Publication | Interpreting the Gospel of John in Antioch and Alexandria

After Frances Young’s Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, is there anything else to say about the issue of the two so-called ancient “schools” of exegesis in Alexandria and Antioch?[1] A colleague and friend raised this question, flippantly, as we sat sipping coffee in the examination halls of Oxford University at the International Patristics Conference in 2015. Little did she know that in the next session, I planned to present a paper that argued for our need to re-visit the very issue of the two schools.

The question of the Alexandrian and Antiochene schools had been a longstanding discussion in scholarship on early Christianity.[2] Until approximately the 1990s, scholars made a sharp distinction between the two groups; the Alexandrians were characterized as “allegorists,” while the Antiochenes were considered “literalists.” This traditional view was called into question in the 1990s after a resurgence of scholarship on Origen’s exegesis in the late 1970s and 80s. Scholars came to realize that this supposedly arbitrary “allegorist” was actually quite interested in the literal and historical biblical narrative, in addition to his interest in the spiritual meaning it might have for his community. Scholars realized that there was a great deal more overlap between the interpretive methods of the two schools than was previously thought, since the authors had all received similar training in ancient grammar and rhetoric. This led to a new consensus stated most influentially by Young: to think about these two centers as two distinct interpretive schools was simply a scholarly fantasy of generations prior.

Therefore, I was well aware that my position on the issue was unpopular vis-à-vis the moment’s scholarly opinion as I wrote the first chapters of my dissertation. My friend’s question – is there anything else to say? – was the typical response I received at conferences and meetings when I informed other scholars, junior and senior, of my project in those early years of my PhD. Nonetheless, I was already convinced of two things. First, these ancient authors’ exegesis of the New Testament had not received adequate attention in previous discussions of the issue, in part due to the great deal of discussion about the distinction between allegory and typology. Second, I could see an emerging distinction arising in these texts concerning how the authors applied the biblical text to their respective communities.

My book, Interpreting the Gospel of John in Antioch and Alexandria, focuses on exactly these two issues by examination of early Christian interpretation of the Gospel of John. I engage with exegetical commentaries and homilies of four influential Greek authors of two prominent Christian academic centres: the commentaries of Origen (d. ca. 253) and Cyril of Alexandria (d. ca. 444), and of John Chrysostom (d. ca. 407) and Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. ca. 428), who were both affiliated with Antioch. Due to the size of these massive interpretive works, I selected five passages from the Gospel of John on which each of my authors commented: the “cleansing” of the temple in John 2; the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4; the healing of the man born blind in John 9; the good shepherd parable in John 10; and the raising of Lazarus in John 11.

The main difference that struck me repeatedly related to how the authors in the two traditions applied the text to their communities. The authors from Antioch found moral lessons and doctrinal teachings, and they were hesitant to provide a non-literal reading of the Gospel.[3] The Alexandrians, although they also underscored moral lessons and doctrinal teachings they perceived within the text, did not stop there. They demonstrated how scriptural passages addressed situations in their contemporary Christian community as well as the concerns of individual believers. They unearthed these messages through allegorical or non-literal reading. This is an important distinction, since one could argue that how the biblical text applied to one’s community was one of the most, if not the most, important aspects of early Christian biblical interpretation. That is, early Christian authors did not make a sharp distinction between a text’s meaning and its message for their community. The text’s meaning was tightly bound to its application.

I particularly attend to the manner in which my authors used a rhetorical-interpretive principle which they learned in the Greco-Roman schoolrooms of grammar and rhetoric, namely, the supposition that a given (inspired) ancient text is, in its essence, useful (chrēsimos) or beneficial (ōphelimos) for the reader and the reader’s contemporary community.[4] In the Greco-Roman schoolrooms, it was Homer’s epics that were inherently useful, but early Christians, including the authors I examine, shifted their focus to the biblical text. My analysis of this principle helped me demonstrate the key difference between the Alexandrians and the Antiochenes. Even though all four of my authors agreed that John’s Gospel was inherently useful, they did not agree about which level of the text its benefits were to be found. In Antioch, it was common to remain at the level of the narrative, where there was ample benefit to be gleaned, whereas the Alexandrians believed one could find beneficial teachings both at the narrative or “historical” level and above or below the letter, depending on the metaphor of choice. Focus on these authors’ use of this principle allows us to observe more nuanced differences between these exegetical approaches than the simplistic allegory versus historical-literal distinction.

An example will clarify what I mean: compare Origen and Chrysostom on the Samaritan woman at the well of John 4. For Origen, this passage is beneficial at the level of the narrative. It provides his readers with moral examples to be followed, as well as doctrinal instruction and the refutation of heresy, in this case of the “gnostic” variety. Jesus exhibits great humility as he converses with the Samaritan woman, who herself models the appropriate attitude that spiritual things are more important than material as she leaves her water jar to tell her fellow Samaritans that she has met the Messiah (ComJn. 13.166–67, 173). Based on the words “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22), Origen understands the passage to support the doctrinal teaching that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the same God and Father as Jesus, who himself fulfills the law and the prophets (ComJn. 13.101–118). After Origen has signaled his move to the non-literal plane, he finds evidence for the superiority of the church’s teachings over those of his “heterodox” opponents, represented by the Samaritan woman herself, who left behind her false beliefs after her encounter with Christ (ComJn. 13.101). Further, above the letter, the passage teaches about the (limited) role of scripture in the life of the believer, and the necessity of gaining access to the instruction of Christ for the individual Christian’s journey toward the Father (ComJn. 13.16–35).

Chrysostom’s treatment of the passage is very close to Origen’s literal reading. The primary benefit he draws from it is behavioral instruction through the example set by the Samaritan woman, who is exemplary in her desire for Christ’s teachings and her zeal for the gospel, and by Christ, who exemplifies a disdain for material possessions and needs as he travelled on foot through Samaria (HomJn. 31.3, 5; 32.3). In addition, Jesus’ words in 4:22 offer doctrinal teaching for Chrysostom too, though he is concerned with the issue presented by the implication that Christ claims to worship the Father in this verse. He solves the problem by recourse to what scholars refer to as “partitive exegesis”—here Christ speaks in his human capacity (HomJn. 33.1).[5] Despite the similarity of these authors’ literal readings, we see here the key distinction of my study: for Chrysostom, there is sufficient benefit in literal narrative and he refrains from moving beyond the letter.

In addition to providing the first sustained treatment of these exegetical materials since the 1960s, my study makes an important contribution to an ongoing rehabilitation of Origen’s approach to scripture, which has been in process for the past few decades.[6] Implicit in the traditional distinction between the two schools of exegesis was a championing of the “historical-literal” approach of the Antiochenes as the precursors to the rise of the historical-critical method and a dismissal of Origen’s fanciful allegories. Those who have wished to do away with any distinction between the two schools were right to demonstrate Origen’s serious interest in the historical narrative. In my work, however, I argue that one can meaningfully maintain the traditional distinction between the two schools and also read Origen as a serious exegete with a coherent (non-arbitrary) system.

My work contributes to the momentum of an increasing scholarly interest in maintaining the distinction between the two interpretive traditions, based on the analysis of texts that have previously not been included in these discussions.[7]

[1] Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 1997).

[2] The scholarly literature on the question is extensive. For a thorough and insightful overview, see: J.-N. Guinot, “La frontière entre allégorie et typologie. École alexandrine, école antiochienne,” RSR 99 (2011): 207–228.

[3] I take “literal” interpretation to refer to these authors’ treatment of the grammatical sense of a given text. That is, they dealt with the wording, the “plain” sense of words in a sentence, the logic of a narrative or passage, and the implied specific reference of the passage.

[4] Scholars have recently begun to attend to this principle in their analysis of early Christian exegesis. See for example, Margaret M. Mitchell’s discussion in her Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), 1–3, 12, 66.

[5] “Partitive exegesis” refers to the early Christian practice of assigning Christ’s words and deeds to either his human or divine capacities.

[6] Maurice F. Wiles, The Spiritual Gospel: the interpretation of the Fourth Gospel in the Early Church (Cambridge: CUP, 1960).

[7] A very recent example is Peter W. Martens’ Adrian's Introduction to the divine Scriptures. An Antiochene handbook for scriptural interpretation (Oxford: OUP, 2017).

Miriam DeCock is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Theology at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark. You can follow her on Twitter.