The Encyclopedia of World Religions

54 S Bible, biblical literature

all of the Bible as equally true. For example, Mar tin Luther said that the central message of the Bible was the teaching of God’s love in Christ. One should accept everything else that the Bible had to say only to the extent that it helped com municate this message. Modern Interpretations In the 17th century, a Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza (1632–37), anticipated modern biblical criticism. He did not assume that God had revealed truth in the Bible and then try to find that truth. He took the Bible as a human product and tried to determine the extent to which it and Jewish traditions about it were historically true. Even before these efforts Spinoza’s ideas had gotten him expelled from the Jewish community. Eventually, however, this form of interpretation came to domi nate among academic biblical scholars in Europe and North America—Jews, Protestants, and Catho lics alike. These scholars have tried to determine how the biblical texts came to be written. One famous example is the “documentary hypothesis” of the origin of Torah developed by the German scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918). It sees Torah as combining four documents, denoted J, E, P, and D, written over several centuries. Another famous example concerns the “synoptic problem,” that is, how to explain the similar words and structures of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The common answer today makes Mark the source of Matthew and Luke, along with a collection of sayings of Jesus that Mark did not use ( see Q S OURCE ). Modern scholars have also tried to read the books of the Bible not as timeless revelation but in terms of the contexts in which they were writ ten. Some psalms, for example, seem designed to be used for the coronation ceremony of the kings of ancient Israel and Judah. This kind of criticism can have radical results. For example, German crit ics in the middle of the 19th century explored the difference between the Aramaic world of ideas, in which Jesus and his disciples lived, and the Greek world of ideas, in which Christian doctrine developed ( see DOGMA AND DOCTRINE ). They pointed

in the biblical books. The Zohar, a kabbalistic book, introduced the idea that the biblical text has four kinds of meaning. The four meanings are the literal ( peshat ), the allegorical ( remez ), the meaning related to HALAKHAH or living a Jewish life ( derash ), and the mystical ( sod ). Taking the first letter of each word, some called this system of interpretation pardes for short; the pronuncia tion of the word alludes to paradise. Traditional Christian Interpretations Allegorical interpretation attracted many ancient Christian interpreters, just as it attracted many ancient Jewish ones. Christian interpreters con nected allegories with a saying from Paul: “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3.6). Unlike Jews, however, ancient Christians tended to find in the Hebrew scriptures prefigurations of Jesus. This kind of interpretation is already found in writings of the New Testament. Paul sees A DAM as a “type” of C HRIST (Rom. 5.14), and 1 Peter sees the great flood as prefiguring Christian BAPTISM (1 Pet. 3.18–22). Some early Christians thought that the entire Old Testament foretold Jesus. They were willing to make liberal use of allegorical interpreta tion to prove it. Similar to the Jewish notion of pardes, Chris tians in the Middle Ages formulated a fourfold method of interpretation. Each text was said to have four meanings: the literal, the allegorical (concerned with doctrine), the tropological (con cerned with morality), and the anagogical (con cerned with the believer’s final destiny). But some in the Middle Ages emphasized just the literal meaning of the Bible. During the Renaissance scholars made intense efforts to study the original languages of the Bible in order to determine its literal meaning as pre cisely as possible. They also began to use ancient manuscripts in an effort to reconstruct as accu rately as possible the original text of the Bible. The Protestant Reformers benefited from these approaches ( see R EFORMATION , P ROTESTANT ). They rejected all meanings but the literal, which they determined by grammatical analysis and historical context. But the Reformers did not always accept