How the Fathers read Scripture

Readers and preachers of the Bible

The Fathers you meet in this app's commentary on the Gospels, Origen and Chrysostom, Jerome and Augustine among them, were above all readers and preachers of Scripture. Their words reach us through the Catena Aurea, the ‘golden chain’ in which Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, linked the Fathers' comments verse by verse through all four Gospels (see the guide to the Catena Aurea and the lesson Thomas Aquinas).

The Fathers took their starting point from Jesus himself:

You pore over the Scriptures because you presume that by them you possess eternal life. These are the very words that testify about Me.

John 5:39

On the road to Emmaus the risen Lord, "beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was written in all the Scriptures about Himself" (Luke 24:27). So the Fathers read the Old Testament as a book that points to Christ, and the whole Bible as a road that leads to him. Chrysostom, preaching on John 5:39, notes that Jesus "did not send them however to the Scriptures simply to read them, but to examine them attentively, because Scripture ever threw a shade over its own meaning, and did not display it on the surface" Chrysostom.

They learned how to do this from the New Testament itself. Paul calls Adam "a pattern of the One to come" (Romans 5:14), using the word tupos (τύπος), and says that Israel's wilderness years "happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us" (1 Corinthians 10:11). Reading real people and events as foreshadowings of Christ is called typology. Commenting on Emmaus, Chrysostom gives a classic case: "the sacrifice of Abraham, when releasing Isaac he sacrificed the ram, prefigured Christ’s sacrifice" Chrysostom.

Origen of Alexandria

Origen, born at Alexandria around 185, was the most tireless biblical scholar of the early church. His father was martyred when he was a youth; he became the church's teacher of new believers in Alexandria and later taught at Caesarea in Palestine. To compare the texts he built the Hexapla, which set the Hebrew Old Testament and several Greek translations side by side in six columns, and he wrote commentaries and sermons on almost every book of the Bible. Tortured in the persecution under the emperor Decius in 250, he died around 254.

In On First Principles, written around 230, Origen compared Scripture to a human being. As a person has body, soul and spirit, so Scripture has a plain, literal sense, a moral sense that shapes the soul, and a spiritual sense that speaks of Christ and the things of heaven. Passages that make no sense taken literally, he thought, are signals to look deeper Origen, On First Principles. Since Paul himself read the story of Hagar and Sarah as a figure of two covenants (Galatians 4:24), Origen believed he was following the apostle.

He weighed single words with care. The word of the Lord, he observed, is said to ‘come’ to Hosea, Isaiah or Jeremiah, but John says the Word was with God, for "the Word having been always with Him, it is said, and the Word was with God" Origen.

Yet his search for spiritual meaning sometimes wandered far from the text, and he speculated that souls existed before bodies and that in the end all things would be restored. In the sixth century, some three hundred years after his death, ideas linked with his name were condemned; how far they were truly his own, scholars still debate. Even so, his textual work and his commentaries flowed into the reading of nearly every Father after him.

The preacher of Antioch and the translator of Bethlehem

The teachers of Antioch, Diodore of Tarsus and his pupil Theodore of Mopsuestia, thought Alexandrian allegory made light of the history the Bible tells. They looked first for the meaning a text had in its own time and setting, and allowed a higher sense only where it rose out of that history. Theodore, for instance, held that only a few psalms prophesy Christ directly. He was condemned in the sixth century, caught up in later quarrels over Christ's person, but Antioch's respect for the historical sense lived on.

Antioch's greatest preacher was John Chrysostom (c. 349–407). A pupil of Diodore, he preached at Antioch for over a decade, became bishop of Constantinople in 398, and, banished by the court, died in 407 while being marched to a still more distant place of exile. He worked through Matthew, John and Paul's letters verse by verse for congregations of merchants, craftsmen and slaves, and he told the rich plainly to care for the poor. The name Chrysostom, ‘golden-mouthed’, was given him later; his sermons on Matthew and John fill many pages of the Catena.

Jerome (c. 347–420) served the Bible another way. In Rome, at the request of Damasus, the bishop of Rome, he revised the Latin Gospels; in 386 he settled at Bethlehem and, having learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers, translated the Old Testament directly from it. Until then the Latin churches had read an Old Testament translated from the Greek; Jerome wanted to return to the ‘Hebrew truth’. Augustine at first feared the churches would be unsettled by an unfamiliar text, but the Latin Bible built around Jerome's work, finished around 405 and later called the Vulgate, became the Bible of the Western church for more than a thousand years.

In his commentary on Isaiah Jerome wrote that to be ignorant of the Scriptures is to be ignorant of Christ. On the treasure hidden in a field (Matthew 13:44), he suggests that the treasure "is either God the Word, who seems hid in Christ’s flesh, or the Holy Scriptures, in which are laid up the knowledge of the Saviour" Jerome.

Augustine, and our own reading

Augustine, bishop of Hippo, set out how to understand and teach Scripture in On Christian Teaching, begun around 396 and finished around 426. At its centre are the two commandments on which, Jesus said, everything hangs:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. … Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

Matthew 22:37-40

Whoever thinks he understands the Scriptures, Augustine wrote, but does not build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet understood them. He taught readers to explain obscure passages by clear ones, to take a passage figuratively when a literal reading would contradict good morals or the true faith, and he urged preachers to teach, to delight and to move their hearers Augustine, On Christian Teaching. He weighed words himself. The Greek logos means both ‘word’ and ‘reason’, but in John 1:1, he says, "it is better to interpret it Word; as referring not only to the Father, but to the creation of things by the operative power of the Word" Augustine.

The Fathers also show what to beware of. On the parable of the Good Samaritan the Catena sets side by side Ambrose, for whom the two coins are "the two covenants" Ambrose, Augustine, for whom they are "the two commandments of love" Augustine, and Origen with yet another meaning. The Fathers also preached this parable as a call to love one's neighbour, and their readings are devout; but allegory not anchored in the text yields as many meanings as readers, and can blunt the parable's own point: "Go and do likewise" (Luke 10:37).

The medieval church read three spiritual senses above the literal one, and the Catholic and Orthodox churches still speak of literal and spiritual senses together. The Reformers put the plain, grammatical and historical sense first and let Scripture interpret Scripture, while keeping the typology the New Testament itself teaches. Evangelicals today differ in how far they read Christ in particular Old Testament passages (see Interpreting Scripture).

What we can learn from the Fathers is clear. They read Scripture prayerfully, within the church, looking for Christ. They weighed single words, preached so that ordinary people understood, and believed that every reading must bear fruit in love. As Bede asked of the Emmaus story, how can anyone boast of being a Christian who does not search how these Scriptures relate to Christ Bede?

Practice