Comparative Hermeneutics of the New Testament

The three great traditions diverge not only in their doctrinal conclusions: they diverge on what it means to interpret a biblical text, on who is its legitimate interpreter, and on the relation between the meaning of the text and the authority that receives it. This module sets out those principles before showing their application to precise cases.

The three structures of authority

Three definitions of meaning

The deepest divergence bears not on the texts but on what it means that a text “has a meaning.”

The question of the canon as a hermeneutical prerequisite

Before interpreting a text, each tradition must answer a prior question: which texts to interpret? The three traditions answer differently, which directly affects their hermeneutics of the Old Testament and, by extension, the reading of Old Testament quotations in the New.

The hermeneutical consequence for the New Testament is direct: when Matthew quotes Isa 7:14 according to the Septuagint (παρθένος, “virgin”) rather than the Masoretic Hebrew (עַלְמָה, “young woman”), the Orthodox tradition sees no difficulty, the Septuagint being Scripture in full; Protestant exegesis sees a philological question to be treated as such; the Catholic tradition articulates the two texts within the framework of the fuller sense.

The role of the Holy Spirit in interpretation

Each tradition has developed methods of interpretation proper to it, with its own criteria of control. This survey presents the principal ones, situated in their genealogy and their presuppositions.

The historical-critical method (Protestant by genealogy, today ecumenical)

Born in the Protestant rationalism of the Enlightenment, developed by Semler, Reimarus and then the whole German liberal school, it aims to establish the original meaning of the text through analysis of its genesis: sources, literary forms, redaction. It rests on a strong methodological postulate: to treat the biblical text like any ancient text, provisionally suspending the question of its inspiration for the purpose of analysis.

The Pontifical Biblical Commission officially received it in 1993 (The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church), subject to integration within a wider theological framework. Orthodoxy received it later and more cautiously, essentially through theologians trained in the West (Breck, Behr), without its ever becoming the reference method.

Patristic exegesis and its four senses

The Reformation rejected this system as arbitrary — Luther: “allegory is like a beautiful woman with whom one may do as one pleases” — in favour of the literal sense alone. Post-Tridentine Catholicism progressively abandoned it in practice without condemning it in principle. Orthodoxy has retained a restricted use of it, essentially liturgical and typological, distinct from the speculative Alexandrian allegorism that the Antiochene school was already criticising in the fourth century.

Antiochene θεωρία

Developed by Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia against the allegorical excesses of Origen and the Alexandrian school, θεωρία refuses to dissolve the historical sense of the text into a purely spiritual signification, while admitting that a single event bears, without ceasing to be itself, an import that exceeds it. The crossing of the Red Sea (Exod 14) remains a real historical event and becomes, by θεωρία, a figure of baptism (1 Cor 10:1-2), without the second reading effacing the first.

It is this model, rather than Alexandrian allegory, that Orthodoxy today claims as its own hermeneutic; John Breck has given the reference account of it in English.

Canonical hermeneutics

Developed by Brevard Childs from the 1970s onward, it proposes reading each text not in its reconstructed context of composition but in its final form, as it functions within the completed canon received by the believing community. It differs from the historical-critical method in its object — the canonical text, not the strata of its formation — without rejecting the latter’s gains.

This approach has found a particular echo in Reformed circles, where it rejoins the old principle of Scriptura sui ipsius interpres: Scripture interprets itself, an obscure passage being illuminated by a clear passage of the same canon.

Narrative hermeneutics

Synoptic table of methods

The principles set out so far take their full measure only when confronted with precise texts. The four cases that follow show, to the letter, how a single verse engenders divergent readings according to the structure of authority and the method mobilised — and where exactly the real points of disagreement lie, as opposed to the apparent ones.

Matthew 16:18 — “You are Peter, and on this rock”

The Greek text plays on Πέτρος (Peter) and πέτρα (the rock), a wordplay that already worked in the underlying Aramaic with the single term כֵּיפָא (Kepha), without the morphological distinction the Greek introduces between masculine and feminine. It is precisely this Greek distinction, absent from the Aramaic, that made the debate possible.

John 20:23 — the power to forgive sins

The Greek text uses two periphrastic perfects whose exact grammatical nuance structures the whole debate: ἀφέωνται and κεκράτηνται, literally “have been forgiven” and “have been retained,” in the perfect, not the future. The difficulty bears on the sense of this logical priority: does the human action follow a divine decision already accomplished, or does it constitute it?

1 Corinthians 11:24 — “This is my body”

The copula is absent in Aramaic — דֵּין גּוּפִי would be said without a verb “to be” — which means that the Greek τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ σῶμά μου introduces an explicitation the Semitic original did not need. This philological fact, acknowledged by all camps, nevertheless settles nothing by itself: the absence of a copula in Aramaic implies neither identity nor mere figuration; it simply leaves the question open at the grammatical level.

The case is pedagogically precious because it shows that a major theological disagreement can survive complete philological agreement: the five positions agree on the Greek syntax and on the ambiguity of the underlying Aramaic. The disagreement is tied entirely upstream, in the metaphysics of sign and sacrament that each tradition brings to the text.

Romans 3:25 — ἱλαστήριον

The term ἱλαστήριον is the Septuagint’s technical term for the כַּפֹּרֶת of Lev 16, the mercy seat, the lid of the ark on which blood is sprinkled at Yom Kippur. Three readings are distinguished according to the relative weight given to this cultic background as against a more general background of propitiation.

This case differs structurally from the three preceding ones: here the divergence in translation — propitiation versus expiation — precedes and conditions the doctrinal divergence, whereas in the cases of Matt 16:18 and 1 Cor 11:24 broad philological agreement did not prevent theological disagreement. It is an example where purely lexicographical work carries a direct doctrinal charge.

A module of synthesis must indicate where the work stops, not only where it arrives. The following questions are not closed in current research; each would constitute a legitimate subject for a master’s thesis or a doctoral dissertation, with a substantial state of the question already available but no consensus established.

Master’s-level questions

Doctoral-level questions

An open transversal question