Interpreting Scripture

Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

N. T. Wright

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780310098614
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Critica e interpretazione biblica

Draws together the most important articles on Scripture and hermeneutics by distinguished scholar and author N. T. Wright.

Interpreting Scripture brings together into one volume Wright's self-selected, key lectures, papers, and reflections on topics of scriptural interpretation, including:

• The Lord's Prayer as a Paradigm of Christian Prayer
• Christian Origins and the Question of God
• Faith, Virtue, Justification, and the Journey to Freedom
• Revelation and Christian Hope: Political Implications of the Revelation to John
• Apocalyptic and the Sudden Fulfilment of Divine Promise
• …and many more.

Interpreting Scripture displays Wright's engaging prose, his courage to go where few have gone, and his joy to bridge the work of the academy and the church.

Here is a rich feast for any serious student of the Bible, especially of the New Testament. Detailed, incisive, and exquisitely nuanced exegesis, this collection will reward you with a clearer, deeper, and more informed appreciation of Scripture and its application to Christian life and thought today.

Many of the included studies have never been published or were made available only in hard-to-find larger volumes and journals.

1
Introduction to The Language and Imagery of the Bible by G. B. Caird

George Caird was the last man in the world to think of establishing a ‘school’. Precise historical scholarship and thoughtful theological reflection were his stock-in-trade, and were what he strove to inculcate in his pupils, rather than specific ‘right’ answers to key questions. Nor was he a campaigner, pushing a particular line in season and out. It is only in long retrospect that his major impact can appear, and it is still in my view sorely needed: his understanding of Jewish eschatology and its relevance to Jesus and the New Testament. The book to which the present piece was a second-edition introduction is perhaps the place where his thesis is most obviously displayed. I was honoured to be invited to write this piece – though it went through some severe rewriting after I had sent an early draft to Caird’s widow, Mollie, who was not one to hold back criticism. I think in the end she was pleased with it, and I have been glad to maintain occasional links with their remarkable children as the years have gone by.

[xi] I

I was conducting a seminar in San Francisco when a participant asked me for some guidance on interpreting the different levels of language in the Bible. By way of reply, I pulled out of my bag the book the reader is now holding [The Language and Imagery of the Bible; see fuller details in the acknowledgments section]. At that, a different participant (a Presbyterian minister) exclaimed, ‘That book saved my life!’ I understood what he meant.

I happened to be in Oxford, visiting George Caird, the day that Language and Imagery was reviewed in The Times. He was like a dog with two tails. Not only was the review excellent (no surprises there). What gave him far greater pleasure was that in the same issue of The Times there were mentions of a play directed by his son, John, and of the Wigmore Hall debut of his oboist son, George. Such a simultaneous triple score must be some kind of record.

It is also an appropriate scene-setting for the reissue of the book in question. Caird was writing about, if one can put it like this, the drama and music of the Bible, and was writing as one to whom such things were not incidentals, peripheral enjoyments on the fringe of serious work, but were woven into his whole approach to life, teaching and scholarship. His was a rich and rounded personality, to which anything that was worthy of interest was also worthy of enthusiasm. He would conclude a lecture with an appropriate rhetorical flourish, gather up books, notes and the folds of his gown in a single movement, and leave the room with the last well-turned phrase still echoing. One might see him, a few minutes later, striding up Mansfield Road to watch the last half-hour of the morning play in a cricket match between Oxford University and one of the English counties. I recall him coming out of the inaugural lecture of one of his fellow professors to be greeted with the news that his beloved Mansfield College [xii] had, in his absence, scored a great success on the river. His reaction made it quite clear where he would rather have been that summer afternoon.

George was the kind of classical scholar for whom all of life came together in an intricate and exciting whole. Not for him the learned monograph that says more and more about less and less and ends by swallowing its own tail. He was a big-picture person, whose grasp of God, life, music, theology, family, sport, ornithology, biblical exegesis, carpentry, ecumenism and much else besides held these diverse interests together in a unique and compelling unity. The detail mattered vitally, as anyone who has read his articles on the Septuagint, his commentaries or, indeed, the present book, will bear witness. But the care he would lavish on an individual tree never made him, or his readers, forget where they were in the forest. Reader as well as author could sense different worlds attaining a fresh integration. (As I wrote this paragraph, I pulled down from my shelf the 1968 and 1969 issues of the Journal of Theological Studies (JTS), containing his articles on Septuagint lexicography. I inherited these issues from George himself, but had never before consulted them. Inside one of them, on a piece of blue card, was a note in his hand about the meaning of the rare word apartia in the Septuagint of Numbers 31.17, 18. Curious, I turned the card over. It was an advertisement for an Oxford concert of music by Bach, Bartok and Haydn, conducted by George Caird, junior. I rest my case.)

George Bradford Caird was born on 19 July 1917. His parents (as George never forgot) were Dundee Scots, but he himself was born in London, where the family was living because of war service. They then settled in Birmingham, at the heart of the English Midlands, where George’s father was an engineer. The family attended Carr’s Lane Congregational chapel, where the preaching was first-rate, and where in all probability George learned the pacifism that he was to hold throughout his life. Like many schools in those days, King Edward’s in Birmingham offered an excellent classical education, and George took full advantage of it. He acquired a loving and exact knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics, which saw him to a scholarship, and then a Classical ‘double first’, at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and to a lifetime of fascinated continuing study. His move to [xiii] Mansfield College, Oxford, for his ministerial training was natural, given the college’s high academic reputation, with former faculty members of the calibre of A. S. Peake, C. H. Dodd and T. W. Manson.

He combined his training with doctoral studies (under the auspices of Merton College, since Mansfield did not at that time have full university status). His thesis was, characteristically, both a word-study and a wide-ranging theological exploration. It was on the meaning of doxa (‘glory’) in the New Testament. Though it was never published as such, parts of it kept finding their way into his other writings, not least the present volume.

He added other languages to his repertoire. When, after a wartime pastorate in north London, he was invited to the chair of Old Testament at St Stephen’s College, Edmonton, Alberta, the college administrators discovered after the invitation had been issued that George’s doctorate was in New Testament, not Old. As Henry Chadwick told the story in his memorial address, they sent a telegram to Dr Micklem, the principal of Mansfield: ‘Can Caird teach Hebrew?’ The reply puts most New Testament scholars to shame: ‘Yes – and if you give him an hour or two’s notice, he can also teach Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic, Akkadian, Sogdian and Sumerian.’ Hearing this anecdote put me in mind of the time when I commented to Caird on the fact that he had reviewed a book written in Italian. He explained that, as editor of JTS, he had hunted for someone who could read Italian and was interested in the subject. Failing to find anyone appropriate, he had decided to write a ‘short note’ (a review of only a few lines) himself. Having, however, equipped himself with an Italian dictionary, he discovered that he could read the book with increasing ease; having finished it and understood it, he wrote a characteristically lucid review.

The move to Edmonton came in the year following his marriage to Mollie (née Viola Mary Newport). In all that follows, one will not understand George unless one thinks of him as Mollie’s husband. Where he could sometimes be austere, with minimal small-talk (at a party: ‘Hello. I’m George Caird. I teach New Testament’ – then silence), she was bubbling over with books read, plays seen, music enjoyed, birds spied and catalogued, children and grandchildren, people coming and going. George enjoyed [xiv] all these as keenly, and felt them all as deeply, as she; their way of expressing it was different, and naturally complementary. Mollie is a published poet. One can understand that when George wrote, in the preface to the present volume, that she had been to him ‘at all times both Muse and critic’, this meant just what it said. Her own delight in words matched his, and she and the children, as he also said, opened doors for him into worlds hitherto unknown.

From Edmonton he moved in 1950 to be Professor of New Testament at McGill University in Montreal, a position he occupied for nine years. (He was still warmly remembered when I arrived to take up the same chair thirty-one years later.) In Montreal he became Principal of the United Church College (the United Church of Canada had brought together Methodists, Congregationalists and some of the Presbyterians), and found himself acquiring a new string to his bow: a commitment to ecumenical work, which took him to the Second Vatican Council as an observer, and made him a frequent participant in, and commentator on, ecumenical endeavours of all sorts. In an article published in the year of his death he described himself as a ‘lifelong ecumenist’.

During his time at McGill he published his first three books, and various articles, including his substantial piece on 1 and 2 Samuel in The Interpreter’s Bible. The broad sweep of The Truth of the Gospel (1950), and the detailed learning of Principalities and Powers (1956), illustrate again the principle of the forest and the trees. His inaugural lecture at McGill had already announced that the time had come, after decades of dissection of the New Testament, to put things back together again. The very title – ‘The New Testament view of life’ – speaks both of the boldness of the scholar who dares to sum up so vast a topic, and of the proclivity to see the big picture, within which the details would find themselves not only included but enhanced.

There were those at Mansfield College who hoped that one day, when the then Senior Tutor retired, George would return to Oxford to take his place. Nobody knew, however, quite when this would happen, until the invitation arrived in 1959. Few academics so well launched on a North American career would have been prepared to accept the substantial drop in salary that such [xv] a move involved, but back the Cairds came, spending eleven years in the post before George, as again was only to be expected, succeeded to the Principalship in 1970. He had returned to North America to give the Birks Lectures at McGill, the Shaffer Lectures at Yale and the Fall Lectures at Union Seminary (Richmond, Virginia) in 1969. During his time as Senior Tutor he had given the Grinfield Lectures on the Septuagint and had published several articles, his masterly commentaries on Luke and Revelation, his book on the Second Vatican Council, and his slim but ground-breaking lecture Jesus and the Jewish Nation. The university elected him to a Readership, an honour as rare then as it is common now: since there was then only one ‘Professor’ in each subject area, the status of Reader was as far as anyone else could advance.

His literary ability was outstanding. George Caird, unlike a good many New Testament scholars, knew how to write good English. He was always polishing his prose, and a work would go through many revisions (and, one suspects, discussions with Mollie) before he was satisfied. His clear, crisp sentences say more in a few words than some scholars manage in several pages. A slim volume from Caird, easily mistaken for a slight or negligible work, is likely to be an explosive charge, packed with pithy wisdom.

This virtue is displayed to great effect in the commentaries, where the reader needs to see both what the paragraph under discussion is all about, and where its peculiar problems, and the possible ways of solving them, may lie. George, the master of the broad summary and the sharp analysis, blended both in section after section, painting the picture, explaining the allusions, sorting out the mare’s nests, and then standing back and letting the reader appreciate the text for itself.

George’s years as Principal of Mansfield were extremely busy. The mixture was as before, only more so: training ordinands, running a college which was playing an increasingly large part in the wider university, translating parts of the New English Bible (NEB) (once, in a lecture, he read, or rather declaimed, a splendid passage from Ben-Sirach, after which he paused, looked up and said ‘I wrote that’), writing hymns, giving lectures, teaching graduates and enjoying his family. I first heard Britten’s ‘Metamorphoses’ [xvi] while in the study with George Senior, having one of my early essays on Paul skilfully and devastatingly dismantled, with George Junior practising his oboe somewhere within earshot in the Principal’s Lodgings.

On top of all this, he took a leading role in bringing together the ‘Permanent Private Halls’, as they were called (the theological training colleges, including the Roman Catholic and Nonconformist colleges), and setting up, for the benefit of all the ordinands in Oxford, the University Diploma in Theology. In addition, he was for two years Chairman of Oxford University’s Theology Faculty Board (a demanding, not to say exhausting, post). As if all this were not enough, he became in the following year Moderator of the General Assembly of the United Reformed Church. The latter post, held by each occupant for a year, carried a kind of honorary archiepiscopal status. George decided that, rather than giving lectures or addresses, he would spend his year visiting as many congregations as he could and answering people’s questions about the Bible. For him, it meant living on adrenalin; for his hearers, it was a wonderful chance to hear a world-class mind address problems that not all local clergy were equipped to handle. It is perhaps not surprising that in the eight years he was Principal he wrote only one major book, his commentary on Paul’s ‘Letters from Prison’.

He continued, however, to lecture and teach, as brilliantly as ever. One of those lecture-courses formed the basis for the present book, about which I shall say more presently. Two other courses he gave regularly were on New Testament Theology and New Testament Ethics. The latter, so far as I know, perished with him. The former was half way through being turned into a book at the time of his death, and has now been triumphantly finished by my one-time fellow research student, L. D. Hurst, and published by Oxford University Press. That is the book, above all, which draws together the major themes and emphases of Caird’s thought.

His election to the Dean Ireland Chair meant that he had to move out of Mansfield after nearly twenty years, and become a Fellow of The Queen’s College. George had initially hoped to retain the Principalship while holding the chair; an Oxford professor, unlike a Cambridge one, is not allowed by statute to be [xvii] the head of a college at the same time, but since Mansfield was still not (as it now is) a ‘proper’ Oxford college he hoped the regulation would not apply to him. When the authorities insisted that it would, he got his own back: he applied for permission to live in the country cottage that had been his holiday retreat, on the edge of the Downs, in excellent walking and birdwatching country. It was, by car, further away from Oxford than the regulations would allow. But, as he said in his official request, it was just inside the limit as the crow flies; ‘and for this purpose professors should be deemed to be crows’. He won.

As far as his scholarship and teaching were concerned, he made a seamless transition to the Dean Ireland Chair, where, no longer having a college to run, he was able to devote himself to a new responsibility for which he was admirably equipped, that of co-editing the Journal of Theological Studies. Those unfamiliar with such matters may not appreciate the significance of the way he went about this task. Editors often content themselves with a short note either accepting or rejecting a proffered article. Frequently they delegate the task of reading and selecting manuscripts to other colleagues. George threw himself into editorship with characteristic thoroughness, employing much the same method he used when reading an essay or draft chapter from one of his graduate students. The form was always the same. In his own neat longhand (often on the back of something else, such as a list of forthcoming religious broadcasts, sent to him in one of his many consultative roles; ever the parsimonious Scot), he would go straight to the point:

• ‘P. 2, para. 3, line 15: You have made an important point here, but you seem to have overlooked the following . . .

• P. 3, para. 1, line 10: But surely in that case Paul would have written archē, not telos?

• P. 4, para. 2, line 6: But see now the article in ZNW 1974, which demonstrates the opposite.

• P. 5, para. 3, line 14: [etc. etc.]’

Often the greatest compliment of which one would be aware at the time was when two pages passed without comment. On reflection, though, the compliment was that he would give such [xviii] attention to the detail of one’s work. For the graduate student, the process could be devastating: that paper, one reflected ruefully, took eight weeks to write, and back it comes (always within a few days of submission) with all these criticisms. It made one determined not to let him do it again, though he always did. For writers submitting articles to the Journal, one suspects that in many cases it was the first time they had ever received such treatment. Articles revised accordingly and re-submitted could not but be greatly improved. Like Caird’s translation work, the long hours of unglamorous labour had as their reward the knowledge that the world of scholarship and Bible reading were being well served. Clarity and discipline of thought; easy intimacy with the relevant literature; forceful, brief, lucid expression. An unstoppable combination.

As a teacher he could be formidable, sometimes devastating. He had thought the matter through and reached a decision, and there was no point wasting ti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction to The Language and Imagery of the Bible By G. B. Caird
• 2. The Lord’s Prayer As a Paradigm of Christian Prayer
• 3. God and Caesar, Then and Now
• 4. Christian Origins and the Question of God
• 5. Faith, Virtue, Justification, and the Journey to Freedom
• 6. Neither Anarchy nor Tyranny: Government and the New Testament
• 7. The Bishop and Living Under Scripture
• 8. Imagining the Kingdom: Mission and Theology In Early Christianity
• 9. Revelation and Christian Hope: Political Implications of the Revelation to John
• 10. The Monarchs and the Message: Reflections On Bible Translation from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century
• 11. Joy: Some New Testament Perspectives and Questions
• 12. Pastoral Theology for Perplexing Topics: Paul and Adiaphora
• 13. Apocalyptic and the Sudden Fulfilment of Divine Promise
• 14. The Bible and Christian Mission
• 15. Wouldn’t You Love to Know? Towards a Christian View of Reality
• 16. Sign and Means of New Creation: Public Worship and the Creative Reading of Scripture
• 17. The Powerful Breath of the New Creation
• 18. Sacred Space In the City
• 19. Foreword to The Church and Its Vocation: Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology By Michael Goheen
• 20. The Honest to God Controversy
• 21. Christ and the Cosmos: Kingdom and Creation In Gospel Perspective
• 22. Get the Story Right and the Models Will Fit: Victory Through Substitution In ‘Atonement Theology’
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Modern Authors