On "Early Biblical Interpretation" by James M. Kugel and Rowan A. Greer ***

Book 3 in the Library of Early Christianity, this one focuses on how Bible readers interpreted the scripture up through about the third century CE. The main thing that I got out of the book was something very obvious, something I just hadn't given much thought to: namely, even the later Old Testament scriptures are even interpretations of the earlier ones. Thus, Chronicles, written after Kings and the Torah, in many ways reads the events recounted in those books in a new way, "making past events bear on present reality" (38).

Much of the book--though not as much as I feared, since that wasn't something I was particularly interested in reading about at present--is given over to the rise of and cannonization of scripture. Much is also given over to different genres of the scripture, at least in the Old Testament, and of interpretation--wisdom writing, apocalyptic writing, interpretations among the Qumran sect, interpretations among the rabbis, the hellenistic allegorical approach.

While the first half of the book focuses on the Old Testament, the second half focuses on the New. The author of this half is particularly interested in Iraneaus's view of the scripture, as he is the first to reference most of the books in the New Testament in his own work. The author delves into the various ways early Christian writers put Old Testament scripture to work within the new Christian framework (Jesus in the Old Testament, the church as the new Israel, etc.). He also looks at the differences between the Alexandrian allegorical school and the Antiochan typological school, showing that actually the two schools are not perhaps as different as one might initially claim, as their main interest was in making theological points.

The book's final line is perhaps most telling of the two religious traditions that come out of interpreting Old Testament scripture: "It is instructive that the figure of Wisdom, portrayed in Prov. 8:22ff, as God's agent of creation and revelation, was equated in Ecclesiasticus (Ben Sira) with the Torah but was identified by Christians as early as Paul with Christ. From the same point of departure we thus find two paths, strikingly similar in many of their presuppositions and methods, but finally divergent" (203).