Patristic and Academic Resources for Biblical Interpretation | How to Read the Bible Semester Discussion Guide

Part 6: Patristic and Academic Resources for Biblical Interpretation

The following should be read aloud as a group, with each person reading one paragraph before passing on to the next person. Afterwards discussion will follow with the provided discussion questions.

…there is a place for honest and exacting critical inquiry when studying the Bible. Our reasoning brain is a gift from God, and we need not be afraid to use it to the utmost when reading Scripture. We Orthodox Christians neglect at our peril the results of independent scholarly research into the origin, dates and authorship of the books of the Bible, although we shall always want to test these results in the light of Holy Tradition.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware¹

Let us flee from those who reject the patristic interpretations and attempt by themselves to deduce the complete opposite. While pretending to concern themselves with the literal sense of the passage, they reject its godly meaning.

St. Gregory Palamas²

The goal an Orthodox Christian goal while studying the Scriptures is to know and become like Christ. Because of this, the first resource sought by an Orthodox Christian to understand the Bible is the words of the Church Fathers, who themselves succeeded in becoming like Christ and studied the Scriptures intensely. While Church Fathers sometimes err and not every word they say is to be taken as absolute truth, generally speaking their writings should be deferred to, as they are written by persons who are holier and wiser than we are. Modern academic resources can also be helpful in studying the Bible, and while many academics in the field of biblical studies are not Orthodox Christians, their insights from close analysis of the text can sometimes be helpful to us as well. However, it is important to keep in mind that biblical studies as a field tends to approach the Bible from a rather sterile and scientific perspective, that is, as a purely human text whose origins and meaning is explainable in terms of purely human causes. While as Orthodox Christians we know that the Scriptures are divinely inspired, the research and insights of biblical scholars can still be helpful to us in some respects. Below are listed various patristic and academic resources to help in understanding the Bible. A resource’s appearance on this list should not be taken as a full endorsement of all of its content.

Patristic Resources

The Bible and the Holy Fathers for Orthodox

This book, published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, compiles commentary from the Church Fathers and saints on the daily lectionary readings of Orthodox Church (i.e. the Epistle and Gospel read each day at Divine Liturgy). It is very helpful for quick and immediate commentary on the daily readings.

Catena: Bible and Commentaries

This is a phone app available for free which displays the text of the Bible along with various commentaries. If you go into the settings and select “Byzantine Theology” and “Early Fathers,” you will be able to view patristic commentary for each passage you read simply by clicking on the verse.

Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture

Similar to Catena, this is a series of books that compiles commentary from various ancient Christian writers on the Bible verse by verse. A word of caution on this resource is that sometimes the ancient Christian writers included are saints of the Church (i.e. Basil, Chrysostom, Gregory the Theologian, Augustine, etc.) while other writers are non-canonized authors or even condemned heretics (i.e. Pelagius, Theodore of Mopsuestia).

Philip Schaff’s Church Fathers Set

Philip Schaff was a 19th century church historian who translated numerous works of the Fathers into English. Many of the works translated are homilies by Church Fathers on specific books of the Bible, such as Chrysostom’s Homilies on Matthew. Since these translations are out of copyright, they can be downloaded for free at Christian Classics Ethereal Library’s website, ccel.org/fathers.

The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation

This is a more modern translation of the Church Fathers undertaken by various scholars and published by Catholic University of America Press. Many of the works published are patristic homilies and commentaries on Scripture.

Homilies of St. Gregory Palamas

Released by Mt. Thabor Publishing and translated by Orthodox Christian Christopher Veniamin, these homilies contain St. Gregory’s words on the Sunday lectionary readings as well as various occasions. They are helpful for both understanding the Scripture passages in our lectionary and applying them to our life as Orthodox Christians.

Academic Resources

The New Testament in its World

This introductory New Testament textbook by Anglican scholar N.T. Wright gives an academic overview of the historical context in which the New Testament was written as well as academic understandings of each book of the New Testament. Wright’s Christian Origins series goes into more academic detail than this textbook does for those who want more information, and his New Testament for Everyone series simplifies some of the material for those looking for a more basic introduction.

An Introduction to the Old Testament

This is an Old Testament textbook by Tremper Longman and Raymond Dillard which provides standard academic schema and historical background of the ancient near east for interpreting the Old Testament. There are also sections on each book of the Hebrew Bible, that is, the 36 books used in the Protestant and Jewish Old Testament canons.

A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible

This book by Paul Wegner gives an introduction to biblical textual criticism, the science of examining ancient biblical manuscripts in order to catalogue the differences between them and see which texts are earlier. This can be especially helpful for interpreting the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke through observing how they tell the same narratives in slightly but purposefully different ways in order to emphasize different theological points.

The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary

This multivolume dictionary is a great resource for getting an overview of the current state of academic scholarship on any given book or topic within the Bible.

Princeton Theological Seminary Faculty Recommended Commentaries

This is a list of recommended commentaries on each book of the Bible from the professors of Princeton Theological Seminary. It is a great resource for those who are looking for ways to take a deep dive on any specific book of the Bible.

Since many quotes from the Church Fathers have been provided throughout this series, below is an excerpt from N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God to get a sense of what biblical scholarship can be like. The following is from a passage about the expectations of second temple Jews in and before Jesus’ lifetime about the enthronement of the coming Messiah as king and the Messiah’s relationship to God:

We are on firm ground in arguing, as we just have, that most second-Temple Jews expected YHWH [Yahweh the God of Israel] to return to Zion, as part of the total redemption of Israel. The other point I wish now to draw out has no such firmness. Nevertheless, there are several texts which seem to point in one particular direction, and this seems to have been picked up by Jesus himself as much as, if not more than, by the early church. […] It was that, in explaining his Temple-action and Temple-statements in terms of Messiahship, he did so by drawing together the two texts which, in several parallel and independent traditions in second-Temple Judaism, pointed towards an enthronement in which the Messiah, or the ‘son of man’, would share the very throne of Israel’s god, would be one of the central figures in a theophany.³

Next week we will conclude our series by talking about how to run a Bible study in your local OCF chapter. May God continue to bless us through the prayers of his most pure mother and all the saints!

Discussion Questions

1. Why do you think the writings of the Church Fathers are so valuable for understanding Scripture?
2. How might academic study of the Bible help us see things we wouldn’t notice on our own?
3. What are some differences between approaching the Bible as a spiritual text and as an academic text?
4. What resources do you think would be most helpful for you in your own Scripture study?

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¹ Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, “How to Read the Bible” in The Orthodox Study Bible.

² The Homilies of St. Gregory Palamas, Homily 34.2, edited and translated by Christopher Veniamin. Quoted from Dr. Mary Ford’s The Soul’s Longing: An Orthodox Christian Perspective on Biblical Interpretation.

³ N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, pg. 624-643.