RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Exegesis or Hermeneutics
J. L. S. Lutz would have the philological-historical interpretation united with the religious, ecclesiastical and dogmatic, in which he was not far removed from the standpoint of the Reformation. Hofmann came to nearly the same conclusion by another road. He took the Bible to be the history of salvation, a history independent of ordinary development and of a different kind. It is the result of the working of the Holy Spirit in the Church of Christ, The theologian, in order to interpret Scripture in truth, must come as a member of the Church and as a witness of the salvation of which he is possessed. Hofmann's service was then contributed in favor of ecclesiastical exegesis, recognizing, however, the historical character of the Bible. The general result of work upon the theory of interpretation is that for a positive exegesis, free from both positive and negative dogmatic interpolations, the guaranty is in a conjoint operation of all varieties, which gives and receives, controls and criticizes, all in order to grasp and to expound the life which is inculcated in the Holy Scriptures.
IV. The Forms of Interpretation of Scripture: The results of the exegetical process may be made available in many different forms; the exegete may indicate how the text is to be understood, in which case he becomes a glossator, scholiast, or commentator; or he may identify himself , so to speak, with the text, may take the place of the author and produce a translation or a paraphrase. All these forms have been highly developed in the centuries during which exegesis has been at work.
The simplest form of elucidation is the gloss, which explains an obscure or uncommon expression by a clear or usual one or substitutes i. Glosses for a foreign term the corresponding and Scholia, translation. This method has been applied to Homer, Plato, the Corpus juris, etc., as well as to the Bible, and the value of its results is varied. The glossator is first of all an interpreter, not an expounder, hence the collections of glosses among the Byzantines were the basis of the lexicons, of which those of Hesychius, Suidas, and Phavorinus contain many Biblical glosses. In the Western Church gloss came to have a special meaning, and the excerpts from the collections became the brief but authoritative commentaries of scholasticism, written either after the text, beside it, or in interlinear fashion. Two of the most noted are that of Walafrid Strabo and that of Anselm of Laon (see Glosses, Biblical and Ecclesiastical). The gloss extended itself beyond the explanation of a word and became a scholium. This was originally a marginal note, and scholia often were for use in the schools. No methodical investigation of Biblical scholia has yet been made.
Commentaries differ from glosses and scholia in
that they attempt to explain the whole of a writing
and not isolated expressions, and they
2. Commen- have literary unity. The purpose
taries and is to give a full and pure impression
Their Type, of the writing so that the reader of
the commentary may be in as good a
position to receive the sense as was the original
reader. Its relation to the original is that of a
bust of Socrates or Augustus to their subjects, though for Biblical writings that ideal is unattainable. A commentary of the Bible must keep in view not merely the Bible, but also the history of its interpretation if it is to present adequately the present status. It can accomplish its end only by division of labor, parting the work into the linguistic, historical, and rhetorical or stylistic. The danger throughout is that attention to minute points will obscure a comprehensive view, while regard for the total impression may cause oversight and error in minutiae. The double purpose, to make clear the document as a whole and to clear up individual difficulties, has produced two types of results, the glossatorial and the reproductive, of which Bengel's Gnomon and Ewald's or Hofmann's commentaries are respectively examples. For a rounded understanding of Scripture both methods are necessary. It would be desirable to give a history of commentaries, since the one-sidedness of certain periods tends to be reproduced in other periods, but space forbids anything but the most brief attempt. For the patristic type Origen's commentaries gave the pattern, concerned as they were with particulars, and turning aside for allegorical meanings and applications. The Antiochian school was concise and scholiastic (see Antioch, School of). During the period of formulation of dogma, exegesis tended toward catena?, excerpts of scholia and glosses (see Catenae), and to schematization of traditional renderings. Humanism awakened the grammatical sense, but produced few commentaries. The Reformation emphasized the religious content. The age of the confessions tended again to heap matter together, and philological comment reproduced scholiastic form. Pietism roamed freely in ascetic edification. The nineteenth century endeavored to employ the linguistic-historical method and at the same time to preserve the religious interests, to bind together analysis, reproduction, and glossematic clearing up of minutiae, all this with regard to the history of the science.
Translation of a document is the fruit and test of complete understanding, and gives an equivalent for the original, so far as that is possible. 3. Transla- It is limited by the fact that much tion and in the original can not be carried over Paraphrase, into another speech. Artistic translation must therefore move freely in order to reproduce the original. The translation is a new dress which enables the stranger to gage the worth of the original. Thus Luther did not merely translate the Gospel, he made it German. Translation is limited also by its aim to reproduce the sense of the original in appropriate verbiage. Here literalness is often no gain, as when a Greek translator reproduced the Hebrew sign of the accusative, though as such it had no equivalent or meaning in the Greek. The desire to combine the merits of a translation and of a commentary resulted in the paraphrase, which reproduces the sense together with what is implied though not expressly said. Patristic exegesis did much of this work, and Erasmus, a supreme artist in this respect, went to school to Origen, Chrysostom, and Jerome.
Exegesis or Hermeneutics