Patristic Exegesis

The difference between reading scripture allegorically and reading it for its plain historical sense sounds like a matter of literary taste, but in the fifth century it became a matter a church council had to settle. The Antiochene habit of insisting that a gospel passage first means what it says about a real human life, taught by Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia and carried into famous preaching by John Chrysostom, shaped how its students described Christ: a reading trained on the concrete humanity of the gospel narratives tended toward language that kept Christ's human and divine natures sharply distinct, each fully itself.

Nestorius, formed in that tradition and made patriarch of Constantinople in 428, preached in exactly that vein, and his opponents, chief among them Cyril of Alexandria, heard it as dividing Christ into two subjects rather than one. The Council of Ephesus condemned Nestorius in 431, and more than a century later, in 553, a second council condemned Theodore of Mopsuestia himself, posthumously, for the same underlying tendency, even though Theodore had died in communion with the wider church and had never been formally a Nestorian in his own lifetime.

The condemnation did not end the Antiochene method; it drove it east. The Church of the East, established beyond the Roman Empire's frontier in Persia and so outside Constantinople's reach, kept Theodore as its principal biblical commentator and continued reading him in Syriac translation for centuries after his Greek original had become dangerous to own inside the empire. The episode shows a reading habit carrying theological consequences practitioners had not intended: the same exegetical instinct Antioch prized as fidelity to the text, Alexandria heard as a failure to see Christ whole.

The Antioch versus Alexandria dispute fed into a christological controversy that split a council. A different and earlier controversy inside patristic exegesis turned not on how to read a text but on which text to read at all.

Commissioned by Pope Damasus to revise the Latin Bible then in circulation, Jerome went further than his commission strictly required. For the Old Testament he chose to translate directly from the Hebrew text used by Jewish scholars of his own day, a principle he called Hebraica veritas, Hebrew truth, rather than from the Greek Septuagint translation that the church had used and treated as authoritative, in many communities as divinely inspired in its own right, since the New Testament's own authors had generally quoted it.

The choice provoked real opposition. Augustine, writing to Jerome directly, worried that abandoning the Septuagint's wording would create needless discord between Latin and Greek speaking churches and unsettle a text generations of Christians already trusted, and reports circulated of a congregation disrupted when a reading from Jerome's new Hebrew based Jonah used unfamiliar vocabulary. Jerome defended the choice in prefaces attached to his translations, most pointedly in the Prologus Galeatus, his preface to Samuel and Kings, arguing that returning to the Hebrew original could only strengthen the text's authority rather than weaken it. His version, the Vulgate, eventually displaced the older Latin translations entirely and stood as the Western church's standard Bible for over a thousand years, the losing side of Augustine's own argument becoming, over time, simply the text.