The Centre for Jewish Studies
University of Manchester
Extra-Mural Lectures January-March 2000
Roger Tomes
DIVIDED BY A COMMON SCRIPTURE:
JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN APPROACHES TO THE BIBLE
III
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II
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Meanwhile Christianity was developing a very different way of reading
what it came to call the Old Testament. Marcion rejected it altogether,
maintaining that the God of the Old Testament was a different being from
the God Christians worshipped. But Marcion was regarded as a heretic, and
most Christians continued to venerate and use the Old Testament as scripture.
For some Christians the Old Testament continued to have some authority
in its own right. The Acts of the Apostles records that when it was first
agreed that Gentiles could be admitted as members of the Church they were
required only 'to abstain from things polluted by idols and from fornication
and from whatever has been strangled and from blood' (Acts 15:21,29). These
requirements are generally thought to have been based on the Noahic laws
developed by the rabbis from Gen 9:1-6. And indeed some Christians throughout
the early centuries of the Church continued to abstain from blood, as Jehovah's
Witnesses will tell you. The Old Testament also had a direct influence on
the institutions of Western Europe in post-Roman times. Tithes were instituted
for the support of the clergy. There were strict rules prohibiting usury.
The right of asylum was based on Mosaic retribution law. Charlemagne exempted
the newly married from military service and taxation for a year (Ludwig
Diestel, Geschichte des Alten Testamentes in der Christlichen Kirche
(1869; reprinted 1981), pp.150-57). The sabbatarian tradition of Calvinism
was also based on the command in the Decalogue.
But some aspects of the Old Testament were problematical for Christians.
To people brought up in Graeco-Roman culture it seemed to contain scandalous
and impossible things. Origen met this objection by saying that these were
there to prompt us to look behind the text for its deeper meaning. This
had to be discovered through allegorical interpretation, which had indeed
been pioneered earlier in the Hellenistic world by the Letter of Aristeas
and Philo. This tradition persisted for a long time: the Venerable Bede
wrote detailed allegorical accounts of both the Tabernacle and the Temple
(Arthur G.Holder, ed., Bede: On the Tabernacle (Liverpool University
Press, 1994); Se·n Connolly and Jennifer O'Reilly, eds. Bede:
On the Temple (Liverpool University Press, 1995), relating their features
to elements in Christian worship, and John Bunyan treated Solomon's Temple
as an allegory of the Christian life (Solomon's Temple Spiritualised,' in
Graham Midgley, ed., The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan VII (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), pp.1-115).
Christians also developed the New Testament conviction that the Old
Testament testified beforehand to Christ. Not only were isolated texts understood
as direct predictions of his coming and of events in his life; events and
people in the Old Testament story were seen as foreshadowing Christ and
the Christian Church. Thus the Flood and the crossing of the Red Sea and
of the Jordan were all seen as types of Christian baptism (J. Daniélou,
From Shadows to Reality (1960)).
The Psalms played an even greater part in Christian devotion than in
the worship of the synagogue, at least in the sense that they were all used
in the monastic hours, and were for a long time, in metrical translation,
the exclusive vehicle of praise in the Calvinistic churches. To this day
Anglican service books contain a complete version of the Psalter. The Psalms
were often understood christologically, as the prayers Jesus prayed, or
as needing a Christian interpretation. In the 18th century Isaac Watts,
a nonconformist minister, produced a metrical version of the Psalter in
which every reference to the king became a reference to Jesus and every
reference to Israel was transposed into a reference to Britain (R. Tomes,
'The Psalms.' In S.Bigger, ed., Creating the Old Testament, pp.251-67,
esp. pp.252-54).
I hope it is clear from this survey that the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament
had come to mean very different things to Jews and Christians. Not that
they were completely unaware of each other's traditions and innovations.
When they did read it together they often did so from polemical stances.
The most famous of these encounters was the disputation between Christian
spokesmen and Nahmanides in Barcelona in 1263 (Hyam Maccoby, Judaism
on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (1982)).
The demands of polemic meant that Jewish scholars had to acquire knowledge
of the Latin Bible and Christian exegesis, and Christians needed some knowledge
of what was in the Talmud. Roger Bacon pointed out that knowledge of Hebrew
was necessary for converting Jews, and to this end in 1311 chairs in Hebrew
were established at five universities (Paris, Salamanca, Oxford, Bologna,
and Rome) (Hailperin, Rashi, p.133). The rabbis in Paris taught priests
to read Hebrew and introduced them to Jewish exegesis. In the 13th century
portions of the Talmud and of Rashi were translated into Latin (1248-55)
at the same time as copies of the Talmud were being burnt in Paris. A commission
was appointed to examine the Talmud. But there were also Christians, such
as Hugh of St Victor (1096-1141), Andrew of St Victor (d.1175), and especially
Nicolas of Lyra (c.1270-1349), who read the Jewish commentators, particularly
Rashi, for their philological erudition, in order to understand the literal
sense of the Hebrew text. Rashi no doubt appealed to Nicolas also because
they both followed the same plan of commenting on the Bible text in order.
The Renaissance also gave an impetus to the study of Hebrew as well
as to Greek (G. Lloyd Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England
(Manchester University Press, 1983)). Christian humanists were no longer
satisfied with the Latin Vulgate and began to translate the Bible 'from
the original tongues'. When they came upon problematic passages they turned
to the mediaeval Jewish commentators for assistance. The Reformation also
emphasised the importance of getting behind mediaeval interpretation to
the original texts. The Continental Reformers - Luther, Zwingli and Calvin
- all learned Hebrew, and Martin Bucer made extensive use of Jewish commentary,
though these studies did not lead to friendly attitudes towards Jews. The
English humanists also encouraged the learning of Hebrew and Greek, and
Tyndale's translation of the Pentateuch was certainly made direct from the
Hebrew. The Geneva Bible and the Authorised Version, although they were
revisions of existing translations, show evidence of careful study of the
Hebrew text and the use of David Kimhi's commentary.
Thus by the end of the 16th century there was considerable agreement
between Jews and Christians that study of the literal meaning of the text,
with the aid of grammar and lexicon, was of first importance. But there
was not yet any appreciable understanding of these scriptures as historical
documents, needing critical evaluation. Our next task therefore is to ask
what difference it made to both communities when a historical critical approach
emerged.
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s.IV
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