RE: Kline article in PSCF

Garry DeWeese (deweese@ucsu.Colorado.EDU)
Tue, 26 Mar 1996 09:07:27 -0700 (MST)

On Mon, 25 Mar 1996, Glenn Morton proposed an interesting "exegetical
experiment":
> The test. Can anyone show that a sizeable minority of commentators prior to
> the year 500 A.D. viewed Genesis 1-2 as non-historical? I would propose the
> sizeable minority as being 15% of the commentators. I suggest this value for
> a reason. It is big enough to avoid the single crackpot and big enough to say
> that if 15% of the people read the original languages in 33-500 A.D. and read
> everything as non-historical then it is clear that it is the LANGUAGE and not
> the SCIENCE which is driving their interpretation. . .
> This type of experimental test clearly
> allows me as the non-expert in hermeneutics to know that I am not being driven
> by those who have an ax to grind either way.
>
While such an experiment might be an interesting study in the history of
exegesis, it ignores the fact that in manmy ways we have a better
understanding of the text than did those living in the second-sixth
centuries, due to the results of linguistic studies of the cognate
semitic languages, better understanding of the literary forms that were
current at the time the OT texts were being written, better
understanding of the ancient near eastern cultural millieu in which the
texts were originally intended to communicate, etc. To seek to do away
with these results would be something like trying to establish if
absolute simultaneity is possible by ignoring all work done since
Einstein's STR and studying only those who accepted a Newtonian system
and thus "had no ax to grind." It also ignores the fact that not all
interpreters were of equal skill and insight.

Nevertheless, it is clear that one of the most able and influential early
exegetes did on fact take a moderately symbolic view of Genesis:
Augustine, of course.

Garry