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Jowett and the ‘Original Meaning’ of Scripture1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
To read the Bible ‘like any other book’: that is one of the striking phrases in Benjamin Jowett's sprawling essay – it is over roo pages long – ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’ in Essays and Reviews (1860; cf. pp. 338, 375, 377, 404 of that edition, which is quoted without further reference throughout this article). Another memorable phrase concerned the ‘original’ meaning: ‘the office of the interpreter is not to add another [meaning], but to recover the original one; the meaning, that is, of the words as they first struck on the ears or flashed before the eyes of those who heard and read them’ (p. 338).
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References
page 433 note 2 So recently, for example, Professor Brevard Childs in ‘The Sensus Literalis of Scripture: an Ancient and Modern Problem’, in Donner, H., Hanhart, R. and Smend, R., Beiträge zur alttestamentlichen Theologie (Zimmerli Festschrift; Göttingen, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1977), pp. 80–93; reference to Jowett, p. 89.Google Scholar
page 434 note 1 ‘Jowett was never historical about the Fathers (or about much else)’: Chadwick, O., The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 150.Google Scholar
page 437 note 1 For another recent assessment of Jowett see Hinchliff, P., ‘Benjamin Jowett and the Church of England: or “Why really great men are never Clergymen”’, forthcoming in Balliol Studies.Google Scholar