4 - Hermeneutics

Summary

The question to which at last we are directed by our study of the interpretative procedures of this first-century Christian is whether what we have found in his work has any point of helpfulness for contemporary hermeneutical reflection. Immediately quite natural doubts present themselves – raised by our deep awareness of the gulf created by the centuries of terminological and conceptual refinement which separate his times from ours. That, as is stated often enough, is the hermeneutical problem.

And yet, to be daunted by those doubts, in the first instance at any rate, would entail a certain irony. For what we have been investigating is the work of a man who has apparently accomplished with some success precisely that from before which we were ourselves in resignation. For the distances, temporally and culturally, between this author and the subject matter of his interpretation (the Old Testament rituals) can hardly be regarded as inconsiderable either; yet obviously he has not been dissuaded by that fact. That is not to exclude the possibility, of course, that in the end we might have to admit that the distances between us are too great for there to be more than tangential similarities between his questions and answers and ours.