10 - Conclusion: towards a hermeneutic of second-century texts

Summary

Many of the earliest Christian texts are letters. They were addressed to specific recipients in the first or second century. Evidently twenty-first-century readers are not the addressees. We cannot read them as their first readers would. The original ‘reading genre’ is therefore not open to us. How then are they to be read? For other reasons the same question must be asked not just of letters but of all the different types of extant material, including that which has been newly discovered.

The development of historical consciousness has meant that for most of the modern period it has simply been assumed that the appropriate way to read these texts is as historical documents. Scholarship has even taken this view with respect to the canonical material. Thus all these texts have been treated as windows through which we can see into a different world, reconstruct past events, discern the evolution of ideas, give a plausible account of early Christianity which is objective. This is not, however, to approach them as ‘works’ in their own right, but as data, material evidence for a historical project which is other than reading the texts.

For those texts which became Scripture the postmodern period has seen some re-evaluation. Structuralism, critical theory, literary approaches and hermeneutics have all grappled with the question about present meaning and reacted against the supposedly objective attempt to determine past meaning. But this is driven by the fact that there are present readers for whom these texts matter, for whom they remain part of the Holy Bible.