Our Fathers’ Bible
I Corinthians: Interpreted By Early Christian Commentators
Volume II In The Church’s Bible
edited by Judith L. Kovacs
series editor: Robert Louis Wilken
Eerdmans, 2005
(337 pages, $35.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Ryan J. Jack McDermott
Christians who want to read the Bible with the Fathers of the Church are blessed with several ways to do so, ranging from complete works by individual authors to devotional and exegetical aids. The most popular and accessible of these ways is the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series from InterVarsity Press, which collates short paragraphs of commentary from the Church’s first millennium, weighted toward the Fathers’ lexical comments and glosses of the literal sense of Scripture (though it also offers plenty of spiritual exegesis).
Christians seeking to enter the mind of the early Church—and pastors doing in-depth exegesis—will want to immerse themselves in the generous excerpts of The Church’s Bible series from Eerdmans. The selections in this series are drawn from extended commentaries and sermon series dedicated to complete books of the Bible rather than from incidental remarks in sermons and treatises.
Spiritual Exegetes
The excerpts run long enough to convey the Fathers’ complex combination of lexical and historical commentary and typological and allegorical interpretation. But the editors are also sensitive to the modern reader’s needs, keeping each entry under three pages and judiciously reining in the Fathers’ prolixity.
“Spiritual exegesis,” the term for allegorical and typological reading that goes beyond the literal sense of the text, connects small details of Scripture to the larger historical drama of redemption—often in ways the original authors probably did not intend. For example, Cyril of Alexandria interprets Paul’s remark that “it is well for them to remain single as I do,” as a fulfillment of the freewill offerings in Old Testament law.
That may not be what Paul had in mind, but, says Cyril in his Commentary on 1 Corinthians (7.8–11), “I think that divine providence intends something similar in the present text.” It takes extended exposure to this kind of interpretive dexterity before we come to see its faithfulness to the Scriptures and profound concern to weave every little thread of Old and New together.
“Scripture interprets Scripture,” the Fathers believed, and The Church’s Bible focuses exclusively on the “canon within the canon,” those books of Scripture that Christians in the first millennium turned to again and again for the strengthening of the faith and the development of doctrine. Volumes on 1 Corinthians and The Song of Songs have been published so far, and volumes on Genesis, Psalms, -Isaiah, Matthew, John, and Romans are planned, with a projected publication rate of about one per year.
These books provided the general framework of the history of redemption, and the Fathers fit their interpretation of the other parts of the canon into this framework. These books (and -several others that the series will include) are particularly important because they are the Scriptures the Church lived by before the articulation of the canon in the fourth century.
In an enlightening introduction on interpreting the New Testament, the series editor, the Catholic Church historian Robert Louis Wilken, writes, “Early in the Church’s history . . . the living Christ was identified by verbal formulas and practices, notably Baptism and the Eucharist.” Most of the commentators included in the volume on 1 Corinthians had at least a rudimentary Christian Bible available to them—the canon within the canon—“but the written Scripture never replaced the living tradition, and its interpretation was guided by the rule of faith and Christian practice.”
Ryan J. Jack McDermott is a doctoral student in English literature at the University of Virginia. He, his wife Darrah, and their first child, Augustine (born in April) are Episcopalians.
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