THE ART OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Re-Establishing the New Testament as Literary Artifact

INTRODUCTION

Literature Exists On The precarious boundary between art and language.50 This is a liminal

space that is poorly defined from both perspectives. Literature is not included within the

ambit of what is called the “fine arts” and is only rarely discussed within the aesthetics

literature—even though it may well have a claim to being representational in nature, and

certainly on occasion evocative, even if not representational or evocative in the same way or

by the same means as a painting or a sculpture. The result is a marginalization of literature

from the discussion of the other arts, even if many works of art—numerous poems come to

mind as examples—are seen as items of beauty on the basis of a number of features, whether

these are related to form, structure, or evoked emotion. Whatever one might say about

literature as a whole is almost assuredly also truly said of the Bible, including the New

Testament. I will generally leave the Old Testament to others to comment upon, but the

fortunes of the New Testament as an artifact—drawing upon the Latin etymology of the word

as something made by or using art—are long behind us. There are still those who will cite

portions of the Old Testament and claim artistic value for them, such as the grandeur of the

Gen 1 creation account or the personal anguish of one of David’s psalms or the pathos of one

of the several hymns such as by Moses or Deborah or the tragi-comedy of the book of Job, to

name just a few. The New Testament, however, does not usually elicit such a list of literary

accomplishments. One may occasionally see reference to the parables of Jesus in the same

vein as the fables of Aesop, or, with William Blake, to the apocalyptic imagery of the book of

Revelation, but for the most part, the books of the New Testament are seen to be functional or

utilitarian in nature, composed of such things as Gospels, histories, and letters, written to do,

not to be. Linguistics has treated literature not much better and only haltingly, with its

emphasis upon spontaneous communicative utterances rather than well-crafted and measured

prose or poetry. Despite occasional efforts to make literature the object of linguistic analysis,

such efforts are virtually always self-conscious in their attempt to “measure” the functionality

of a literary piece, almost without regard for the non-quantifiable (and hence indescribable)

element of the literature, as such a factor is far more difficult to identify and estimate. New

Testament linguistic analysis continues in this vein by examining the various linguistic

features that convey the message between author and reader.

I must confess that, even though I have devoted much of my professional career to linguistic

analysis, an even earlier love was of literature. I can be almost instantly moved by a great

poem (“How do I love thee, let me count the ways . . .”)51 or by a great depiction of

character at full throttle (“O, let me kiss that hand!” “Let me wipe it first. It smells of

mortality”). But I can also be moved by many passages in the New Testament, in fact, for

those who know me well, by almost any passage in the New Testament. This evocative

response obviously is not sufficient to justify the New Testament being considered literary

art. In one of the most unusual chapters in a modern biblical commentary, Brooke Foss

Westcott in his commentary on the Johannine letters includes an appendix on “The Relation

of Christianity to Art,” but even in this unique but prescient chapter, he does not consider the

New Testament as a work of art, but instead views Christianity as opposed to art of the

time.52 How is it that Westcott arrived at this position so that the New Testament has been

excluded from the halls of great literature, and its authors, such as Paul, the Gospel writers,

and others, excluded from the pantheon of the literary greats? Is it simply because they wrote

in prosaic forms, such as the letter or the Gospel?53

In this chapter, I wish to resurrect the notion that the New Testament—whatever else it may

be, such as a suitable corpus for linguistic investigation or the theological basis of our

Christian faith—deserves to be discussed and treated, and most of all, read, as literary art. By

that, I mean not just that the New Testament contains a few well-wrought passages of

undeniable art (e.g., 1 Cor 13, a beautifully written passage that arguably rivals any other

ancient Greek writing),54 but that it is in its essence a reasonably large, complex literary

document or set of literary documents that merit and reward their literary and hence artistic

recognition in all of its dimensions. I will do this, however, by not specifically exegeting a

single passage, but simply by recounting the history of the philosophy of art (which I will

occasionally refer to as aesthetics) and literary theory and by tracing the history of the

interpretation of the New Testament within this history. I realize that I have set a large task

for myself, especially as I am arguing against, if not the explicit, at least the implicit

consensus of scholarship since Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote in the early nineteenth

century. My argument will proceed in several steps.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART AND LITERATURE

The major part of my argument is that one of the major reasons for not considering the New

Testament as literary art is because of how art and literature are themselves defined.

Therefore, I will make a quick examination of both the philosophy of art and how it is

defined, or what we typically call aesthetics, and the nature of literature, in particular literary

theory. I realize that each of these could consume all of our time, but I think that they lay the

appropriate foundation for the larger question of the New Testament as a “literary artifact” in

the fullest sense of the two words.

The history of the philosophy of art is a parallel history to that of literary theory itself and

with them the history of philosophy.55 The philosophy of art is concerned with what

constitutes art, while literary theory is concerned with how we understand the nature of

literature. All such histories usually and rightly begin with Plato and Aristotle. The history of

the philosophy of art is the history of discussion of a variety of essentialist and non-

essentialist views of what constitutes art, with the former prevailing until the more recent rise

of the latter. In other words, is art determined by some kind of essential properties that a work

called art must contain or embody by definition in order to be considered a work of art, or is

it not? Most aesthetic theories, in fact, pretty much all of them until the twentieth century,

have said yes, there are essential properties that all art shares. Despite their differences, Plato

and Aristotle were both essentialists and more particularly representationalists (or

mimeticists, based upon the ancient notion of imitation or mimesis). This means that they

believed that art was representative of nature. The influence of representationalism has been

immense, including such figures as Plotinus, the Neoplatonists, Augustine, Aquinas,

Renaissance Neoplatonism, Cartesian innate essentialism, empiricism, and even some forms

of German (and other types of) idealism. I realize that I am myself “painting” with broad

brushstrokes at this point, but all of these are built upon major representationalist

assumptions. This representation can take different forms and varying degrees from natural

substance to innate ideas and forms, but the essential characteristic of all art is that it is a

representation to varying degrees of reality, however that reality is defined.

Even though representational views are some of the oldest, they have continued to have

currency in a variety of revised forms. For example, both George Santayana and John Dewey

are representationalists of various types. Santayana, writing at the end of the nineteenth and

beginning of the twentieth centuries was, therefore, subject to influences of other movements

(see below, such as expressionism), but he took an essentially representational view of beauty

as “pleasure objectified” in a view that has been called “naturalism” or “materialism.”56

Dewey similarly takes a view described as “empirical naturalism or naturalistic empiricism,”

drawing upon later philosophical categories that are nevertheless fundamentally

representational.57 Twentieth-century Marxist materialism in its various forms (dialectical,

historical, etc.), such as is found in Georg Lukács, is probably also best seen as a

representational theory because of its materialist position. There are many problems with

representational views of art, the most pressing being that the definition of representation is

so difficult to agree upon (is it complete or partial?), along with what is being represented,

that there has never been a consensus on what constituted art as representation.58 Despite this

important and longstanding view of art, the New Testament has never been seriously

considered as literary art on the basis of it being representational. Much of the New

Testament is representational in a variety of ways, including its view of human nature and

even of God, but this has not proved convincing at least to modern critics.

In the eighteenth century, expressionist views of art emerged. In expressionism, art reflects

the outpouring or expression of the inner being of the artist, captured in the artistic object.

Expressionism, as an essentialist theory, is associated with a variety of intellectual

movements, including especially Romanticism, and this is worth remembering. William

Wordsworth captures the movement in his statement that poetry “is the spontaneous overflow

of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”59

Expressionism has sometimes been linked to intense personal emotion, regardless of the

audience, and sometimes to transmitted emotion.60 Philosophers such as Georg Friedrich

Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Tolstoy, Benedetto Croce, R. G.

Collingwood, and Susanne Langer are all different types of expressionists, and their differing

types vary widely. Croce is one of the most important modern aestheticians. Although he

emerges from an idealist philosophical tradition, akin to Hegel and the other German

idealists, he sees art as another type of knowledge that is primarily expressive.

There are several problems, however, with the notion of expressionism in art. One of these is

simply that much art is not expressionistic in the sense of conveying some kind of emotion or

powerful feeling, just as various people respond differently to the same artistic object.

Another is that art seems to require an audience, not just an expression. In fact, one of the

major problems is how to define “expressionism.” Expressionism can range in meaning from

something that is representational to something that is highly abstract. Most notions of

expressionism rely upon a notion of metaphor, in which the supposed expression is implicitly

related to something else, the work of art. Although we may concede that some art seems to

be expressive, there are few or at least not enough spontaneous overflows of emotion in the

New Testament (unlike the Psalms, perhaps) to defend it as expressionist art, and few have

done so. Expressionism, however, has persisted as one of the most enduring and common

definitions of what constitutes art, and this romantic notion has persistently influenced the

philosophy of art.

In the twentieth century, formalist views of art became highly significant. Formalism is the

reflection if not the product of the convergence of a number of factors, including

philosophical developments (analytic philosophy and logical positivism), the rise of modern

technology (such as photography and film), and the need to go beyond impressionism and

expressionism to find what they had in common. What they had in common and what

reflected the technological and even philosophically minimalist (some might say

reductionistic) definitions of meaning was form, and so form came to determine art itself, as

argued by Clive Bell.61 In a sense, formalism democratized art, because it was thought that

form was the one thing that all art possessed. But so does everything else, including nature,

and even for much art form is incidental or unintentional or even has a bad form or is without

form, so formalism needed to develop further. The form was at first equated with the content

of art,62 but then came to be seen as having not just form but the appropriate form

(Neoformalism). But this resulted in a “commendatory” rather than a general theory of art

(some art was real or better art than other art). Formalists ended up recognizing various types

of form related to its various elements and their interrelations,63 but rather than simply being

descriptivist they found equilibrium in what came to be what might be called a functional

view. That is, “the artistic form of an artwork is the ensemble of choices intended to realize

the point or purpose of the artwork.”64 This comprises the basis of the appreciation of art.

The formalist view found its way into a wide array of art forms, including not only the plastic

arts of painting and sculpture, but music and the modern arts of photography and film, and

especially of literature. Russian formalism was a movement that began in Moscow and St.

Petersburg and had a major influence upon diverse linguistic and literary movements,

including structuralism with its origins in central Europe and the New Critics in the English-

speaking world.65 Formalism also had a major reciprocal relation with phenomenology and

various other semiotic approaches, including myth criticism. Phenomenology developed from

the notion of acceptance of the “given”66 (akin to notions of the thing in itself examined by

formalism) and how one experienced it and described it apart from preconditions,67 which

itself led to phenomenological existentialism, concerned with questions of being and being in

the world associated with Martin Heidegger. Semiotic theories of art took their cues from

formalism under the influence of various scholars, particularly interested in matters of

language. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, who developed the meaning pyramid,

differentiated uses of language (similar to the organon model of Karl Bühler, adopted later by

Michael Halliday).68 Some language functions as referential (symbolic) and other as

emotive. The influence of this kind of distinction has been widespread, including not only in

the realm of literature (the New Critics) but in the various plastic arts. At the same time,

studies of myth in anthropology had a similar influence, for similar reasons. Myths came to

be seen as symbolic systems that arose out of various rituals (the myth and ritual school).

These symbolic systems played an important role in providing material for artists, such as the

poetry of T. S. Eliot, and, especially in the work of James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study

in Magic and Religion, had an influence upon a range of scholarship that explored the origins

and functions of myths as the articulation of the ritual. Ernst Cassirer developed an entire

philosophy of language as a symbol when he recognized that the symbol systems we use are

important in constructing our world. That is, these symbol systems are not models of the

world, but they model it.69 I must recognize that there have been those who have discussed

the New Testament in formalist terms. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were a number of

studies that were concerned with the formal structures of the New Testament, resulting in a

movement called “narrative criticism,” which was a developed form of the New Criticism.

However, this movement has faded, and was never a strong theory of the aesthetics of the

New Testament or of the New Testament as literary art, despite attempts along those lines.70

I will comment further on this below.

The theory of art as aesthetic experience shifts from the representation or expression of the

artist and from the form of the art itself to the response of the subject to the art, what one

might call viewer-response experience.71 This is still an essentialist definition because the

response of the participant, even if it is unique to that participant, is created by certain

qualities of the art itself. This is not simply the emotional response of someone to natural

phenomena but is focused upon particular artistic objects. Therefore, artists create art so as to

elicit aesthetic responses from their viewers by means of the features that they embody in

their works of art. There are two forms of aesthetic response that have resulted. The first is

based upon the features found within the art itself, what Carroll calls “content-oriented,” and

the other is focused entirely upon an attempt simply to contemplate in a disinterested way an

object for its own sake, what Carroll calls “affect-oriented.”72 In many people’s minds,

especially those who are perhaps simply responding to art, the simple contemplation of art

and responding to it satisfies a definition of art. This is probably the weakest form of the

definition, as the ability to contemplate art merely for its own sake has proven nearly

impossible. There is always some interest in the art (one cannot be disinterested because of a

variety of social, historical, or other concerns), and in fact, such an interest is warranted in

one responding to it. Despite this popular approach, the feature-oriented attempt is generally

considered more promising. However, it, too, has the problem that the viewpoint is based

upon the intention of the artist and the ability to identify features of the art, rather than simply

reading these features into the art by the respondent.

The twentieth century resulted in a number of seismic shifts in conceptions of the world and

how we know it. Their general tenor was to destabilize the foundations of knowledge. These

changes swept across most arenas of thought, including the arts. At this point, we shift from

essentialist to non-essentialist definitions of art. All of the above theories, whether they are

related to the artist, the respondent, or the work itself, are based upon there being some

essential features of art, something to do with the artwork itself that either elicits or reflects

their examination. However, many would argue that we have yet to find a satisfactory

definition of art on this basis, at least in part because reality is not constituted on the basis of

stable being, and so there has been a turn to non-essentialist definitions. Non-essentialist

definitions of art argue that there is not any property, characteristic, or even intention by the

artist or interpreter in the work of art itself, but that its status as art is dependent upon other

orientations that are located outside of the work. There have been four major theories of such

art.

The first is the Neo-Wittgensteinian approach to art. The earlier Wittgenstein was one of the

major influences upon logical positivism (through the Vienna School). However, the later

Wittgenstein is associated not with analytic philosophy but with an approach that states that

there are no essential properties of art, that is, art cannot be defined in relation to fixed

properties. Nevertheless, we still desire to be able to identify a work of art and to say whether

a particular set of sounds that we hear is music or simply noise. In the middle of the last

century, the situation had become such that those who were thinking about defining art had

come to realize that despite discussion for many years, no satisfactory definition of art had

been found and that perhaps none could ever be found. There was a more widespread

rejection of institutionalized thought and a reaction against over-codified intellectual thought.

Ordinary language philosophy was one of those movements. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical

Investigations had had an impact upon (or at least a relationship to) ordinary language

philosophy, with its concern for how language is actually used to do things rather than being

precise symbolic systems of meaning.73 Similarly, his work caused those interested in art to

move away from essentialist definitions. Just as ordinary language reflects how language is

used, without appealing to innate rules that say how it is done, so we often know what objects

are even if we can’t define them (e.g., what is a dog? We know one but we probably can’t

define one). The notion of family resemblance came into play. Art is that which resembles art,

an open concept that changes to accommodate the various works that resemble those works

of art that we know. There are problems with the family resemblance theory, including

knowing where to start and why (can we agree on what is art to start with, and if so why can’t

we use that definition throughout?), problems with family resemblance (as Carroll states, just

because his eyes are like Gregory Peck’s does not mean he has a family relationship with

Peck—he does not),74 and it is too inclusive as it potentially includes everything as art

because everything in some way resembles everything else at least at some level.

The second non-essentialist view is the Institutional Theory of Art. The Institutional Theory

of Art rejects the family resemblance theory of art and instead argues for a social theory of

art, one that involves the social construct of “the art world.” This theory argued in the 1970s

that they could determine what was art without including everything as art, and this was

determined by those in the art world who determined what was art. In other words, for a piece

to be considered art, it needed the endorsement of someone in the art world. This

endorsement recommends to the rest of the world that this object has been seen as a work of

art. This view has generally been rejected for historical and philosophical reasons. We see

that historically it simply does not work. Monet and the other Impressionists were ignored

and even outright rejected by the French Salon dealers in the early twentieth century so that

they could display their Romantic and effusive landscapes—painted by artists who now are

virtually unknown. In other words, because it is a sociological theory, it is prone to all of the

criticisms of social institutions, including the fact that artists are self-appointed and subject to

the same pressures and politics as everyone else in society. This simply puts the power of

determination into too few and too involved hands, deciding the tastes of the consumers of

art.

The third theory is the Historical Definition theory. In some ways, this theory takes some of

the strengths of the Neo-Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblances and of the

Institutional Theory of Art in that it is social in nature, depends upon continuity between

artworks, and respects the ability to integrate art within the wider social forces of culture, but

with the added feature that the object being considered must have been intended by the

creator as a work of art. Carroll calls this feature “art regards,” that is, the work must have

been created with regard for it being considered art and more than that as something that was

intended to remain and endure as art.75 In other words, this intention must have been made

“nonpassingly.”76 This allows one to examine objects historically to determine whether they

are art, and requires a certain amount of education because one must know something of the

artist and the time in which the piece was created and how art was viewed during its time.

The Historical Definition theory corrects some of the problems of the earlier non-essentialist

theories but retains others of them and adds some of its own. The Historical Definition theory

does not get away from the problems of social definitions and adds to the problem by trying

to determine such things as artistic intentions with regard to their supposed art. Some work

functions as art, even if the creator never intended it as art. As Carroll points out, art

museums are full of objects not intended to be there.77

The fourth and final theory is that of Historical Narrative. The Historical Narrative has many

similarities to the Historical Definition theory but without reliance upon intentionality. The

Historical Narrative approach instead relies upon the informed ability of the one assessing the

artifact to create a historical narrative that “‘explains’ why the artifact in question is an

artwork.”78 Carroll depicts these narratives being created in a wide range of contexts,

including artistic statements, lectures, reviews, various types of handouts, and artistic

appearances—all in an attempt to create a convincing narrative that explains and accounts for

the status of the work as art. He uses the example of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1963)

painting. This painting of a Brillo Box, without the narrative, raises questions as to how it

would be seen in relation to such things as an actual Brillo box. Questions might legitimately

be raised whether this was at first some kind of joke or attempt to mislead the public into

thinking of this as art so that the artifact could make money. A convincing historical narrative

would create links between Warhol’s work and the art world of the time, showing how it was

part of an understandable trajectory within art. The Historical Narrative approach has similar

problems as Institutional and Historical theories. It is, in fact, one that combines many of

their elements in an attempt to explain a work within its context. One may not be able to

provide the kind of knowledge necessary for historical accounting, such as the work of a

single, isolated artist. The writing of the narrative also assumes the establishment of a

tradition of recognized art not subject to the same historical assessment. The problems of the

qualifications of the author of the narrative and who responds to it are also important, with

the possibility being created of the historical narrative simply being written by those who

represent forces within the art world or who have non-artistic agendas.

There have been various efforts to utilize some of the above non-essentialist theories in

regard to analyzing the New Testament, especially some Neo-Wittgensteinian efforts that

draw in speech-act theory (see further below).79 Even this essay might arguably be seen as

an effort to write a historical narrative in defense of the New Testament as art. However, most

of the non-essentialist positions taken regarding the New Testament are concerned with

something other than its artistic value.

Since the New Testament is a written document (or set of documents), one would need to

argue that it is to be accepted as an artistic artifact on the basis of being an example of literary

art. The history of discussion of literature as art is in many ways paralleled by the general

history of the philosophy of art that I have presented above, with a few differences based

upon the fact that literature is, as was indicated above, on the boundary between art and

linguistics, that is, it is a language-encoded artifact, rather than one created in paint or stone,

and hence comes with wordings that may (or may not) aid in the determination of the literary

status of the artifact.

Over the course of its development, literary theory has also moved over a similar course of

time from the author (or behind the text), to the text, to the reader (in front of the text), just as

we saw in our general treatment of artistic theories. Theories of representation dominated the

western literary tradition until the eighteenth century, until Romantic expressionism emerged

in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although even this was still highly

representationalist in that it attempted “to ascertain how far the language of conversation in

the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.”80 The

emphasis to this point in literary study was upon the author, with concern for describing the

intention of the author within the originating literary context. Much study of the New

Testament remains focused upon and has even revived interest in this literary theoretical

stance, with emphasis upon authorial intention.81 The rise of formalism in literary theory

also occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century under the same influences and with

the same results. This represented a shift to emphasis upon the text and was most widely

known in what came to be called the New Criticism, although there were also other semiotic

theories, such as structuralism and even speech-act theory (another theory related to the later

Wittgenstein), and even mythic theories, such as the archetypal patterns of Northrop Frye.

These kinds of close readings of the New Criticism have continued to play an important part

in literary study, even if they are subsumed under other theories.

Literary studies have seen a variety of more recent approaches, most of them reflecting

similar currents as philosophical and aesthetic studies. Some of these reflect a move toward

the reader, such as reader-response and related criticisms, and even deconstruction, which

provides an interesting reaction to formal and semiotic theories by both embracing and

renouncing them. For the most part, however, literary studies have assumed the mantle of a

historically based discipline often referred to as cultural studies and have, at least in some

ways, returned to a new view of the author and intentionality. Even where literature is not

studied simply in this way, much theorizing is now done in relation to historical and related

ideological questions, such as in studies of the New Historicism, Marxism and Post-Marxism,

feminism, gender and sexuality, postcolonialism, race and ethnicity, psychoanalysis, and the

like. These types of literary theory often reflect various institutional, historical, and narrative

concerns.82

The major, fundamental question that has been raised in the history of examination of

literature and its purpose is whether literature is meant to teach or delight. I realize that this

sounds reductionistic, but despite the major differences among theorists, this question

constantly seems to re-emerge. Plato and Aristotle had opposing views on this, at least in

places. Plato’s dialogue Ion speaks of the divine inspiration of the Muse that elevates the

language of the poet (delight), while Aristotle states that the purpose of tragedy is “an

imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; . . . through pity

and fear effecting the proper purgation (catharsis) of these emotions” (teach).83 This

opposition between teaching and delight has continued right through the history of literary

studies. The medievals tended to emphasize teaching, the Renaissance delight, the neo-

classical period teaching, the Romantics delight, and the late nineteenth-century teaching.

The twentieth century is far more complex than to be able simply to assert a single view: The

New Critics emphasized delight, but much ideological criticism has emphasized edification.

As recently as 2003, the literary critic Harold Bloom strongly criticized J. K. Rowling of

“dumbing down” her readers. He noted that her writing was poor and that she should not be

read by children, according to Anne Stevens, “Precisely because Bloom values reading for its

educative properties rather than its entertainment value.”84 In other words, we are still

worrying about whether literature is to teach or delight. One can see that the New Testament

would be a prime text to be evaluated within such a complex paradigm.

THE LITERARY AND UN-LITERARY FORTUNES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

This leads me to a new consideration of the New Testament as a literary artifact. There are

several periods in the study of the New Testament that I wish to emphasize in its relationship

to the notion of its being a literary artifact. Despite a few time periods when the New

Testament has been considered of sufficient literary merit for examination in those terms, for

the vast majority of its existence it has not been considered “literary” in nature. However, I

believe that an argument can be made on the basis of the history of its treatment, and how

various theories of art have influenced our conceptions of art, that the New Testament

warrants more than simply passive recognition and merits revival of consideration as a

literary artifact.

I begin the defense with this question: where did literary interpretation and with it

appreciation of literature in the western world come from? It did not come from Plato’s

Republic Book 10, one of our earliest literarily reflective essays, because in it, Plato takes a

very negative view, seeing literature as imitative and many removes from reality, which takes

precedence. Literary appreciation did not come from Aristotle’s Poetics. Whatever Aristotle

may have said regarding literature (he saw it as almost entirely didactic), Aristotle’s Poetics

appears to have fallen out of notice shortly after it was written and was not revived until the

late thirteenth century at the earliest.85 Other ancient literary theorists of note, such as

Horace, Quintilian, and Longinus, did not have an influence upon interpretation so much as

upon style. Thus, the ancients do not provide the answer to this question. The basis of literary

interpretation, however, is the Bible itself, in particular as it was interpreted during the late

patristic and early medieval period. As Stevens rightly observes,

Medieval religious scholars helped to shape the practice of literary criticism through their

development of methods and terminology for interpreting the Bible. The Bible was the most

important book to European medieval thinkers, and the methods that theologians developed

to interpret it helped reshape the history of literature by establishing a canon of texts and

developing methods for interpreting biblical passages on multiple levels.86

These methods, even after they were no longer applied to the Bible, became the basis of

western literary interpretation and appreciation. Whereas forms of allegorical interpretation

preceded the early Christian interpreters, this interpretation, such as is found in Philo, had no

lasting effect on the interpretation of the Bible. Christian interpretation of the Bible, perhaps

found earliest in a sophisticated form in Origen, continued to develop into the four levels of

interpretation outlined by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica (1265–74). I note that

even though Thomas was influenced indirectly by Aristotle through Islamic scholars, his

writings occurred before Aristotle’s Poetics had been translated into Latin in 1278. These

levels of interpretation were, in fact, responsible for shaping the vast majority of what

constitutes the literature of the medieval period, including such examples as the mystery and

miracle plays, romances, heroic tales, didactic literature including poems, even Chaucer and

Spenser, and culminating in the work of Dante.

The four levels of interpretation, even though they deal with both the Old and New

Testaments, are primarily a New Testament interpretive framework, designed not only to

bring the Old Testament into a relationship with the New but to create a framework for

understanding the New Testament. I think that it is important to note that many, if not most of

the later orientations of literary theory—whether representational or expressionist or formal

or whatever—are found adumbrated if not explicated in the four levels of interpretation.87

The first level is the literal or historical level. The literal or historical level is foundational to

interpretation, as it offers a basic understanding that has integrity in itself as representing

“what is,” while also providing the foundation upon which all other interpretation is based.

The use of the terms “literal” or “historical” tends to imply self-evident meanings when such

terms imply nothing more than the ancient equivalent of a close reading of the presented text.

The fact that readings are not self-evident is what motivates the other levels of interpretation.

The second level is the allegorical or typological. Beyond the literal or historical level, the

next level is what we might today call figurative meaning, especially as found in the

metaphorical or symbolic. Whereas the ancients tended to use typological readings to bring

the Old Testament into harmony with the New, such as finding Noah’s ark (a true historical

account) as a prefigurement of Jesus saving sinners, the second level provides the structure

for finding figurative meanings in literature, those meanings that represent more than is

offered by the basic reading. Such theories are the basis of much modern metaphorical theory

of representation.

The third level is the tropological or moral. The second level offers figurative meanings, the

third level offers didactic meanings. As noted previously, one of the recurring tensions in

literary theory is whether literature is written to profit or delight. The tropological or moral

level provides justification for the belief that literature is to teach or instruct. Regardless of

the type of literature, whether found in the New Testament or in secular literature whether

that is poems or novels or dramas, literary interpretation has used this basic account as a

justification for the other levels, including the moral.

The fourth level is the anagogical or spiritual. This fourth level is the most difficult to grasp

and to practice in interpretation, in the sense that it is concerned with the most abstract and

non-literalistic readings, those that are not simply metaphorical or moral in nature. As

Stevens points out, Aquinas saw this level as pertaining to heaven and the relevance of the

scriptural text for matters related to the hereafter.88 There is a sense in which she is correct,

but anagogical or spiritual meanings have always meant more than simply explorations of

heaven. The spiritual is concerned with life in glory and, in that sense, is about the delight

that occurs when one receives the results of one’s right interpretation, not only moral life but

spiritual life.

As Stevens points out, not every passage is readily given to complete fourfold interpretation,

but that does not mean that any given passage is not able to be interpreted with such a

fourfold framework. In fact, it can be. The result is what Aquinas and others have recognized

as multivalent interpretation, that is, passages that mean on various levels. The importance

here is that this means of interpretation not only served the church well into the time of the

Renaissance (and, truth be told, to the present), but it set the agenda for interpretation both

sacred and secular from the medieval to the present. This quadripartite interpretive matrix

established the importance of an understanding of the text (formalism and close reading,

associated with a representational view), gave not only permission for but explicit warrant to

further types of interpretation, that is, that there is more to the text than simply its literal or

historical level, and found these in three different types that have had currency at various

times in literary interpretation (whether expressive or impressive), the allegorical or

typological (what we might call the metaphorical or symbolic), the tropological or moral

(interpretation as offering teaching), and the anagogical or spiritual (interpretation as offering

delight). I may be overstating these equations, but if I am, it is only a slight exaggeration, as

the history of interpretation bears out.

This framework endured in various ways through the Renaissance and Reformation. Even

though the Reformers may have emphasized the literal or historical through their

grammatical-historical approach to the text, they were concerned about the other levels. They

found typological, moral, and spiritual meanings in the New Testament. However, in their

effort to find these meanings, the result was that theology soon took precedence over the

Bible, and dogmatics replaced exegesis. This, in fact, set the stage for the next major step in

interpretive theoretical development.

As a result of the Enlightenment, the level of interpretation that was called into question was

not the spiritual or moral or typological seen as unnecessary accretions, as one might have

expected, but the literal or historical. The result of the Enlightenment was the growth of

scientific knowledge and with it knowledge of the natural world. As knowledge of the natural

world grew, there was an increased sense that explanations of this world could be made

without an appeal to divine order. These scientific advances were accompanied by advances

in a number of other non-scientific areas as well, including the revival of classical learning,

the growing divide between dogmatic theology and exegetical theology, the discovery of an

abundance of ancient documents (besides their languages), and most of all the recognition

that advances in human learning had direct bearing on questions of understanding and

interpretation.

It is, therefore, not surprising that the fundamental thinking in the area of hermeneutics or

how we understand revolved around the Bible, and in particular, the New Testament.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, the theologian and philosopher, was the first to systematically

tackle the notion of hermeneutics, and he did so by addressing issues in understanding the

Bible, especially the New Testament. I note, in fact, that the editor of the current translation

of Schleiermacher’s work on hermeneutics states that when Schleiermacher’s work was

brought back into print in 1977, the editor “omitted the majority of the passages directly

referring to the New Testament in order to be able to highlight the more philosophical aspects

of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics.”89 The current editor says that he has tended to follow

this practice, even if he has restored some of the passages. The emphasis in discussing

Schleiermacher has been upon his role in formulating philosophical hermeneutics,

overlooking the fact that his view of hermeneutics grew directly out of his view of the New

Testament.

The consequences of this misunderstanding have been great—almost as great as

Schleiermacher’s own misunderstandings. Misunderstanding is part of a general trend to be

noted in Schleiermacher scholarship—to misrepresent what Schleiermacher is indeed saying.

Hans-Georg Gadamer himself has been accused of being one of the most violent offenders of

Schleiermacher, but it is a tradition that goes back much earlier, probably to one of

Schleiermacher’s earliest interpreters, Wilhelm Dilthey.90 The major violation revolves

around a “failure adequately to engage with the philosophy of early German

Romanticism.”91 This has resulted in misunderstanding German Romanticism, its historical

context, and the importance of philology in Schleiermacher’s method. Gadamer, among

others, failed to realize how pervasive German Romanticism was at the time. German

Romanticism, a form of expressionism (as noted above), was not just a way of approaching

art and texts, but it was the way of understanding art and texts.92 Schleiermacher was not just

concerned with understanding but how interpretation, and misinterpretation, occurs in any

use of language. Hence grammatical interpretation, or philology, is crucial to Schleiermacher,

including—and this is important to note—how the use of language relates to the environment

in which language is used (something Gadamer overlooks).

For Schleiermacher, the fundamental relationship is between the language user93 and

audience, and this relationship focuses upon arriving at meaning, meaning to the point of

knowing the author better than the author knew him- or herself, and this constitutes

Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical circle (not one of parts and whole, as this is usually

conceived). Any larger view of language is dependent upon the grammatical understanding of

the language so that there are two levels of language use, the universal and the individual.94

One of Schleiermacher’s limitations, however, was that “Schleiermacher does not consider, as

part of his hermeneutics, the significance of historical texts for human self-understanding at

large. His hermeneutics does not ask how the canonized texts of tradition are made available

to us through a continuous process of historical mediation.”95 Schleiermacher is instead

concerned with what he calls “divination,” in conjunction with a comparison of texts. Rather

than simply comparing texts by the same author or of the same period, he attempts to recreate

a hypothesis about the text and to understand its individuality. This constitutes the standard

for determining meaning.96

As far as the New Testament is concerned, Schleiermacher posits that there is no such thing

as a special hermeneutics for the New Testament since its philological matters are Greek in

nature and its psychological issues are not reflective of a unity but of several different types

(genres), and thus that its interpretation falls within the general hermeneutics that he is

developing.97 Furthermore, the New Testament must be considered along with all other

ancient Greek texts, but it must be recognized that it was written after the Golden Age of

Greek writing when the language was in decline. The writers tend to reflect “common

life.”98 One must also take into account the influence of Aramaic, the subject matter (for

which no special vocabulary is created), and the influence of bilingualism. Schleiermacher

then expands upon these various features, placing the New Testament in a particular location

with regard to the historicality of the text and its authors. In all major respects, in comparison

with other classical authors and writers, the New Testament is seen to be an unstable

amalgamation of various influences.

The result, when Schleiermacher summarizes, is to claim to prove that any special nature of

the New Testament has been shown, at the grammatical level, to have no substance. With the

fall of the literal or historical level and his failure to appreciate how historical texts can play a

continuing role, so falls the other levels, as Schleiermacher notes when he says that one

cannot appeal to the figurative if the literal is not explicable.99 In other words, for all intents

and purposes, the New Testament, both as inspired text and as an artistic artifact, has been

permanently demoted on all accounts, all because its language does not conform to classical

standards of the time but is a supposed mix of Greek and Semitic languages.100

Schleiermacher can and should be questioned on both counts, but his viewpoint nevertheless

prevailed. The result was that the New Testament could no longer be treated as either

Scripture or literature, and not even as a historically reliable and understandable common

text.

At this point, a major split occurs in relationship to the interpretation of the New Testament,

apart from how it was studied in theological faculties (where it continued to be studied as

Scripture, but in a much-chastened form). On the one hand, those concerned with questions

of interpretation moved beyond the New Testament in their theories of understanding,

creating further advances in hermeneutics that followed more philosophical paths that led to

such thinkers as Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and others.101 On the other

hand, those concerned with literary interpretation, having already fully absorbed the notion of

levels of interpretation into their interpretive matrix—since they were unaffected by the

rejection of the New Testament but retained non-literal and historical interpretation—

continued to apply such levels of understanding—that is, looking for moral or other kinds of

meaning in the literal or historical accounts of texts—while at the same time overlooking

interpretation of the New Testament. The New Testament became a source document, a

repository of references and allusions upon which to draw, rather than a primary text of

interpretation in literary circles. This was the case even though literature at this time was not

more narrowly defined as “‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ writing,” but as writings “that

conformed to particular standards,”102 mostly those established by the expressive or

Romantic interpretive theory. As a result, a survey of virtually all accounts of literary theory

moves from the medieval to the eighteenth century in an almost seamless transition, with the

Bible virtually unmentioned—apart from possibly citing several of the translations of the

Bible into English, such as the Great Bible or the Bishops Bible and especially Tyndale’s

New Testament and the King James Bible, as examples of English prose. One must also note

that departments of English literature were not formed in English language universities until

the end of the nineteenth century, thus also leaving no formal place for the English Bible at

least to be studied as literature.103 Of course, the New Testament was being studied in

theology faculties, but not as literature or as art, and all too often, after Schleiermacher, not

even as inspired Scripture.

Apart from in theological faculties, the next major endeavour to study the Bible and even the

New Testament as an artifact occurred as the result of a movement that had very little to do

with biblical scholars, the Bible as Literature movement.104 Although anticipated by some

others (such as Walt Whitman), the Bible as Literature movement emerged in the late

nineteenth century among primarily literary scholars, especially those who wrote for a more

popular audience, and hence it had an effect on the wider public regarding their views of the

Bible. As might be expected, the Bible as Literature movement was not well received among

Bible scholars, even though many in it accepted the results of historical criticism. This

skepticism of the movement was because those who were reintroducing the study of the Bible

as not simply the product of grammatical-historical and then historical-critical exegesis were

interested in exploring a different dimension of the Bible—its literary character, though this

character was defined in differing ways and often concentrated upon the Old Testament. In

some ways, this is a movement that began in the nineteenth century and lost most of its

momentum by the mid-twentieth century, so that the enthusiasm with which it is pursued

today is much less than it was at an earlier time. The movement has had relatively little

impact upon the field of professional biblical studies, and even those within the Christian

church (apart from Christians who might study the Bible as literature in an academic course).

The poet Matthew Arnold can perhaps be attributed with inaugurating the Bible as Literature

movement, not intentionally but inadvertently. He was a professor of poetry at Oxford

University, and took what Martin Buss calls “a literary approach to the Bible.”105 For

Arnold, this involved three major emphases: a concern for general education of the public

through reading the Bible, seeing the Bible as literary, by which he meant essentially emotive

or expressive in nature (even though Arnold is considered a Victorian, the Victorians were

highly influenced by the Romantics, including Arnold by John Keats), and interpreting it not

simply along historical lines but as helping its readers understand life.

Richard Moulton is probably less well-known today than Arnold, but it is to him that we owe

the terminology of the Bible as Literature. Moulton, too, was an educationalist with concern

that the general populace should be more widely exposed to the Bible. He was appointed as a

teacher at the University of Chicago in 1892 and was head of the Department of General

Literature, where literature was studied in translation. To give an indication of the

environment in which Moulton brought study of the Bible to the general public, at the end of

a lecture he gave on a visit to the US (he was British), the audience voted the following

declaration of him: “he has led us as a prophet of the coming time, when the Bible shall be a

branch of study in all our colleges, and when all culture and all literature shall acknowledge

the Bible as the world’s chief book.”106 I note that this was in response not to the theological

study of the Bible but to the Bible as literature.

There are several important things to note about Moulton. First, Moulton thought that the

literary character of the Bible would provide a common meeting point for both professional

and amateur, specialist and generalist, readers of the Bible. Second, Moulton helped to revive

the medieval view of the interpretation of the Bible. As Buss states, “The old—e.g., medieval

—view that the Scriptures represent literature at its highest was thus resurrected in a

moderate form in the context of an interest in general education,” a movement that had begun

with the Reformation and continued in subsequent centuries.107 Incidentally, I note that in a

book he wrote on Shakespeare, Moulton had treated the “moral system” within Shakespeare’s

thought—a reminder of the influence of New Testament levels of interpretation on

subsequent literary interpretation. Third, Moulton produced a joint project entitled The Bible

as Literature, published in 1896 (and gave its title to the movement). One of the contributors

to this volume was Milton Terry, who had written a well-known and still reprinted

introduction to biblical hermeneutics (1883)108 that, contrary to Schleiermacher, included

and treated special hermeneutics of the Bible.109

There were others who identified with this populist educational movement that attempted to

bring the Bible back into the literary discussion, whether it was within literature departments

or even for the general public. There was resistance to such a movement,110 and eventually,

the movement died down. The major emphasis of the movement, however, was to take the

Bible out of the hands of the historians and theologians (those under the sway of the

Schleiermachian legacy) and appreciate it for its literary qualities, which were often defined

in relation to its generic relations to other ancient literature.111

Although there were some who anticipated a revival of examination of the literary qualities of

the Bible, such as Eric Auerbach in his aptly-titled book Mimesis,112 such a movement did

not recur until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Two major books that reflect such a movement

are David Rhoads and Donald Michie’s Mark as Story and Alan Culpepper’s Anatomy of the

Fourth Gospel, as two of the earliest and best of the movement. The books are very similar in

many ways. Rhoads is a New Testament scholar, and Michie is a literary scholar, and they

combined forces to offer an interpretation of Mark’s Gospel following the narratological

model of the American narratologist Seymour Chatman.113 They organized their book in

such a way as to reflect the basic orientation of Chatman’s book. The second and third

editions of this book, however, shift to a structure suggested by Wesley Kort, while retaining

much of the same organization, except increasingly expanding with a further chapter with

each edition. Alan Culpepper, under the guidance of the well-known literary scholar Frank

Kermode,114 also draws upon Chatman and narratology, but is also much more eclectic in his

drawing on various other topics and scholars so as to offer a literary reading of John’s

Gospel. These two books were followed by numerous other books by New Testament

scholars, offering readings of various literary dimensions of the New Testament, in particular

the Gospels. The literature on the Gospels, in fact, became voluminous and treated many

different literary topics, but in particular character and plot, with occasional studies of other

topics like setting. The book of Acts was also treated as literature by a few scholars, but

mostly simply to place it within the ancient romance genre. Paul’s writings, with a very few

exceptions, were generally excluded from such literary treatment, presumably because they

were letters and hence did not qualify as being “literary” in nature. They instead soon came to

be analyzed as instances of ancient rhetoric, despite the fact that ancient rhetoricians did not

view the letter as a rhetorical form.115

This general literary movement within New Testament studies developed in several different

directions. One was to pursue the literary dimension more fully, moving into reader-response

criticism and then into deconstruction. Both proved relatively short-lived in both literary and

New Testament circles, and much literary treatment resorted to cultural criticism, an

encompassing term that has all too often come to characterize and embrace what used to be

done in English literature departments. The other direction was for the development of what

has come to be called “narrative criticism.” Narrative criticism, first called such by Rhoads, is

a type of fixed formalist criticism that draws upon the New Critics and various elements of

narratological study, with emphasis upon the standard elements of literary analysis: character,

setting, point of view, plot, and sometimes rhetoric.116 Narrative criticism has continued to

be used in New Testament studies, despite the fact that it is not recognized as a type of

criticism by that name within secular literature departments and is thus a uniquely named (if

not entirely unique) form of biblical criticism, and is characterized by its fixed and even

formulaic application.

A representative volume in this phase of literary study of the Bible is The Literary Guide to

the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. In the “General Introduction” to the

volume,117 the editors position their work much as did the Bible as Literature movement.

They identify with how the general populace does not now know its Bible, even though it

stands as a monument of importance in contemporary culture. They distance themselves from

traditional historical-critical scholarship while admitting that their contributors do not neglect

such matters. They are instead determined to treat the Bible as one would other works of

literature. They, in fact, go so far as to posit that a crucial point has been reached in which the

Bible is regaining a place within literary study. While not imposing any particular critical

model upon their contributors, the editors also point out that some of the extreme forms are

avoided (presumably such things as reader-response and poststructuralist deconstruction).

They further note that, with the widespread revival of literary study of the Bible, they have

drawn upon an international group of contributors, although they also note that all but two of

them are from secular universities. They close by noting that, for the most part (though not

invariably), the King James Version has been used for “obvious” reasons, as it is “the version

most English readers associate with the literary qualities of the Bible, and it is still arguably

the version that best preserves the literary effects of the original languages.”118 Whereas

there are a number of ostensive similarities between this latest effort and the Bible as

Literature movement, there are also some major differences. One of these is that this later

movement is more particularly located within the field of biblical studies and, in particular,

the area of the Old Testament. Of the forty chapters in Alter and Kermode’s volume (divided

over Old Testament, New Testament, and General Essays), only nine including an

introduction are given to the New Testament. Of these nine, there are only six different

authors and two who are literary scholars, Frank Kermode himself, who writes three of the

chapters (Introduction, Matthew, and John), and Gabriel Josipovici, who writes on Hebrews

and the Catholic Epistles. In other words, whereas the Bible as Literature movement was a

movement from outside of theological studies designed to re-integrate the Bible, and for our

purposes the New Testament, into the field of literature and its appreciation, the recent

literary criticism movement is an internal movement within biblical studies, incorporating the

development of its own form of literary reading of the Bible, narrative criticism. Despite a

few claims to the contrary, for the most part, this movement is less about literature as artifact

than it is about the New Testament as a type of literature that fits within the scope of study of

the New Testament. Nevertheless, despite the occasional literary study—such as a study of

characters, apparently the most enduring of literary topics in recent discussion—the most

recent literary movement, apart from narrative criticism, has again receded into the

background.

CONCLUSION: JUSTIFYING THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE

In light of these factors and this history, I wish to argue that the New Testament should be

reconceptualized not just as a theological document or as a historical document but as a

literary text, that is, as a literary artifact, and that it should be studied in that light.

There are several arguments in support of this. The first is that there are no good reasons to

exclude it from such consideration. The reasons that the New Testament is excluded from

literary study are based on misconceptions regarding the philosophy of art, literary theory,

and the history of interpretation. The philosophy of art indicates that there are a number of

different aesthetic models that have been proposed. However, the expressive view (associated

with Romanticism) came to dominate the general view of art with deleterious effects on

viewing the New Testament. Several of the current models of art theory—social functional

theory and narrative historical theory—both provide a place for the study of the New

Testament within the domain of literary artifact.

The second argument in support is that the New Testament fulfills appropriate criteria for

study as literature. One of the major reasons for exclusion of the New Testament as a literary

artifact is that many of those who have determined the place of the New Testament within the

field of art have had views that have had unjustified sway over artistic theory. The aesthetic

views have changed, however, but the positioning of the New Testament has not. The

expressivist view of Romanticism—still very strong in many people’s minds—was a view

understandable in its time, but that time has come and gone. The only essentialist view that

garners much support today is the social functional view. This view argues that art must have

a function within its contemporary context. This is a position that is, in fact, deeply enshrined

within standard critical views of the New Testament but has had to my knowledge virtually

no impact upon artistic views of the New Testament.

As noted above, Gunkel, who helped pioneer views of language differing according to

context, developed form criticism in a way that moved away from an appreciation of the use

and function of language in its situated life. Form criticism instead moved toward the view

that forms are shaped by later oral but also, and perhaps primarily, by literary contexts. This

divergence moved away from the position argued first by Gardiner and then by Malinowski,

followed by Firth and then the Hallidayan school of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This

concept came to be associated with what was called a context of situation, in which registers

of language varied according to the situational context. However, for a variety of reasons not

pertinent here, this stream of linguistics, while it has discussed other literary texts, has not

taken up the New Testament in such light (apart from in the work of a few New Testament

scholars).119 The Gunkelian retreat from context of situation had the effect of shifting the

emphasis in New Testament studies—especially in study of the Gospels—away from the

Gospels as literary artifacts and in the direction of their being later derivative documents.

They were not literary in nature but compilations by those who assembled fixed forms

reflective of later contexts, not the contexts in which language was first used.

This is only one major missed opportunity in the history of New Testament scholarship when

the New Testament could have re-entered the mainstream of New Testament studies as a

literary artifact. However, this would have required a completely different development in

form criticism. This applies to the Gospels, but it could also apply to the letters. There was

some early work in epistolary study that differentiated between letters as genuine writings

and epistles as literary creations,120 but the majority of the New Testament letters were seen

as letters rather than epistles. As we now know, however, this is a false dichotomy, and

genuine letters and literary letters are both situationally contextual..

The third argument in support of the New Testament as a literary artifact is that the entire

history of literary interpretation is dependent upon the interpretation of the New Testament.

The four levels of interpretation, worked out over several centuries by medieval theologians

for interpretation of the Bible, in particular the New Testament, are integral to literary study

to this day, whether that study is concerned with literal and historical material or various

other levels, such as the figurative and metaphorical, moral, or aesthetic. The reason that the

New Testament is no longer included within this interpretation is because of a huge mistake

by Schleiermacher and a subsequent failure to address this misunderstanding by later

hermeneuts and other interpreters. Because of his rejection of the inspired character of the

Bible, Schleiermacher in his attempt to attack the literary and historical level of the New

Testament had the effect of not just disputing this level of interpretation but deposing all the

other levels of interpretation and along with them the entire New Testament—and he did so

arguably on the basis of two major interpretive errors that have stood uncorrected for nearly

200 years. The New Testament is not best understood as written in language that invites

comparison with the classical language, and it is not a form of language that consists of a mix

of Semitic language and Greek. Not only is there an anti-Semitic bias to Schleiermacher’s

formulation, but there is a failure to understand the nature of language and the language of

the New Testament in particular.

The fourth argument is that I am, in some ways, attempting to make a Historical Narrative

argument for the New Testament as a literary artifact. I have engaged in retelling and

reassessing the history of the literary fortunes of the New Testament. Rather than seeing the

New Testament as easily shunted aside and as being unliterary and not worthy of such

appreciation, I believe that a new narrative can be written that argues that the New Testament

is fundamental to all literary interpretation on the basis of the medieval four levels of

interpretation and that one cannot simply discard the New Testament and retain the residue of

such an interpretive model. Furthermore, it is only if one accepts expressive theories of

aesthetics—such as did Schleiermacher and others along the way and which have had a

disproportionately large deleterious effect on subsequent philosophy of art—or if one accepts

other severely limiting theories of art or literature that one can even begin to argue for the

New Testament being excluded as a literary artifact. If one moves beyond essentialist views

of aesthetics and introduces non-essentialist views, one can make convincing arguments that

there are good reasons to examine the New Testament as literary art, that is, art in the form of

words, because there are no good reasons for excluding it. The history of interpretation, when

rightly understood, bears this out at all major points.

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Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Lewis, C. S. Christian Reflections, edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967.

McCormick, Peter J. Modernity, Aesthetics, and the Bounds of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1990.

Moulton, James Hope. A Grammar of New Testament Greek: Vol. I. Prolegomena. 3rd ed.

Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1908.

Ogden, C. K., and I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of

Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. London: Kegan Paul, 1923.

Palmer, D. J. The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English Language and

Literature from its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School. London: Oxford

University Press, 1965.

Porter, Stanley E. “A Newer Perspective on Paul: Romans 1–8 through the Eyes of Literary

Analysis.” In The Bible in Human Society: Essays in Honour of John Rogerson, edited by M.

Daniel Carroll R. et al., 366–92. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995.

———. “Why Hasn’t Literary Stylistics Caught on in New Testament Studies?” In Discourse

Studies and Biblical Interpretation: A Festschrift for Stephen H. Levinsohn, edited by Steven

E. Runge, 35–57. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2011.

Porter, Stanley E., and Bryan R. Dyer, eds. Paul and Ancient Rhetoric: Theory and Practice in

the Hellenistic Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Porter, Stanley E., and Jason C. Robinson. Hermeneutics: An Introduction to Interpretive

Theory. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.

Resseguie, James L. Narrative Criticism of the New Testament: An Introduction. Grand

Rapids: Baker, 2005.

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Gospel. 1982. 2nd ed. with Joanna Dewey, 1999. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Fortress, 2012.

Ryken, Leland. The Bible as Literature. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, edited and

translated by Andrew Bowie. CTHP. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Stevens, Anne H. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Peterborough, ON:

Broadview, 2021.

Terry, Milton S. Biblical Hermeneutics: A Treatise on the Interpretation of the Old and New

Testaments. Reprint, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974.

Westcott, Brooke Foss. The Epistles of St. John. London: Macmillan, 1886.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 2nd

ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

Wolfreys, Julian, ed. The Continuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory. New

York: Continuum, 2002.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.

Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads, edited by R. L. Brett

and A. R. Jones. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1991.

Wright, Adam Z. Of Conflict and Concealment: The Gospel of Mark as Tragedy. MBSS 5.

Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2020.

50. However, I note that often when language is mentioned in relation to art, it is to talk about

the “language of art,” as if plastic art has a grammar, etc., a metaphor to help us understand

its nature. See Eaton, Basic Issues, 53–65.

51. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 from Sonnets from the Portuguese:

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach . . . I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.”

52. Westcott, Epistles of St John, 329–74 (esp. 339). This is a substantial chapter. Westcott

rightly views ancient Greek art as representational, but sees Hebrew art as symbolic, out of

which emerges later Christian art.

53. Such a view has not always been so and need not be so. James Hope Moulton once called

the New Testament “a Book of unique importance, written in a language which has absolutely

no other literature worthy of the name” (Moulton, Grammar, xiv).

54. There are other passages of incredible artistry as well, such as Phil 2:6–11, whether Paul

wrote it or not (and I think that he did).

55. I am most indebted to the following works in aesthetics for what is summarized here:

Beardsley, Aesthetics; and Carroll, Philosophy of Art. I utilize the basic framework and

categories, as presented by Carroll, with further elaboration from Beardsley. Other works in

the philosophy of art and aesthetics I have found helpful are: Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic,

for an alternative history; Dickie, Aesthetics (esp. 69–108), for a different view of the history;

and McCormick, Modernity, for a view from the philosophical side.

56. Beardsley, Aesthetics, 330, 329.

57. Beardsley, Aesthetics, 332.

58. This theory has been revived in an ordinary language framework (art as action) by

Wolterstoff, Works and Worlds of Art, according to his positioning of his aesthetics, although

it may fit within the Neo-Wittgensteinian category as well, with its attention to J. L. Austin,

the originator of speech-act theory, the notion that language is performative.

59. This is from “Wordsworth’s Prefaces of 1800 and 1802” (Wordsworth and Coleridge,

Lyrical Ballads, 251). This preface is not for the 1798 edition, which appeared with only an

Advertisement; contra Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 59. I resist the urge to comment upon the

nature of the Preface in relation to the artistic process itself.

60. Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 65.

61. See Bell, “Artistic Representation.”

62. See Bradley, Poetry. A. C. Bradley was the brother of the British idealist philosopher F. H.

Bradley, on whom T. S. Eliot wrote his undefended Harvard doctoral dissertation

“Knowledge and Experience.”

63. Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 134, 140.

64. Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 143. Original in italics.

65. See Beardsley, Aesthetics, 365–66, for a summary of the movement, with reference to

such figures as Roman Jakobson, Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Boris Tomashevsky

in the Russian formalist circle (one might also add the later Vladimir Propp), and I. A.

Richards, William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt Jr., René Wellek, Austin

Warren, and Beardsley himself among the New Critics. Virtually all of these figures are

discussed somewhere in Wolfreys, ed., Continuum Encyclopedia, passim.

66. Beardsley, Aesthetics, 366.

67. Beardsley, Aesthetics, 368. An example of phenomenological criticism is Roman

Ingarden.

68. Ogden and Richards, Meaning of Meaning.

69. Beardsley, Aesthetics, 349. Beardsley treats Charles Morris’s Iconic Sign Theory and

Susanne Langer’s Presentational Symbolism Theory here, but these are perhaps better seen as

representational and expressionist theories of art, respectively, even if they are semiotic in

nature.

70. This is seen in the work of Resseguie, Narrative Criticism, who includes examples from

various literary works in his exposition of narrative criticism, as an attempt to provide a

comparison with the New Testament.

71. This is reflective of the language of Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 157.

72. Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 168 (cf. 170).

73. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.

74. Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 225.

75. Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 241.

76. Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 243.

77. Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 248.

78. Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 254.

79. I am thinking here of the work of Anthony Thiselton and, to a lesser degree, Kevin

Vanhoozer.

80. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 7.

81. The vast majority of introductions to study of the New Testament, including exegesis

handbooks, focus upon authorial meaning.

82. There has also been an understandable movement against the theory. See Eagleton, After

Theory, and Cunningham, Reading after Theory, among others. Neither dismisses theory,

only notes that now we must deal with the period after the intense period of so-called “high

theory” is over.

83. Kaplan and Anderson, Criticism, 23.

84. Stevens, Literary Theory, 36.

85. Wright, Of Conflict and Concealment, 46–48, who provides the information here on

Aristotle.

86. Stevens, Literary Theory, 76.

87. I rely on Stevens, Literary Theory, 79–80, for this section. A definitive work on medieval

exegesis is de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis.

88. Stevens, Literary Theory, 80.

89. Bowie, “Note,” xxxvii.

90. Gjesdal, “Hermeneutics and Philology,” 144–45.

91. Bowie, “Note,” xxxvii.

92. The following summarizes the argument in Gjesdal, “Hermeneutics and Philology,” 134–

44.

93. Schleiermacher recognizes a psychological element to language (related to thoughts), but

that this is reciprocal with the use of language: one influences the other and vice versa. See

Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 9–10.

94. Our limited knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin texts is due to our not having direct

access, and so this constitutes a limitation for understanding. See Schleiermacher,

Hermeneutics and Criticism, 24.

95. Gjesdal, “Hermeneutics and Philology,” 144. Schleiermacher (Hermeneutics and

Criticism, 15), in fact, states, “historical interpretation is only the correct insistence on the

connection of the writers of the N.T. with their age.”

96. Gjesdal, “Hermeneutics and Philology,” 142–43, 154. Gjesdal notes that Schleiermacher

shared this notion of divination with other interpreters of his time, including Johann Gottfried

Herder. Both Schleiermacher and Herder were students of the early philologian Johann

August Ernesti. See Baird, History of New Testament Research, 1:177–83 on Herder and

108–14 on Ernesti.

97. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 19. What qualifies the New Testament for a

“special hermeneutics” (according to Schleiermacher) is the Hebraizing element (see 20).

98. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 40.

99. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, 81 (cf. 151), where he states that the New

Testament books lack sufficient knowledge for providing a foundation for knowing their

circumstances or origins.

100. There may well be an anti-Semitic element to Schleiermacher’s appraisal of the Greek of

the New Testament. See Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 61–76, on

Schleiermacher. He does not consider Schleiermacher anti-Semitic, but he also does not fully

consider how Schleiermacher characterizes New Testament Greek and the results of this

misformulation.

101. See Porter and Robinson, Hermeneutics, for a tracing of some of the major thinkers.

102. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 15.

103. See Palmer, Rise of English Studies.

104. My discussion here is based upon (but attempts to refine and go beyond) Buss, Biblical

Form Criticism, 187–208. Buss tends to equate those in the Bible as Literature movement

with those who emphasize literary form (the thrust of his volume), rather than emphasizing

its literary merit. Thus, Charles Briggs (treated by Buss, Biblical Form Criticism, 193–95)

and William Rainey Harper (Buss, Biblical Form Criticism, 195–98) should probably not be

included within the movement as I define it. This entire movement is apparently not

mentioned by William Baird in his History of New Testament Research (vol. 2).

105. Buss, Biblical Form Criticism, 187.

106. Buss, Biblical Form Criticism, 192, citing S. P. Cook.

107. Buss, Biblical Form Criticism, 192. As Buss notes, Benjamin Jowett had said in 1860

that one should “read the Scriptures like any other Book,” by which he meant the Bible

should be read the same way as any other ancient text. This was not meant as a statement

upholding the literary character of the Bible but placing it in the same category as other

historical works (Jowett, “On the Interpretation,” 338).

108. Terry, Biblical Hermeneutics.

109. Some of the other major figures in the Bible as Literature movement include Mary Ellen

Chase, Robert Traina, and T. R. Henn (whom Buss [Biblical Form Criticism, 205] calls

“virtually the last representative of the movement”). However, there were still some

subsequent books on the topic produced, such as Ryken, Bible as Literature, and Gabel and

Wheeler, Bible as Literature. All three of these last three authors are English professors, not

biblical scholars (just as the three above). Only four (of 17) and two (of 15) chapters in these

books respectively, however, are devoted to the New Testament.

110. Besides biblical scholars, some of this resistance came from literary figures, such as T.

S. Eliot. C. S. Lewis’s response is generally positive, with his making disparaging comments

of biblical scholars who (he asserts) claim to be able to read the biblical texts but who fail in

his judgment to discern their literary character. He also wishes to note that the Bible is a

theological document, besides a literary one. Lewis, Christian Reflections, 152–66, where he

(not by name) chastises Rudolf Bultmann.

111. There was an opportunity for some of these insights regarding the situatedness of

language to be developed further in biblical studies during the time of development of form

criticism. Alan Gardiner, the Egyptologist and general linguist, had rejected the

Schleiermachian notion of the interaction of psychology and grammar, and had wished

instead to position language within its social context and function. He had written to this

effect (referring to “setting of real life”) in a letter to Bronisław Malinowski. The language is

very similar to language used by Hermann Gunkel in his formulation of form criticism (Sitz

im Leben or setting in life). Form criticism instead became far more literarily formalized and

historical, whereas Malinowski further developed the notion of context of situation as a way

of speaking of the use of language, particular to a kind of situation, which later became

Systemic Functional Linguistics. An opportunity was missed to bring the insights of the Bible

as Literature movement into mainstream biblical studies by means of a more dynamic and

situationally responsive notion of form in form criticism. See Buss, Changing Shape, 153–54.

112. Auerbach, Mimesis.

113. Chatman, Story and Discourse.

114. Kermode (Genesis of Secrecy) himself wrote a literary treatment of Mark’s Gospel. He

also wrote many other works of literary criticism. A comparison of his Genesis of Secrecy

with most works in New Testament studies, even those that are called literary readings, is

instructive.

115. For a literary treatment of Paul’s letter to the Romans, see Porter, “Newer Perspective.”

For a recent volume that assesses Paul and rhetoric, see Porter and Dyer, Paul and Ancient

Rhetoric.

116. See Resseguie, Narrative Criticism.

117. Alter and Kermode, “General Introduction,” 1–8.

118. Alter and Kermode, “General Introduction,” 7.

119. I refer to the work being done in SFL at places like McMaster Divinity College—

although even here little is done concerning the literary dimensions of the New Testament.

The literary stylistics movement had relatively little influence on New Testament studies

either. See Porter, “Why Hasn’t Literary Stylistics Caught on?”

120. Deissmann, Bible Studies, 1–63.

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