist and did not allegorise to the extent that Philo and Origen had done, but there was definitely room for allegorical, figurative reading in his exegesis. The reason for this is partly because of his cultural circumstances. Augustine was born in the Latin-speaking, African part of the Roman Empire. Although he learned it in his youth, he did not know Greek and therefore could not get proper access to the Alexandrian interpretive tradition. He did however study and admire philosophy, especially the Platonists who he regarded as the closest to Christians in doctrine and as a Platonist, his synthesis of Christianity and Platonic philosophy continues to influence the faith today. Augustine did believe, then, that scripture was in many cases historically accurate and conveyed true events, but his version of “literalism” was not the same as literalists today would think of it and to explain this properly, I will turn to two brilliant specialists on Augustine and scripture: Robert A Ziegler and Robert Cameron. For a start, as Ziegler writes in his 2015 article “Augustine of Hippo’s Doctrine of Scripture: Christian Exegesis in Late Antiquity”, Augustine believed that ‘divine speech’ was fundamentally different to human speech as God, unlike humans was not confined to time:

For Augustine, divine speech, like God Himself, exists beyond the confines of time. Mortal speakers necessarily communicate in syllables and in languages. But, verbal communication reflects humanity’s subordination to time. Augustine contended that God’s communication is not contained within syllables or limited to a single language because God himself is not subordinate to time and therefore possesses no need to communicate in a sequential, verbal manner. Thus, despite the divinely inspired nature of their work, the biblical authors were not recreating divine speech, which, within Augustine’s theological framework, could not be bounded by the grammatical and time constraints inherent in all human communication. )

(p. 33)

Adding to this, Robert Cameron in The Blackwell Companion to Augustine writes that Augustine did therefore not regard the Bible as a direct word for word transcription of what God had actually physically said and, in order to communicate with humans, he had to somewhat “come down to our level” by having the scriptures in a human language:

For Augustine, God’s majesty surpasses the Scriptures … Scripture uses human authors and words, and it features the same rhetorical devices that are found in all discourse: figures of speech, staged dialogues, and shifting verb tenses. On the other hand, Scripture is not like any other book, because its words are faithful conduits to the divine mind. God inspired the writers of Scripture with wisdom that respected the human act of writing while it revealed his will for salvation. Scripture represents a fecund diversity of authors, genres, images, stories, laws, rituals, characters, and events – all converging upon the will of God …

(p. 202)

Secondly, as I stated above, Augustine’s view of interpreting a verse literally was not the same as someone today reading a verse literally. Augustine’s “literalism” meant that a variety of literal interpretations could be attached to a verse. This is different to the modern version, where it is mainly “The Bible says it, therefore that’s it”. As Ziegler writes:

Yet, one must recognize that Augustine possessed a broader understanding of literal interpretation than many modern readers do…One must recognize that Augustine’s belief in a multiplicity of true, literal interpretations was tempered by his theological commitments. While two orthodox expositors could develop two divergent, literal, and equally valid explanations for a single passage, a literalist, Donatist interpretation would be rejected as patently false. Thus, Augustine’s approach to literal readings of Scripture is in one sense subjective. A range of literal and orthodox meanings may be wrung from a text, but the validity of one’s exegesis is ultimately measured by the orthodoxy of one’s conclusion, not by any attempt at objective textual analysis.

(p. 35)

Cameron summarises Augustine’s view on literal interpretation with the following, talking about Augustine’s views on Genesis:

To begin with, even after discounting the usual historical and linguistic barriers to understanding, having several plausible options for interpretation means that interpreters cannot really be sure what meaning Moses had in mind. Furthermore, Augustine asks, since Moses was aware that his words would teach so many different people across so many generations, should we not expect him to make his words allow as many true meanings as possible?

(p. 208)

We must remember that Augustine was not a modern man, but a man of his time from the late Roman Empire. He inhabited a completely different cultural and intellectual world from our modern one and so to read back onto him our modern ideas of creationism would be anachronistic. I do however highly recommend both Ziegler and Cameron’s brilliant essays on this topic, should a reader want more information.

As both of them, and I stated, Augustine defiantly agreed with and allowed allegorical interpretations of scripture and he defiantly believed that you needed some kind of interpretive guideline to read it properly which would prevent the usual “cherry picking” charge that is often levelled against this type of interpretation.  Augustine took it upon himself to write just such a guide. Apart from his other well-known works such as City of God and Confessions, Augustine also wrote a book that is recognised as the first true book on hermeneutical interpretation ever, the book is De Doctrina Cristiana (On Christian Teaching). This book was a guide for Christian students on how to read and interpret the Bible. At the start of the work, he addresses his critics who say that the Bible does not need to be interpreted or that interpretation does not need to be taught:

Their excitement must be restrained by the recollection that…they nevertheless learned even the alphabet with human help…My argument is with Christians who congratulate themselves on a knowledge of the holy scriptures gained without any human guidance and who – if their claim is valid – thus enjoy a real and substantial blessing. But they must admit that each one of us learnt our native language by habitually hearing it spoken from the very beginnings of childhood and acquired others, Greek, Hebrew, whatever either by hearing them in the same way or by learning them from a human teacher….they should learn without any pride what has to be learned from a human teacher and those responsible for teaching others should pass on without pride or jealously the knowledge they have received.

(pp. 4-5)

Augustine then goes on in the four books of the work to describe in detail to Christians how to interpret the text. Like Origen before him, he thought that the Bible had different “senses” – such as “literal” and “figurative” (allegorical) – in which it could and should be read and warned against mistaking one sense for the other:

To begin with, one must take care not to interpret a figurative expression literally. What the apostle says is relevant here ‘the letter kills but the spirit gives life’ [2 Cor 3:6). For when something meant figuratively is interpreted as if it were meant literally, it is understood in a carnal way…A person who follows the letter understands metaphorical word as literal and does not relate what the literal word signifies to any other meaning…It is then a miserable kind of spiritual slavery to interpret signs as things and, to be incapable of raising the mind’s eye above the physical creation so as to absorb the eternal light.  

(p. 72)

Thus, from this we can see that Augustine was neither a complete allegorist nor a complete literalist, but somewhere down the middle, although he most likely would have seen no dividing line at all because he believed all scripture came together in a unanimous whole which pointed the way to Jesus Christ. As Cameron said above, Augustine acknowledged that the passing of time would mean new interpretations would emerge, even new literal ones. Unlike some modern literalists however, he did not accept everything in scripture uncritically. Whilst as we have seen, he believed it was historically accurate, he also realised that culture, morality and mores had changed from the time it was written to his own time and that it was important that this fact was accepted by Christians because some of what occurred in biblical times was now not acceptable in their own:

We must therefore pay careful attention to the conduct of appropriate to different places, times and persons, in case we make rash imputations of wickedness … Righteous men of long ago visualised the kingdom of heaven as an earthly kingdom and predicted it accordingly. In the interests of perpetuating the race, there was  a perfectly blameless practice for one man to have several wives … Given such social conventions, things that the saints of those ages could do without any lust – although they were doing something which cannot be done without lust nowadays – are not censured by scripture…Likewise, we must take care not to regard something in the Old Testament that is by the standards of its own time not wickedness or wrongdoing, even when understood literally and not figuratively, as capable of being transferred to the present time and applied to our own lives.

(pp. 78-81)

Augustine also had no time for Christians who attempted to lecture people on subjects, such as what we would call today, the natural sciences, about which they really knew little to nothing about because they thought the information was contained in scripture. He writes this in a remarkable passage from his work On the Literal Meaning of Genesis quoted in an article by Joshua J Mark. This is quite a long passage but it is worth quoting in its entirety, because it could contribute very much to the ongoing cultural debate between science and religion and the issue of some believers not wanting to believe things about which there is a scientific consensus such as evolution:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

Again, this is a very interesting statement, especially given the time in which Augustine wrote, it seems almost modern. One wonders what Augustine would have thought today of the many believers who reject the scientific consensus on things such as evolution, climate change and more and prefer to see the answers in scripture. From this quote, it looks like he would have disagreed with them, but would he therefore have abandoned his own literal interpretation(s) of biblical stories such as Genesis? That is more difficult to say and unfortunately we will never know the answer. Augustine’s stance on this issue however should be more widely known about by both believers and atheists, for believers of a more literal bent, it tells them that the Bible is not and was not written as a science textbook, but that they can still believe in many of the things contained in it whilst believing in science. For some atheists similarly, it shows that science and religion do not have to be at odds with each other and that many religious people, even ancient ones, believed and continue to believe in science as much as they do.

Lastly, to finish our discussion of Augustine, We can see that he gives us an example of another type of interpretation, unique to Christians like midrash was a form of interpretation unique to Judaism, called “typological interpretation”. This was basically the idea that the events of the Christian New Testament were foreshadowed and alluded to in the Hebrew Bible.  As Biblical scholar, John Barton, who we will also meet later on, writes about this type of interpretation:

It is a reading that extends beyond the natural sense of the Hebrew Bible and makes fresh claims and proposals about the relation between God and the human race that do not contradict the Old Testament but do move outside it. Christians then proceeded to read the Old Testament as though it already taught these new ideas … This was worked out in practice by a creative rereading of the Old Testament as though it spoke with the New Testament’s voice … by the later second century, more sophisticated methods of reading the Old Testament had been developed, in which it was seen as having a natural surface sense, yet also a deeper meaning that pointed forward to Jesus and the New Testament.

(p. 325-326)

Most of the Church Fathers and Christian exegetes of late antiquity believed in, and used this type of reading, not just Augustine and it continued into the Middle Ages. One of the examples of Augustine using this type of interpretation is in his famous work City of God, where he interprets the story of Noah’s ark as representative of the crucifixion of Jesus. After mentioning how Noah was instructed by God to build the ark and survive the flood, Augustine says:

Without doubt this is a symbol of the City of God on pilgrimage in this world, of the church which is saved through the wood on which was suspended ‘the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus’. The actual measurements of the ark, its length, height and breadth symbolise the human body, in the reality of which Christ was to come and did come, to mankind….And the door which it was given in its side surely represents the wound made when the side of the crucified was pierced with the spear. This was we know, is the way of entrance for those who come to him…

(Page 643)

This typological interpretation could be said to be one of, if not the earliest uniquely Christian form of interpreting the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. The first Christians were all, of course, Jewish and believed that Jesus was the Messiah from their interpretations of certain passages of the Hebrew Bible that they thought signified the coming of Jesus. It was also such interpretations that early Christians most likely used in discussions with Jewish people to try and convince them that the Messiah had finally arrived in the person of Jesus. It continues to be used today, for example the passages about the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 53 is thought by a lot of modern Christians to be a prophecy about Jesus’ suffering on the cross. It shows that, once again, pure allegorical interpretation was not the only form of exegesis used by Christians and Jews, there were others, though it could be argued that typological reading involves partly allegorical reading in the way that it sees a hidden meaning below the surface level of the text. Augustine’s example of it, anyway, is a good a one as any to demonstrate its use.

Augustine was later made a saint of the Catholic Church after his death and later a Doctor of the Church. He continues to be revered as one of the most important Christians ever to have lived and his influence, not just on Western Christianity, but on Western philosophy, thought and Western culture in general is unparalleled. He was routinely used as an authority to support arguments in scholastic debates during the Middle Ages along with other church fathers and Greek philosophers such as Aristotle. All in all, Augustine had a very mixed bag of views on scriptural interpretation that one could regard as a decent middle ground. He did believe scripture was fully divinely inspired and in most cases, historically accurate. He also believed however that the Bible was not a word for word account directly from God’s mouth. The Bible, in his view, needed to be interpreted with guidelines set by someone knowledgeable. He also advocated allegorical interpretation where needed and, as we have seen, dismissed some Christians who used the Bible to support unsupported and untrue opinions about the world that caused not only them but the scripture itself to appear ignorant and uneducated. As a side note, he also believed that truth could come from outside the Bible including from pagan works. His City of God shows that he had read countless works of Greek and Roman literature and knew them well, he also advocated the famous approach of the “gold of the Egyptians” in which he said that Christians could appropriate and use the works of pagans that were useful to them and Christianity. This had a large impact on the preservation of Greek and Roman works, and their use by Christians and as such, a large impact on the world in general given that the re-discovery and use of these works led to the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

It remains to be said that Augustine, whilst professing many controversial views such as the idea of original sin was a brilliant and sophisticated thinker who should be justly praised for his many achievements and deserves his place as one of the most important figures of the Western canon.

Before we leave the Patristic Era, it is useful to take a tiny detour to see some aspect of Biblical interpretation in the Middle East, in the centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the years just after the Arab conquests of the seventh century. The area, both before and after the Arab conquests, was majority Christian and they also held many of the interpretive opinions of their earlier and Western counterparts. This is an area that is less well known about in popular history when compared to the Christian East and West of the Roman Empire, so it will be interesting to note. For a quick glance at the historical context, all but one of the churches in this part of the world had been separated from the main Christian church in Constantinople due to doctrinal disagreements after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD about the nature of Jesus. Interestingly, the Christian scholars here also took a similar attitude to interpreting the Bible as related by historian, Jack Tannous in his great book The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society and Simple Believers. The situation was that John, the stylite of Litarb, had written a letter to Syriac Miaphysite Christian scholar, Jacob of Edessa, about the unorthodox overly literal theological opinions reportedly expressed by a Christian poet called Jacob of Sarugh. He apparently thought, as Tannous says, that God had spoken with an actual audible voice during the creation of the world and that words like “body” referred to actual physical bodies, when used in scripture. As Tannous writes.

In many ways, being able to read the Bible and the Fathers was more dangerous than not being able to read them. Taken too literally, or not interpreted properly in light of other fathers and tradition, a whole host of erroneous ideas might result.

(pp. 244-245)

This shows that interpreting the Bible and reading it in diverse ways was not only something that Christians in a certain locality did, but something that they did in all areas in which Christians were present. These Christians too relied on tradition and guidelines, like Augustine did, when reading scripture. Interpreting, and as we have seen, normally allegorical interpretation of scripture was the norm and this, along with the other ‘senses’ would continue into the Middle Ages in the West as we will now see.

The Middle Ages

The methods for interpreting the Bible had been formalised by the Middle Ages. The main methods used – the notion of senses of scripture – came principally from Origen, but Augustine, as mentioned, was also a big influence in terms of scriptural exegesis as well as theology. After the fall of Rome in 410 AD, the rest of the Western Empire similarly fell to the barbarians and new kingdoms were established upon the ruins of what a few decades previously had been Roman territory and chaos ensured. As Karen Armstrong says, (The Bible: A Biography p.127) due to the social instability created by Rome’s collapse, the only place really available for any kind of biblical exegesis were the monasteries. The idea of monasticism had been brought to the West from the East by John Cassian (360-435). Cassian also brought with him to the West the exegetical methods of Origen but added a new sense to Origen’s three original ones of the literal, moral and allegorical (body, psyche and spirit). Cassian added the anagogical sense, which revealed how a passage of scripture related to the end of time in the Christian worldview.

The four senses of scripture in the Middle Ages now read as follows, summarised by Alister McGrath:

1. The literal sense of scripture, in which the text could be taken at face value, referring to some historical event.
2. The allegorical sense, which interpreted certain passages of scripture to produce statements of doctrine. Those passages tended either to be obscure, or to have a literal meaning that was unacceptable for theological reasons to their readers.
3. The tropological or moral sense, which interpreted such passages to produce ethical guidance for Christian conduct
4. The anagogical sense, which interprets passages to indicate the grounds of Christian hope, pointing toward the future fulfilment of the divine promises in the New Jerusalem. (pp. 113-114)

The scheme of interpretation was often summed up in an easy to remember Latin poem, or rhyme that is found within the writings of many scholars of the Middle Ages:

Littera gesta docet

Quid credas allegoria

Moralis quid agas,

Quid speres anagogia

McGrath’s rough translation of this is:

“The literal [sense] teaches about deeds; the allegorical [sense] what to believe; the moral [sense] what to do; the anagogical [sense] what to hope for”.

Certain examples from scripture were used to demonstrate how the fourfold sense of scripture was to be used. Cassian himself used the example of Jerusalem. Whilst any passage from scripture could be read using all four senses with a number of reading methods, medieval exegetes tended to focus on certain aspects and strategies more than others. As David Vessey writes in The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics:

Cassian’s own example has become standard. Jerusalem, in the literal sense, refers to the city. In the allegorical sense, it refers to the Christian church. In the moral sense, it refers to our soul. In the anagogical sense, it refers to the kingdom to come. In theory, every passage of scripture can be read in all four senses; in practice, medieval interpretation tended to focus on the literal and the spiritual meaning of a text, where the spiritual could include allegorical, typological, tropological, or anagogical interpretations. In practice, Gregory the Great’s (540– 604) threefold strategy of interpretation – start with the historical, discern the typological, and draw out the moral – would dominate the next four hundred years of biblical hermeneutics.

(p.76)

Since, as I said, the methodology of biblical exegesis had been more or less formalised by the Middle Ages, (though this does not mean that everyone used them in exactly the same way), I will not go into too much detail about how individual thinkers interpreted the scriptures as I did with Origen and Augustine. Instead I will focus on general trends to do with biblical exegesis in the Middle Ages. As with the other sections, should any reader wish to know more about this area, I recommend looking at the sources listed in the bibliography below.

Islands of stability: Monastic schools, Medieval Universities and Scholasticism

As Armstrong said above, Western Europe was thrown into turmoil by the fall of Rome and the collapse of Roman power in virtually all of the Western half its empire. The Eastern, Greek-speaking half would of course, continue for almost 1,000 years more as what we now know as the Byzantine Empire until the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, but that does not concern us here. Amongst the instability generated by Rome’s collapse and the various other peoples that governed in its place, the only real place available for disciplined study of the Bible were the monasteries. As also stated above, monasticism had really taken off in the Christian East with many Christian monks and nuns taking off to the deserts, mainly of Egypt, depriving themselves of all but the barest necessities to devote themselves to God. These monks, first preceded traditionally by Saint Anthony (251-356), made homes for themselves in the wilderness, becoming known as the Desert Fathers (and Mothers), the sayings of whom are still available to us today. As also stated above, monasticism was brought over to the West by John Cassian (360-435). Monasticism was later expanded in the West by the creation of the monastic orders such as the Order of Saint Benedict modelled after the Rule created by St Benedict (480-547) and later came the Mendicant orders of the Dominicans founded by St Dominic (1170-1221) and the Franciscans by St Francis of Asisi (1181/2-1226) later in the thirteenth century. In these monasteries, monks, as well as engaging in prayers and other monastic duties, also studied the Bible in what became known as “lectio divina” (divine study). This was not just a simple reading of the Bible however, also involved was meditation on the words as well as interpretation. As Karen Armstrong writes in her The Lost Art of Scripture:

A monk spent two to three hours each day in lectio divina (divine study). He would imagine himself standing beside Moses on Sinai or at the foot of Jesus’ cross. Instead of simply running his eyes over the page, he would mouth the words, murmuring them subvocally, a practice recommended by classical rhetoricians as an aid to memorialisation.

(p. 266)

As well as the Bible, these monks also learned and translated classical texts, or at least the ones they had at hand, indeed, it is down to Christian monks that many of the texts from antiquity survived at all, before the Arabic translations came to Europe later on from the Islamic world, coincidently, many of the translators of which were also Christians of the Eastern churches. Around these monasteries (and also cathedrals), there developed schools where the Bible was studied more systematically. It was not just the Bible that was studied either, also studied were the sayings of the Church Fathers, including Origen and Augustine. Many (if not all) of the Church Fathers had written commentaries on scripture and they were viewed as authoritative guides for interpretation. 

Studying the Bible then mainly consisted of analysing a manuscript of the Bible along with what became known as ‘glosses’ commentary and notes in the margins and at the sides, normally from the Church Fathers to assist interpretation and understanding. As G.R Evans says in his The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle Ages:

The running commentary had many merits as a vehicle of teaching on the Bible. In its written form it allowed the individual reader to turn to the margin or the space between the lines of the book he was reading and find a difficult word or grammatical construction explained, an extract from Gregory or Augustine to clarify a perplexing passage, ready selected for him and conveniently placed to hand. The student listening to his master’s lectures was presented with an oral version of the commentary. He had an opportunity to ask questions and be further enlightened.

(p. 37)

The idea of glosses became very influential and eventually became standardised (somewhat) in the Glossa Ordinaria or Standard Gloss, though there were many different versions and it was not really a uniform work in the way we have critical additions of works today. Peter Lombard (1095/1100-1160) managed to improve matters greatly when he created his famous ‘Sentences’ (Sententiae in quattuor libris distinctae, or “Sentences divided into four books”). Drawing on the tradition of the glosses, and of the Christian interpretation of the Bible as a whole, the Sentences also coupled scripture with commentary and interpretation from authorities but unlike its predecessors, went further. As Philipp W. Rosemann writes in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages:

They not only compile biblical texts with authoritative interpretations from different sources, attempting to harmonize them, but arrange these texts systematically, according to a logical order…The four books of the Sentences follow a conceptual logic.

(p. 90)

As Rosemann goes on to say, the four books each address elements that are important and correspond to the Christian view of the world. Book One dealt with God and the Trinity, Book Two creation, Book Three with the Incarnation and lastly Book Four with the Sacraments. The Sentences may not seem like much, but it had a massive influence on theology throughout the Middle Ages. A Rosemann says, the Sentences:

… served as the standard theological textbook of the Latin West from the thirteenth until the sixteenth century. During this time, it was part of the duties of every aspiring Master of Theology to lecture on the Sentences. The history of much of scholiastic thought could therefore be written as the history of commentaries on this book.

(p.90)

What the use of the various commentaries and glosses indicate is a difference in how the Biblical exegetes of the Middle Ages, and how many literalists in modern times view the Bible. In the Middle Ages, the Bible had to be read and interpreted from within a tradition. It could not just be picked up, opened, read and instantly understood. One had to go back to the authorities to see how they had read a particular verse and/or interpret the text using the tradition of the fourfold senses of scripture. The way that they were used though was not always the same for everyone, as we will see. Firstly, we will examine the Medieval Universities.  

Eventually, from the monastic and cathedral schools arose the universities. The three principal and most famous universities were established at Paris, Oxford and Bologna. I will dwell a little on these because they became the main places where biblical exegesis took place within the newly developing phenomena of scholasticism. All the best and most well-known theologians of this era also attended them. The three main subjects one could study and end up earning a higher degree in were Theology (which included philosophy), Medicine or Law (Canon or Civil). Different universities specialised more in particular subjects than others: Bologna for example specialised more in Law whilst all the best theologians came from the University of Paris. There were quite a few differences with modern universities as Timothy B. Noone explains in  A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages. To begin with, the age ranges of students was very different to our era. Looking at the faculty of theology in particular, Most students entered the university to study at about 14, though with some as young as 12 (!). The BA course took three years and the MA then took another three with an extra year of teaching. The entire course length varied but could be 11-14 years in total so that the average fully trained theologian with his MA and a full member of his faculty would leave university study at about the age of 36 (!). Each faculty also had a prescribed course of study with a selected set of books to be lectured on and debated.

This resulted in a common intellectual framework that almost all university graduates shared. Also different from modern universities is the fact that you had to earn an MA before you entered into what would be considered ‘higher studies’ whereas today an MA is considered to be higher study. Lastly is the fact that when a student finally graduated, they would be expected to become a member of the faculty which they had just left and complete a period of postgraduate teaching. From a university one received a universal license to teach, not just in one’s university but in any university in Europe (ius ubique docendi).

What students were taught varied. A couple of texts and commentaries on Plato and Aristotle were available, as well as obviously the Church Fathers and the Bible. There were also works by other pagan writers such as Cicero, Seneca and more (which also goes against the idea that Christianity somehow hated pagan literature) This situation changed as time progressed and more texts became available from the Islamic world and the Greco-Arabic translation movement that had taken place centuries before, and were translated into Latin. By the end of the twelfth century, the majority of Aristotle’s works were available in Latin translation to be taught to students. Aristotle’s reputation was exemplary and he quickly became an “authority” to be cited along with the Church Fathers and others in theological debates. The great Islamic philosophers Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna (980-1037) and Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes (1126-1198) were also translated into Latin from Arabic and became much respected in the Latin West. Averroes in particular became known for his brilliant commentary on Aristotle that helped a lot of scholars in the West to be able to make sense of his complex ideas. Whilst Aristotle was known in the West as “The Philosopher”, Averroes became known as “The Commentator”. Sadly, Averroes’ own brilliant contributions to philosophy, particularly his work on reconciling faith and reason, was only to be known later, but that’s another story. Tim has already written a brilliant article on this topic himself that I linked above too. I recommend going to that, should a reader want more information on how ancient literature was transmitted.

Medieval university students did a variety of academic exercises in their studies, many of them relevant for our purposes. One of the main ones was known as the quaestio (question). It has its medieval source, as Noone, says in developments in the practices of the university faculties of theology in the second half of the twelfth century. Theologians lectured their students primarily, as already mentioned, on the Bible and Church Fathers. The collections of their sayings formed a basis for theological debate and normally within lectures, the masters would raise questions or ask their students questions. Eventually this practice became more formalised and masters would hold regular disputes and debates (quaestiones ordinariae) as part of their normal teaching activities. They could be held between a master and his students or between his ‘class’ and other masters and their students. (pp.55-64). All of this was part of the prevailing intellectual culture of scholasticism which was the main method of learning that encompassed all that we have so far learned about education in the medieval universities. As Noone goes on, the three overarching characteristics of scholastic thinkers were as follows:

1. Thinkers treasured rigorous argumentation and trusted logic and dialectics to uncover, through discussion and analysis, philosophical truth (the principle of reasoned argument or ratio)
2. They accepted, as a fundamental guide to developing their own ideas, the ancient insight that earlier philosophers whose thought and writings were remembered and preserved had so privileged a claim on one’s attention that to show the legitimacy of one’s own reflections involved constant reference to and dialogue with such predecessors (the principle of authority or auctoritas)
3. By and large, thinkers during this period felt obliged to raise questions about the relationship of their theories to revealed truths and to coordinate the insights of philosophy with theological teaching (the principle of the harmony of faith and reason or concordia) (p. 55)

From this brief look at medieval universities, we can see that all of these characteristics were regularly demonstrated, with the development of scholasticism, there was a healthy intellectual culture of debate, commentary on, and inquiry about the scriptures. Students were taught to ask questions and engage in theological disputations, hardly something that would happen in a society where completely literalist interpretations prevailed. As well as this, the students were taught the interpretations of the Church Fathers before them. If most Christians, were, as popular belief sometimes has it, reading their scriptures literally until the Enlightenment, why would medieval Masters even bother having their students learn debate and interpretation in the first place when surely all they would have had to do would be to open the Bible and say “There’s the answer?” The answer is that completely literalist interpretation had not yet been invented and other forms of interpretation, the fourfold sense of scripture, was the norm. To finish, to that we will now return.

Fourfold sense of Scripture

As already stated, the fourfold sense of scripture – the literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical – were the normal way the Bible was interpreted during the Middle Ages that came down from the Patristic period. However, we should avoid generalisation, just because it was the norm, that does not mean that everyone agreed with it or that everyone used the four senses in the same way. It also does not mean that there were not problems with it that scholars saw as needing to be addressed.

As Beryl Smalley writes in possibly the best book on this entire topic, her masterpiece The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, some scholars such as Hugh of St Victor (1096-1141) actively disagreed with the allegorical interpretations utilised by the Church Fathers, including that of Genesis. Many of the Fathers as we have seen did not interpret the creation story in Genesis completely literally. Smalley says this was because “to work in stages of time would be unworthy of an omnipotent creator and suggestive of human weakness.” (p.133). Hugh however, took the opposite view:

Hugh believes on the contrary, that to work by stages in no way derogates from the Creator’s omnipotence. Undoubtedly God could have worked differently. But he made all things for the benefit of rational beings; so even the making was meant to set them an example.

(p. 133)

Some medieval exegetes actively disliked the emphasis on the allegorical at the expense of the other senses, including the literal. As Denys Turner writes about Nicholas of Lyre (1270-1349), an exegete of the 14^th century in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory:

In fact, Nicholas himself had an axe to grind, if not with the terminology itself, then with what he understood to be the prevailing employment of the hermeneutic of the “four senses” in the practice of biblical interpretation. On the score of priorities, Nicholas himself is firm, the literal sense comes first … But therein lies the point. For Nicholas believes that far too much of the practice of scriptural interpretation of his own times and earlier has suffered from a neglect of the literal sense in its enthusiasm to exploit the other three, non-literal, or “mystical” senses, especially the allegorical.

(p. 72-73)

Thomas Aquinas’ views and the problem of the senses

Some authors, although they agreed with and used the prevailing system of biblical exegesis, tended to go for one sense more than the others. Even St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who is routinely called the best philosopher of the Middle Ages did this, as Eleonore Stump writes in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas:

In his own commentaries Aquinas does concentrate on the literal sense, but it would be a mistake to suppose that he avoids altogether the spiritual sense so popular among some of his predecessors.

(p. 258)

However, we should look more closely at what Thomas meant by the word “literal”, because like Augustine’s view of it, it was not exactly the same as literalism today. As Thomas Prügl writes in The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, in a dispute between how St Augustine and St Basil, two Church Fathers, about the interpretation of the creation story in Genesis, Aquinas proposes the following solution. After distinguishing between the truth and interpretation of the Bible, not everything that is true is the same as revealed truth. On the other hand, one must not assert the truth against anything in the Bible, so what is the answer to this contradiction? Prügl continues:

Therefore, says Aquinas, the solution to what seems to be a contradiction between (immanent) truth and the (transcendent) authority of Scripture is found in the legitimate possibility of multiple literal interpretations of biblical passages. Scripture, whose ultimate author is the Holy Spirit and which cannot therefore be based on even a single error, must not be reduced to one specific interpretation. Instead, salvific truth, which in itself is invariable, is therefore comprehended differently, depending on the location, the time, and the intellectual faculties of the interpreter…According to Aquinas, the resulting multiplicity of interpretations can reach a point where circumstances may lead to a meaning not specifically intended by the biblical author, that is, the interpreter may reach beyond the intentio auctoris to the more comprehensive intentio Spiritus sancti. As a matter of fact, the interpretation of Scripture is never final because the Holy Spirit imbues the texts with a degree of vitality that continues to affect the Church in ever new ways and at all times.

(p.396)

Aquinas then clearly had a different view of “literalism” to modern literalists, it was clearly much more pluralistic in nature than is literalism today. There was however, a problem in the fourfold sense of scripture. As Smalley says, the first step for Medieval exegetes was to work out the distinction of the Church Fathers between the letter and spirit of the texts (literal and spiritual/allegorical meanings). They had to decide what the “letter” actually encompassed because the Fathers were not always clear. This was because as Smalley continues:

The Patristic tradition had no agreement as to the meaning of ‘literal’ and ‘historical’. St Gregory said that history was the foundation of allegory, yet he sometimes denied the historical sense; St Augustine admitted that in rare cases one might deny a literal meaning in favour of the allegorical.

(p. 41)

She goes on to say that Angelom of Luxeuil (died 895) applied as many as seven senses (!) to some books of the Bible in an attempt to solve the problem. The person to come to the rescue was St Thomas who in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae, Smalley goes to say proposed a solution:

He takes the familiar distinction between words and things from the (Augustine’s) De Doctrina Christiana and fits it into an Aristotelian framework. God is the principal author of Holy Scripture. Human writers express their meaning by words; but God can also express his meaning by “things”, that is by historical happenings. The literal sense of scripture, therefore, is what the human author expressed by his words; the spiritual senses are what the divine author expressed by the events which the human author related. Since the Bible was the only book which has both a divine and a human authorship, only the Bible can have both a literal and a spiritual sense.

(p. 300)

I will just summarise the rest of what Smalley says on the rest of the same page. As the literal interpretation was defined by Thomas as the whole intention of the inspired author, it made no difference how he expressed himself, whether historically, symbolically or metaphorically. The literal sense was not a figure of speech, but the content. The spiritual senses did not come from the words of the writer, but from the sacred history, known only to God in which he was taking part. No arguments could be drawn from these spiritual senses, but only from the literal one, Thomas said. The problem was therefore solved.

Before we end this section, it is useful to go back to Smalley one more time to address something many readers may have wondered up to this point. I have showed how the allegorical form of interpretation, from the Patristic tradition (mainly Origen) was the most influential of the fourfold senses of scripture in Medieval times. The question I have not asked or answered though is – why? Why, for example was the form of more literal exegesis expounded by the rival Antiochene School not adopted instead? Smalley provides an answer, she says that although the Antiochene view was not adopted, because the material was lost by the Middle Ages. On the other hand, Medieval students had enough material to at least learn the basics, why didn’t they then? She continues:

The reason must be that our Latin student preferred the Alexandrian method to the Antiochene. The former satisfied a paramount emotional need and corresponded to a world outlook while the latter struck him as a cold and irrelevant.

(p. 19)

Smalley’s book The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages is again considered a masterpiece in this field and many of the other authors I have quoted, quoted or mentioned her themselves. Should anyone wish to know more about the way the Bible was read and interpreted in the Middle Ages, I definitely recommend a copy of her book. I wanted to end this section with her before the conclusion because I believe she should have the last word in any study on this area.

Conclusion – And a Note on the Reformation

What can we say about how the Bible was interpreted then from antiquity into the Middle Ages then? Firstly, I think a quick summary is in order. We have seen that Judaism, the first of the Abrahamic faiths had began the process of interpreting the Bible very early on. They started this with their own native traditions of exegesis, as shown by Hillel, which eventually developed into midrash, but they continued it with the incorporation of Greek methods of allegory in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. Many Jews, such as Philo, became thoroughly Hellenised and adopted Greek culture and philosophy along with their interpretive methods. This later continued into the Christian era, with allegorical interpretation being adopted by many Christian intellectual; especially Origen who was its most notable exponent and who, along with Cassian and some say Gregory the Great, created the idea that there were different “senses” of scripture – the words of the Bible could be read in countless different ways, it was up to the exegete to see how this was to be done. These methods continued to be prevalent and they were adopted by Augustine, who also acknowledged different senses, but as we saw, tended to go for a more literal interpretation sometimes as well. We also saw how Augustine’s version of “literalism” was not the same as modern versions around today.

Going into the Middle Ages, we saw that the fourfold senses of scripture were adopted and acknowledged by the majority of Christian interpreters in the period. This did not mean that they did not agree with some of it, that it did not have problems, or that every interpreter used the senses in the same way and some as we saw, even criticised what they saw as the overreliance on allegorical reading. One major difference between how some today and the interpreters of the Middle Ages read the Bible was that, for them, it had to be read and understood from within a tradition. The glosses and Sentences of Peter Lombard provided a centuries old framework of interpretation that nevertheless was flexible. We looked at the medieval universities and how they encouraged debate, questioning and interpretation. Lastly we saw how the fourfold senses were used by some theologians and how issues with them were dealt with.

What I hope has been shown by this article is that Christians (and Jews) have not always interpreted their scriptures literally – at all. The modern form of biblical literalism as I said at the beginning only arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reasons why are too many to get into here but they can be found in many of the works I have cited. Something that I believe is one of the reasons and that I will give my opinion on briefly is the Reformation, because I think that some of it, at least, is one of the antecedents of modern literalism. When Martin Luther started what became the Protestant Reformation, one of the main principles he adhered to was Sola Scriptura (by scripture alone). This was the idea that the Bible was the sole source of authority for Christians. All the authorities of the Middle Ages, whether the Church Fathers or Greek philosophers, in Luther’s view were not needed to interpret the Bible; anyone would be able to understand it without referring to any other authority. This view was undoubtedly more democratic and equal, indeed, whilst the Church never really prohibited people from reading the Bible themselves (another myth), most of the laypeople of medieval Europe simply could not read and the Reformation encouraged mass literacy so that people could do so. This was obviously a very good thing and the Reformation resulted in many good things, but I think the complete abandonment of tradition and to some extent the four senses was also a mistake in some ways.

The ways the Bible was interpreted were not perfect: we have seen that there were problems with them, but they nonetheless provided a solid foundational basis for interpretation and exegesis that went back centuries. The four senses meant that biblical literalism of the type seen today could not have arisen, because the literal sense was always countered by the other three, and literalism in the Middle Ages was very different from modern literalism as we saw. Getting rid of the notion of authoritative interpretation meant that there was no longer anything to ground your interpretation on and anyone could interpret it how they wanted, because they could claim their ideas had a biblical basis. Whilst the Bible had of course always been foundational to Christianity, the Church existed before the fully completed Bible did and that’s why tradition was considered to be important, along with the scripture. People may protest as Luther and the Reformers did, asking, why should people be forced to read the scripture in a certain way at all? Why can’t they just read it how they want? This is a good question, undoubtedly people should have this freedom but I think if the notions of tradition and the senses had been kept by Protestantism to a larger extent, the senses and the notion of authority could have evolved with the times, especially as modern historically critical methods of Bible study became available and many of the things authorities (such as Aristotle) said, were found out to be wrong. It also would have prevented completely literal readings in many places becoming dominant and maybe the current “war” between religion and science would have been calmer. That said, again we must avoid generalisations – there was still much interpretation and exegesis within Protestant traditions, not all Protestant churches adhere to Sola Scriptura, not all Protestants are literalists (they can be found everywhere, in every church). I am also not arguing that the Reformation was the direct cause of literalism: some of Luther’s ideas may have been one of the causes, but as I said, proper modern literalism did not emerge until well after the Reformation. The idea of interpreting the Bible within a tradition, similar to medieval times, is still also adhered to by millions of Christians today including in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, though once again avoiding generalisations, not all of these believers are uniform in what they think about scripture and there are many more churches with diverse views.

The idea that I have tried to disprove is one held by many believers and atheists, that the Bible has always been read in this way and the reader has hopefully concluded that it almost certainly has not. Some atheists routinely criticise the Bible for not adhering to modern scientific theories, but the problem is that the Bible was not written as a science textbook and it was written in a time when science did not even exist as we know it today, in a completely different culture and thought-world. When they fail to take this fact into account and read verses literally, then saying how stupid the writers must have been for having believed all this stuff, without context, they are reading it in the same way as the literalists they claim to be against because they are not taking into account the rich traditions of Biblical exegesis. Many of the contradictions that some atheists point out in the Bible, especially for example in Genesis, had already been pointed out and readily acknowledged centuries before by interpreters and the story was not read as a literal historical account of the world’s origin by everyone, even back then. For some literalist believers, who seem to think that all the Christians who believed in these methods of interpretation were wrong, that would then mean they are calling most of the Christians who lived before them, including some of the most famous and influential believers whose faith was as profound and as dear as their own, all wrong which is equally ignorant.

I think a better understanding of how the Bible has been interpreted over the centuries will create a better environment for believers and atheists alike. Gaining back some of the understanding of centuries passed will do a lot, I think, to create dialogue between non-believers and believers and also create a more acceptable way for modern scientific findings such as the theory of evolution to be accepted by those believers who find that science clashes with their understanding of scripture. For believers, I hope to have shown that you can still fully believe in the Bible without having to believe every single word of it is literally and historically true. Not being all completely true, does not make it any less the word of God. One could interpret it for example, as saying that God tailored his revelation to what the people at the time would have been able to understand in their cultures.  You need context and interpretation in any reading of the scriptures.

For atheists, I hope to have shown that religious believers were not just unthinking zombies, accepting every single thing in the Bible as true without question or rational thought. Believers were reading their scriptures in countlessly diverse ways for centuries and contradictions, mistakes and other things were already known about. It was always known that the Bible was not a literal history of the world and it was always known that not every word and story in it corresponded to a literal event. As shown by scholasticism, as well as by Origen and Augustine, rational thought and reason was always prized in interpretation. There was no separation of faith and reason as is viewed today in much of these periods. Hopefully some of the people cited in this essay and their ways of interpreting the Bible may even seem to you to be very modern.

What I hope to have revealed to both groups, is the rich tradition of scriptural exegesis and interpretation that they may not have known about beforehand. Hopefully this will lead to as I said more, dialogue and understanding between atheists and believers. If even one person’s mind is changed, I’ll know I have done a good job. What I have written here, as long as it is, is only a small snapshot of this rich tradition. Plenty more can be found in the sources I have used in the bibliography. Due to space and time constraints, I have had to leave out the many more Biblical interpreters from both the Patristic and Medieval era and only focus on a few. Unfortunately adding to this, I have left out the later traditions of Jewish biblical interpretation and Islamic exegesis of the Koran. Should people be interested in this, I will gladly write an article focusing on those. They are as equally important and as rich as the traditions I have covered here. I should note that interpretation has been used to some extent in all religious traditions including for example, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and many more. Lastly, if you have had the patience and interest to stick with me this far, thank you very much for reading this article. I hope you have enjoyed it as well as having learned something new. Thank you also to Tim for giving me the opportunity to contribute to his brilliant blog.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Armstrong, K (2007) The Bible: The Bibliography. London: Atlantic Books.

Armstrong, K (2019) The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts. London: The Bodley Head.

Augustine/Bettenson, H (1972) Concerning the City of God against the Pagans. London: Penguin Books, p.643

Barton, J (2019) A History of The Bible: The Book and its faiths. London: Penguin Books. pp. 325-326

B Shabbat 31a (1975). In A Cohen, ed. Everyman’s Talmud, 1^st ed. New York: Schocken Books, p.65

Caputo, J D. (2018) Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information. London: Penguin Random House, p.4

Cameron, M (2012). “Augustine and Scripture”. In M Vessey and S Reid, ed. A Companion to Augustine, 2^nd ed. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Copeland, R and Struck, P (2010). “Introduction”. In R Copeland and P Struck, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 2

Dawkins, R (2006/2016) The God Delusion. London: Transworld Publishers. P.269

Evans, G.R (1984) The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Goodman, Martin (2017) A History of Judaism, UK: Penguin Books.

Hadot, P/Davidson, A.I (ed) (1995) Philosophy as a Way of Life. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Pp. 126-144

Harris, S (2007) A Letter to a Christian Nation: A Challenge to Faith. London: Transworld Publishers P. 11

Hart, Bentley, D (2009) Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. P. 63

Hitchens, C (2007) God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. London: Atlantic Books p. 103

Holland, T (2019) Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. London: Little, Brown.

Lohr, W (2010) “Christianity as Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives of an Ancient Intellectual Project”. Vigiliae Christianae. [Online] Vol 64 (2) pp. 160-188. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20700362.pdf?ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Ae2057f09e2dab811807eb9bc1e904833 [Accessed 22^nd March 2021]

MacCulloch, D (2009) A History of Christianity. London: Penguin Random House UK

McGrath, Alister E. (2013) Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Pp. 22-53

Mark, Joshua J (2012)  St. Augustine: from The Literal Meaning of Genesis [Online] World History Encyclopaedia. Available at: https://www.ancient.eu/article/91/st-augustine-from-the-literal-meaning-of-genesis/ [Accessed 22^nd March 2021]

Noone, Timothy B (2003) Scholasticism. In J, J.E Gracia and T, B. Noone, ed. A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 1^st ed. Masachussets, USA/ Oxford, UK/Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing.

Origen of Alexandria/Crombie, F (trans) (2015) Against Celsus/Contra Celsum. United States: Ex Fontibus Co. , p. 41

Origen of Alexandria/Crombie, F (trans) De Princpiis, Book IV. [Online] Available at: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04124.htm [Accessed 19th March 2021]

Parry, K (2015). The Nature and Scope of the Patristics. In K Parry, ed. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Patristics, 1^st ed. Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, pp. 7-8

Pew Research Center, (2014) Interpreting Scripture. [Online] Available at: https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/interpreting-scripture/#beliefs-and-practices [Accessed 19^th March 2021]

Philo/Yonge, C.D (trans) (1993) The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged. United States: Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC. 

Prügl, T (2005) Thomas Aquinas as Interpreter of Scripture. In R, Van Nieuwenhove and J, Wawrykow, ed. The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, 1^st ed. Indiana, USA: University of Notre Dame Press p. 396

Rosemann, P.W (2003) Peter Lombard. In J, J.E Gracia and T, B. Noone, ed. A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 1st ed. Masachussets, USA/ Oxford, UK/Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing. P.90

Rupke, J. Richardson, D, M.B (trans) (2018) Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. P. 171

Saint Augustine/ Green, R.P.H (trans) (1997) On Christian Teaching. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press

Saad, L (2017) Record Few Americans Believe Bible Is Literal Word of God. [Online] Gallup. Available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/210704/record-few-americans-believe-bible-literal-word-god.aspx [Accessed 19th March 2021]

Sefaria (2021) Menachot 29b: The William Davidson Talmud [Online] Available at:https://www.sefaria.org/Menachot.29b?lang=bi [Accessed 21^st March 2021]

Sefaria (2021) Mishna Sanhedrin 6: The William Davidson Talmud [Online] Available at: https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Sanhedrin.7?lang=bi [Accessed 21^st March 2021]

Sefaria (2021) Bava Metzia 59b : The William Davidson Talmud [Online] Available at:https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Metzia.59b.5?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en [Accessed 21^st March 2021]

Smalley, B (1964) The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Indiana, USA: University of Notre Dame Press

Stump, E (1993) Biblical commentary and philosophy. In N Kretzmann and E Stump ed. The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, 1^st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Tannous, J (2018) The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society and Simple Believers. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, Page 244-245

Turner, D (2010) “Allegory in Christian Late Antiquity”. In R Copeland and P Struck, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 72-73

Vessey, D (2016) “Medieval Hermeneutics”. In: N, Keane , and C, Law ed. The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics, 1st ed. Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. pp. 67–80 Ziegler, Robert A (2015) Augustine of Hippo’s Doctrine of Scripture: Christian Exegesis in Late Antiquity. Primary Source. [Online] Vol 5 (2) pp. 33-39. Available at: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/psource/issue/view/1239 [Accessed 22nd March 2021]