Biblical Interpretation: Then and Now

Gerald Bray

            This is a very ambitious book: Gerald Bray is not afraid of a challenge. He has undertaken to document the complete history of biblical interpretation, from the very beginning to the date of publication (1996). This is no small feat because the Bible is likely the most interpreted book in the world, with libraries worth of interpretations over the past two thousand years. But in spite of the difficulties, I think that Bray has done an excellent job in this endeavor. Granted, it did take him almost 600 pages, but the result is a readable and accessible overview of how the Bible has been interpreted throughout the ages. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the broad view of how those who have gone before read the Bible.

            The book was written because of a distance the author felt between scholars and the church. Scholarship in the area of biblical interpretation has exploded in the past one hundred years, but instead of helping the church it has progressively moved farther away from the church. The church, on the other hand, has continued on its preaching, but bewildered by the enormous amount of scholarship has ignored much of the work done by scholars. In this lack of communication Bray has written to seek to show the history of biblical interpretation to help the church see the history of biblical interpretation and to see what the current trends are among scholars. Here is how he admirably achieves his very ambitious goal. 

            The methodology of the book is the highlight of the book. The first chapter is an introduction to the topic of the book, an examination of several systematic theology categories related to biblical interpretation, such as revelation and canon. After this begins the meat of the book: a survey of the history of biblical interpretation. There are three parts in the book: before historical criticism, the historical-critical method, and the contemporary scene. The first part includes chapters on biblical interpretation in the New Testament, the patristic era, the medieval era, and the Renaissance and the Reformation. The second part contains chapters on the beginning of the historical-critical method, two chapters on the nineteenth century (one on the developments in relation to the Old Testament and one on the New Testament), and two chapters on the twentieth century (OT and NT). The final part has chapters on current academic trends in interpretation, social trends in interpretation, and evangelical interpretation. 

Each chapter is divided into several sections. The chapter begins with “The period and the subject,” an introduction and a short history of the time period. The main part of the chapter (in my opinion) comes next: “The interpreters and their work.” This is essentially an annotated list of all the important interpreters of the time period, giving a few important details about their life and their most influential works. A short section entitled “The issues” gives three or four essential debates that occurred in the time period. A more substantial section, “The methods of interpretation,” lists the primary ways that the interpreters read the Bible. The last two sections are a bibliography of the important works and a test case, in which Bray picks a biblical book to show how interpreters have viewed it throughout the ages, focusing particularly on the time period of the chapter.

The clearest benefit of this book is its wide scope. Since he covers all two thousand years of church history, he is able to give the reader a good sense of the movement as well as the consistency in trends in interpretation of the Bible. Since there are as many trees in the forest as interpretations of the Bible, this overview could have become an unreadable mass of detail. But Bray has managed to present the flow of interpretations in a helpful format for the reader to get a good grasp on what people are thinking when they read the Bible. The primary way Bray does this is through the way he structures his chapters. Instead of being purely a data dump, he presents more of a story than a list through his various test cases and summaries. Even the lists of interpreters, which in some ways are the heart of the book, read much better than most lists due to their storylike characteristics. Overall, I think that the format of the chapters is the highlight of the book, since it allows the reader to sort through a large amount of data without getting bogged down. Bray also writes in a helpful manner, including the occasional fun phrase. “Others, who were of a more conservative bent, such as Henry VIII of England, reacted against Luther to start with, but later found themselves on his side – in this case, to their mutual embarrassment” (167). He includes the following helpful analogy in regards to finding evidence for the great empires of the Ancient Near East: “It was rather as if a modern student of European history had been forced to concentrate on the Low Countries until suddenly presented with evidence pointing to the greatness of Britain, France and Germany” (299).

From my perspective, his two chapters on Old Testament interpretation were the best part of the book. Bray helped me to put all the names of the influential Old Testament scholars in relation to each and show what each of them were arguing for and how they disagreed with each other. We as evangelicals have a bad habit of lumping everyone else together in the broad “liberal” category, forgetting that many of them react against each other as much as they would react against evangelicals. Bray helps to show these movements and disagreements in the big picture, such as the reaction of Gunkel against Wellhausen. These two chapters will be chapters I go back to in the future in order to remind myself of the big picture and how a certain interpreter fits in with other scholars. I rather selfishly wish that a more narrowly Old Testament version of this book could be written which covers the same time period but in greater depth. Perhaps there is one that I do not know about.

His predictions about the future seem to be coming true, as least as far as the thought that theology will come to take a wider role in biblical interpretation. This is evidenced by a variety of factors, such as the large number of Old Testament theologies coming out recently and the theological interpretation of Scripture movement.

There a multitude of historical nuggets buried in the book, most of which are not helpful but are quite interesting. Here are a few of them.

·        Herbert of Bosham (fl. 1160-1170) was the first Christian to use a Hebrew dictionary (141) and Conrad Pellican (1478-1556) was the first Christian to write a grammar of Hebrew.

·        The rise of covenant theology in England improved the lot of Jews in England (207).

·        Jean Morin (1591-1659) was an anti-Semite and thought that the Hebrew text of the Old Testament was totally untrustworthy, seeing several ideas that were also seen by later critical scholars (238).

·        “In spite of everything, it was probably easier to defend traditional views in a scholarly manner in 1900 than it had been in 1800” (298).

·        There was a strong reaction against archaeology by scholars when the first digs began (404).

In contrast to his main strength, the main weakness of the book is also its comprehensive scope. Since he is covering two thousand years of church history, he is bound to simplify some details to the point of distortion and ignore important interpreters. I get the feeling that scholars will think that this book is excellent for the areas they do not work in, but is deficient for their own areas of specialty. While he does an excellent job of choosing whom to cover, I would have chosen differently in some places, as any reviewer would naturally choose differently than Bray chose, at least to some measure.

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