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INTERPRETATION

The sixty-six "books" which together make the Bible have, more than any others in world history, demanded interpretation. At the start of the early modern period, interpreting the Bible changed radically and permanently. There were two revolutions. The first was firmly within the life and traditions of the church.

The thirty-nine ancient Hebrew books of the Jewish Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, have always received active reinterpretation, even as part of their earliest daily religious use. Thus the tradition of midrashim, written commentaries on every passage or word, exemplified argumentative, if reverential, discussion down through the centuries. Christians often add fourteen early books found in the Greek version (the Septuagint), not the Hebrew, either printed scattered through the Old Testament or put together between the Testaments as the "Apocrypha."

The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were originally written in everyday (koine) Greek. They are dominated by the four Gospels and the thirteen Epistles, or letters, of Paul. The latter, of the greatest importance in the founding of Christian theology, do not set out to lay down a system, but rather to express the unique revelation of God in Christ by means of elaborate rhetoric, extensions of Hebrew expressiveness in image and symbol. Within those original Epistles, active interpretation is assumed by God's help in the light of the rest of Scripture and by that only. As has been said, Christianity was born in hermeneutics (the theory and methods of interpretation).

Humanist investigation, developed from the new philological scholarship in northern Italy (such as that of Lorenzo Valla, c. 1406–1457), worked toward establishing scholarly texts of the Hebrew and Greek originals. Soon printed editions of these were widely available, successfully challenging the Latin Vulgate, which was itself later revised. From these recently printed Hebrew, and then Greek, Scriptures, printed translations of the whole Bible into the chief European vernaculars were accomplished by the late 1530s—in some countries, of which England was the chief, in the face of ruthless opposition by the church. The church maintained that the Bible, which was only to be known in short passages, was too difficult a book to be understood without the highest learning or a special grace of understanding given to priests. Wide dissemination of manuscripts of the whole Bible in English in the 1380s, under the aegis of the Oxford scholar John Wycliffe, triggered a violent response: the church denounced reading the Bible in the vernacular as a heresy. Such "heretics" were handed over to the civil authorities for the severest punishment, often to the extreme of burning them alive.

TEACHING AND PREACHING

Within the church, interpretation of the Bible was at two levels. Addressing the common people remained, as it had been for over a thousand years, subordinate to the liturgy of the church. The Bible had authority, but alongside traditions and practices, including the "unwritten verities." The aim was—through the people's attentive participation in ceremonies—to enable true penitence, lamentation for sins, and the healing brought by the seven sacraments (baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, marriage, penance, holy orders, and extreme unction). These would strengthen the bulwark of thorough Christian conduct. To this end, small and digestible selections of the Bible called pericopes, read in Latin in the Catholic Mass, were used as a basis for translation and exposition in the vernacular. Such passages to be interpreted could be a few words, a verse or a short paragraph; they were occasionally longer treatments in cycles based on a particular book. The purpose was always to underpin existing practice. Such sermons reinforced, as aids to pious reflection, the presentation of key Bible events such as the story of Adam and Eve, Noah's ark, and the Crucifixion and Resurrection in paintings on church walls and in stained glass windows, in occasional, and severely local, plays, and, for the wealthy, little books of piety. All these, as well as the readings (in Latin) in the liturgies, contained a great deal that was not in the Bible at all.

University lectures, printed Bible annotations and commentaries, and theological works (always in Latin) also showed considerable movement. At the end of the fifteenth century, John Colet (1466/1467–1519) gave lectures in Oxford (they have not survived) on Paul's Romans and 1 Corinthians. In them a corner had been turned in biblical interpretation, not because Colet dismissed the standard and hallowed method of allegory in Bible interpretation in favor of the literal Greek text (he did not, and in fact knew no Greek), but because he gave lectures on Paul at all and because he associated the apostle with the Christian life. His lectures were not, as could then have been assumed, on one of the basic theological works of the time, based largely on Scholastic method derived from Aristotle's logic, such as the nonbiblical Sentences of the twelfth-century Italian theologian Peter Lombard. Though Colet's Paul was on New Testament grounds unrecognizable, being mainly a moralist, he was at least present for himself in Scripture, and that was new. The chasm between medieval Scholasticism and exegesis was beginning to be crossed.

THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT PRINTED

The great Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) met and disputed with Colet while lodging in Magdalen College, Oxford. In the summer of 1504, in the Premonstratensian monastery at Louvain, Erasmus read Lorenzo Valla's Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum and discovered the possibility of a new humanist exegesis based on scientific philology (he caused that book to be reprinted in 1505). He had already found the commentaries of St. Jerome and the Egyptian Christian Origen's great third-century parallel edition of six versions of the Hebrew Scriptures, his Hexapla. Erasmus awoke to his life's work, to nourish moral and spiritual reform by the public renewal of biblical theology, based on scientific understanding of the original texts, linked to his fresh evaluations of the principal church fathers. The most influential result was his 1516 edition of the original Greek New Testament, the first ever printed.

The new philology set out to establish the original texts for study. In Spain Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros gathered together the scholars who produced the remarkable four volumes of the Complutensian Polyglott, which printed the New Testament in Greek, and the Old Testament in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic alongside the Latin Vulgate, with elaborate further commentary. The New Testament was ready by 1514, but not printed, lacking the pope's imprimatur, which was not given until 1522.

THE BIBLE AND REFORM

In 1530, the French Bible translation (from the Latin) made by the humanist scholar Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (c. 1455–1536) in Paris was part of his larger intention of initiating Catholic reform through Bible preaching. He was attacked by the church authorities for giving the Word of God to "the humble," a criticism compounded by his not being an academic theologian. One of a circle of Catholic reformers, he wrote in favor of the then novel (later accepted) idea that neither the penitent sinner who anointed Christ's feet (Luke 7:37) nor Mary the sister of Martha (Luke 10:38–42) should be identified with Mary Magdalen (Luke 8:2–3, 23:49, 24:10). His generally trenchant views, expressed in prefaces to his 1523 New Testament translation, led, in spite of his royal protection by Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of King Francis I, to his Bible translation later being put on the Index of Prohibited Books. In the Catholic University of Louvain, Frans Titelmans, a lecturer on Scripture, provided in 1533 for Thomas Herentals's Den Speghel des kersten levens (The mirror of the Christian life) to be printed with his own Den Schat des kersten Gheloofs (The treasure of the Christian faith) with marginal references newly indicating the biblical sources of Catholic teaching and practice. Lefèvre's earlier New Testament in French had been printed in Antwerp in 1525. Though from the Latin, it was condemned on 25 August 1525 by the Paris Faculty of Theology, together with Erasmus's 1516 new Latin translation, his Novum Instrumentum. The latter had caused wide offense by its many corrections of the Vulgate text of the New Testament—he dared to open St. John's Gospel ("In the beginning was the Word . . .") with sermo, 'everyday speech', for the Word, instead of verbum, 'declaration'. At Luke 10:21, Christ thanked the Father for revealing the secrets of the kingdom not to babes but to stulti, 'fools'. These and many more caused scandal.

Yet the triumphant fulfilment of Erasmus's aims of reform came increasingly, and then overwhelmingly, outside the church, although that was something he did not wish. He unleashed the second revolution in Bible interpretation by printing in 1516 that New Testament in Greek noted above, setting it alongside his Latin New Testament to justify his many changes. Easily available to scholars throughout Europe, this work became at once the basis for quite fresh translations of the New Testament into all the vernaculars. Within twenty years, ordinary people could read for themselves, or hear read, the whole New Testament.

VERNACULAR BIBLES

In the chief vernaculars, Martin Luther was first in 1522: his large and beautiful German Septembertestament (September testament) became a bestseller. A Dutch New Testament followed in 1526, the same year as William Tyndale's very influential English New Testament, which had been printed in Worms and was smuggled into England. Pierre-Robert Olivétan's French Bible of 1535 included a New Testament from Erasmus's Greek. And so it continued.

Revised and always massively reprinted, in the first sixty years of the sixteenth century these and others rapidly widened the scope and shifted the methods and function of Bible interpretation and have never been seriously opposed since. The guiding principle was access to what the text says in the original language, as precisely as possible, rather than the elaborations, often fanciful, permitted by earlier hallowed doctrine or practice.

UNDERSTANDING THE WHOLE BIBLE

Opposing the pope and Catholic tradition as sole authorities, Protestants understood from Scripture itself that it should be exposited to all believers in their own language as a whole text. For Protestants the entire New Testament was paramount, particularly the Epistles of Paul. They declared that the New Testament authorized only two sacraments (the Lord's Supper and baptism), not seven, and that neither purgatory nor the concomitant system of indulgences was biblical. They believed that, following the model of the earliest congregations described in Acts and the Epistles, and newly visible to all readers, the Holy Spirit led the faithful into comprehension of Scripture without an intermediary priest. The words of Jesus were first addressed to the lowly: even plowboys were capable of understanding. The Bible was no longer in a remote language, nor declared to be so difficult that only those lengthily educated (in Latin) could interpret small portions of it for the parvuli, the little people attending the liturgies. Preachers could assume in the hearers detailed knowledge of the whole Bible. That knowledge was the new element.

UNIVERSAL READING

The Protestant Reformation was university-led, but biblical theology in its new development was not, as before, consumed only within college walls. Erasmus wanted everyone to read and study the Scriptures—weavers, plowboys, Turks and Saracens, and even women. Erasmus's influential Paraphrases of the New Testament in English, published in the 1520s and 1530s and often reprinted, elucidating the Greek text for every New Testament book except the Apocalypse (Revelation), were, after 1549, by royal command to be placed in every English parish church, adjacent to an English Bible.

In Protestant Europe, the new vehicle of interpretation was the whole of Scripture in the vernacular for everyone (massively bought and studied) with prologues, marginal cross-references and commentaries, elaborate concordances, pictures, and maps. Theological teaching now focused on Paul, taken as a whole, with special emphasis on the sinner's justification by his own faith, without intermediary priest, but supported by his local congregation. Martin Luther's Paul in, for example, his Prologue to the Epistle to the Romans in successive New Testaments, or in his influential printed sermons in German, is indeed fully present, almost overwhelmingly, as the touchstone of all Christian faith. Luther's Preface to Romans in English was one of the two earliest Protestant documents circulating in England. He found in Paul not only "justification by faith alone" but the imperative to educate the German-speaking people in the new biblical theology, under the banner of sola gratia, sola fides, sola scriptura ('grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone'). His huge output as a theological writer was matched by a similarly large readership.

Sixteenth-century leaders of Bible interpretation—Philipp Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, Huldrych Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, and others—all wrote with the aim of elucidating Scripture. John Calvin (1509–1564) approached the Bible text as a lawyer: not for nothing was a Bible first divided into verses in his Geneva, a convenience for identifying texts in a network of references internal to Scripture. More than Luther, Calvin was a linguist and scholar of ancient languages. The output of Bibles from Geneva in European languages was a response to the desire of Calvin and his colleagues to combine a scrupulous new accuracy of text and the widest popular dissemination.

Under Calvin, Luther's sola scriptura reached its full power. Every reader of Geneva Bibles, in French or English, was taught, by means of the marginal annotations and cross-referencing, that Scripture should only be interpreted in the light of Scripture. As Tyndale put it, the kingdom of heaven is the word of God. Calvin's greatest value lay in his insistence that theology, which now meant biblical theology, uniquely revealed not this church practice or that, but the overarching sovereignty of God.

ACCESSIBLE ILLUMINATION OF THE WHOLE

It is important to recognize that fresh interpretation of the Bible in early modern Europe was done, to by far the greatest extent, in the annotations in vernacular Bibles, read in vast numbers (well over a million English Bibles, mostly Geneva versions, were bought before 1640). Individual study, alone or in groups, at home, in the back of the church, or in the field, allowed absorption of marginal interpretation, which was almost entirely direct textual elucidation toward a literal understanding or internal cross-referencing.

See also Calvin, John; Calvinism; Church of England; Erasmus, Desiderius; Humanists and Humanism; Luther, Martin; Lutheranism; Melanchthon, Philipp; Reformation, Protestant; Zwingli, Huldrych.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 2, The West, from the Fathers to the Reformation. Edited by G. W. H. Lampe. Cambridge, U.K., 1969. Vol. 3, The West, from the Reformation to the Present Day. Edited by S. L. Greenslade. Cambridge, U.K., 1963.

Daniell, David. The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. New Haven and London, 2003.

Moeller, Berndt. "Scripture, Tradition and Sacrament in the Middle Ages and in Luther." In Holy Book and Holy Tradition, edited by F. F. Bruce and E. G. Rupp, pp. 113–135. Manchester, U.K., 1968.

Peel, Albert. "The Bible and the People: Protestant Views of the Authority of the Bible." In The Interpretation of the Bible, edited by C. W. Dugmore, pp. 49–73. London, 1946.

Prickett, Stephen. "Introduction." In Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory, edited by Stephen Prickett, pp. 1–11. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1991.

Shuger, Debora Kuller. The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1994.

Wood, James D. The Interpretation of the Bible: A Historical Introduction. London, 1958.

Zim, Rivkah. "The Reformation: The Trial of God's Word." In Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory, edited by Stephen Prickett, pp. 64–135. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1991.

DAVID DANIELL