Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture

This book challenges conventional accounts of biblical interpretation in the early Church.

This book challenges standard accounts of early Christian exegesis of the Bible. Professor Young sets the interpretation of the Bible in the context of the Graeco-Roman world - the dissemination of books and learning, the way texts were received and read, the function of literature in shaping not only a culture but a moral universe. For the earliest Christians, the adoption of the Jewish scriptures constituted a supersessionary claim in relation to Hellenism as well as Judaism. Yet the debt owed to the practice of exegesis in the grammatical and rhetorical schools is of overriding significance. Methods were philological and deductive, and the usual analysis according to 'literal', 'typological' and 'allegorical' is inadequate to describe questions of reference and issues of religious language. The biblical texts shaped a 'totalizing discourse' which by the fifth century was giving identity, morality and meaning to a new Christian culture.

Preface; List of abbreviations; Introduction; Part I. Exegesis and the Unity of the Scriptures: 1. Reception and appropriation; 2. The mind of scripture; Part II. The Bible as Classic: 3. Cultures and literatures; 4. The advent of scholarship; 5. Bible and culture; Part III. Language and Reference: 6. Reference and cross-reference; 7. The sacrament of language; 8 Allegoria and theoria; 9. The question of method; Part IV. The Bible and the Life of Faith: 10. The contexts of interpretation; 11. The life of faith; 12. The theologian as exegete; Conclusion and retrospect: towards an outline historical account; Bibliography; Index of biblical references; Index of modern scholars; Index of subjects.

This book challenges standard accounts of early Christian exegesis of the Bible by placing its interpretation in the context of the Graeco-Roman world. It describes how the Jewish scriptures were taken over, added to and reinterpreted as part of the process of forming the identity of the new Christian 'race' with its distinct culture.