A History of Biblical Interpretation. Vol. 2: The Medieval through the Reformation Periods (review)

Biblical scholarship from the end of antiquity through the Reformation and early-modern period is, needless to say, a vast subject. Extant commentaries on biblical books—Jewish and Christian, Catholic and Protestant—are numerous. Any single effort toward systematizing its contents or even describing its growth over history is deemed to be fragmentary and incomplete. What should the focus of such an endeavor be? Should it concentrate on the most influential texts and movements of the period? Or perhaps bring to light the least studied? Or should the focus be on the exegesis most relevant to its times, or perhaps on the most relevant to our time? These questions are all apparent in this book—the second volume in a series—which aims to provide a survey of biblical interpretation spanning the 1000 years of history and the different confessional settings implied by its title.

After a lengthy "Introduction and Overview" contributed by the editors and seeking to bring the most salient points of the ensuing contributions together, the first chapter on biblical interpretation proper, "Early Medieval Exegesis: Gregory I to the Twelfth Century" by Mary A. Mayeski, covers the first 500 years or so of medieval Western exegesis and seeks to capture its character as well as describe its methods and development. The result is with necessity rather patchy given the mere nineteen pages (of which one is a table) it has been allotted. The following two chapters, "Jewish Midrashic Interpretation in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages" by Carol Bakhos and "Medieval Jewish Biblical Exegesis" by Robert A. Harris, cover the medieval Jewish biblical interpretation of largely the corresponding period. This is followed by a piece on "Eastern Orthodox Biblical Interpretation" by Paul M. Blowers, using this title in spite of the fact that all but two of the quoted authors lived before the year of the Great Schism.

Not only interpretation in the strict sense is covered by the volume, and the next two chapters deal with the history, development, and reception of the text of the Old and New Testaments respectively, "The Text of the Tanak" by Russell Fuller and "The Text of the New Testament" by J. Keith Elliott. This is followed by the chapter most people would associate with medieval biblical interpretation, "Scholastic Interpretation of the Bible" by Christopher Ocker, which is full of interesting information but can, of course, never completely justify the enormous amount of material—the lion's share of which is still in manuscript—it seeks to describe. The rest of the volume is largely devoted to Renaissance and post-Renaissance biblical studies, particularly as studies of individual reformers: Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, and John Calvin are each assigned one chapter.

The vast scope of the presentation results inevitably is some overlap and repetition, and some of the themes would have profited from being treated together. The account is occasionally marred by typos and misspellings of names and titles of works, typically Latin ones (Pope Gregory the Great's "Expositio in Ezechial"), but also modern ("Kristellar" and "Gluntz"); and Gustav Vasa (1496–1550) is not the same Swedish king as Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1632). More serious criticism could be leveled at the surprisingly unfair treatment Western medieval exegesis and exegetes receive. Of a volume of over 570 pages only about forty-five deal, strictly speaking, with the Latin exegesis of the Middle Ages. This means that the treatment of the exegetes and works representative of this period becomes extremely sketchy in comparison with, for instance, the in-depth study of individual Protestant reformers and their work (c. 100 pages are devoted to the reformers; of these, Calvin receives thirty).

The history of biblical interpretation has attracted considerable attention in recent decades, particularly, perhaps, with respect to the field of medieval exegesis. The present volume bespeaks this phenomenon; if...