Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture

Frances M. Young is a scholar of early Christian thought, and this Cambridge University Press book is the standard modern monograph on patristic biblical exegesis, including the well-known difference in interpretive method between the Alexandrian and Antiochene schools of the early church. Its strength is that Young situates these exegetical methods within the wider literary and rhetorical culture of late antiquity, explaining why the early church read scripture the way it did rather than simply cataloguing different interpretations. Its limit is that it focuses on the patristic period specifically, so a claim about how biblical interpretation developed later, in the medieval or Reformation periods, needs a source addressing those later periods.