Interpretation & Hermeneutics
- Exegesis
- Drawing meaning out of a text through close attention to its own language, grammar, and context, rather than importing an outside idea into it. The word comes from the Greek for “leading out.”
- Eisegesis
- Reading a meaning into a text that its own language and context don’t actually support, usually driven by the reader’s prior assumptions. Treated across traditions as an interpretive error to avoid, in contrast to exegesis.
- Hermeneutics
- The broader theory of how interpretation works — the principles and assumptions behind the practice of exegesis, rather than the practice of interpreting a particular passage itself.
- Sensus literalis / sensus plenior
- Latin for the “literal sense” of a text versus its “fuller sense” — a meaning the text may carry beyond what its human author consciously intended, a category especially discussed regarding how New Testament writers reuse Old Testament passages.
- Typology
- Reading an earlier person, event, or institution as foreshadowing a later one within the same overarching story — for example, Adam read as a “type” of Christ. Distinct from allegory, since typology treats both sides of the comparison as historically real.
- Allegory / allegorical interpretation
- Treating a text’s persons and events as symbols pointing to a deeper spiritual meaning, often only loosely tied to the text’s plain sense. Common in patristic and medieval exegesis; used more cautiously in modern historical-critical scholarship.
- Midrash
- A genre of ancient Jewish biblical interpretation that expounds, expands, or fills narrative gaps in a text, often through additional story material woven around the biblical text itself.
- Pesher
- A Jewish interpretive technique, well known from the Dead Sea Scrolls, that reads a biblical text as a coded prediction of the interpreter’s own contemporary events and community.
Historical-Critical Methods
- Historical-critical method
- The umbrella term for methods that analyze biblical texts as historical documents shaped by human authors and historical processes, distinct from (though not necessarily opposed to) confessional or devotional reading.
- Source criticism
- Identifying and reconstructing the underlying written sources a biblical book may have drawn on — the method behind, for example, the Documentary Hypothesis for the Pentateuch.
- Form criticism
- Classifying units of text by their literary “form” or genre — proverb, hymn, legal saying, miracle story — to recover the oral tradition behind them and the setting in which that form functioned.
- Sitz im Leben
- German for “setting in life.” The social or communal context in which an oral tradition or literary form was used and transmitted before being written down. Coined by Hermann Gunkel in the early 20th century and central to form criticism.
- Redaction criticism
- Studying how an editor (“redactor”) selected, arranged, and adapted existing sources or traditions to shape a text’s final form — used, for instance, to compare how Matthew and Luke each edited material they share with Mark.
- Tradition criticism
- Tracing how a tradition — a story, law, or saying — developed and was reshaped as it passed through stages of oral and written transmission on its way to the text’s final form.
- Canonical criticism
- Interpreting a text primarily in light of its final, canonical shape and its function within the whole Bible, rather than focusing on the sources or stages behind it.
- Narrative criticism
- A literary approach that analyzes biblical narratives using tools like plot, character, and point of view, largely setting aside questions about the sources or historical events behind the text.
- Social-scientific criticism
- Applying models and concepts from sociology and anthropology to reconstruct the social world — kinship, honor and shame, patronage, and so on — assumed by a biblical text.
Textual Criticism & Manuscripts
- Textual criticism
- The discipline of comparing surviving manuscripts of a text to reconstruct its earliest recoverable wording, since no original autograph survives for any biblical book. Older terminology sometimes calls this “lower criticism.”
- Textual apparatus
- The critical notes printed at the bottom of a scholarly edition, such as Nestle-Aland or BHS, listing places where manuscripts disagree and which manuscripts support each reading.
- Autograph
- The original manuscript a biblical author actually wrote or dictated. No autograph survives for any book of the Bible; every existing manuscript is a copy, or a copy of a copy.
- Variant (variant reading)
- A place where surviving manuscripts disagree on the exact wording of a passage — the raw material textual criticism works with to weigh which reading is most likely original.
- Textus Receptus
- The “received text,” a printed Greek New Testament tradition beginning with Erasmus (1516) that underlies the King James Version. Later mainstream scholarship largely moved to critical editions built on older manuscripts discovered since, though some traditions still hold to its priority.
- Majority Text / Byzantine text-type
- The text-type found in the largest number of surviving Greek New Testament manuscripts, mostly medieval copies. Its advocates argue sheer manuscript count favors its reliability; most mainstream textual critics instead weight a manuscript’s age, geographic spread, and internal quality over raw numbers.
- Critical text
- A scholarly reconstructed Greek or Hebrew text, such as Nestle-Aland/UBS for the New Testament, built by weighing manuscript age, geographic distribution, and internal evidence rather than simply counting how many manuscripts support each reading.
- Codex
- A bound book made of stacked leaves, as opposed to a scroll. The format in which most early Christian Bible manuscripts survive, including the great 4th-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.
- Lacuna
- A gap in a manuscript where the text has been physically damaged, worn away, or lost, leaving a portion of the original wording unrecoverable from that copy.
- Interpolation
- Words or a passage inserted into a text by a later copyist rather than being original to the author — debated examples include the longer ending of Mark 16 and the “Comma Johanneum” of 1 John 5:7.
- Vorlage
- German for the underlying source text a translator or scribe actually worked from — for example, the Hebrew Vorlage presumed behind a given Greek Septuagint translation, especially useful language when that underlying text no longer survives directly.
Authorship, Dating & Composition
- Pseudepigrapha
- Writings attributed to a well-known figure — such as Enoch or Solomon — who did not actually write them. Used both for a body of extra-biblical Jewish and Christian texts, and, more controversially, by some scholars for New Testament letters they consider written in an apostle’s name by someone else.
- Pseudonymity
- The broader ancient practice of writing under someone else’s name. Sometimes understood as continuing a legitimate teacher’s school or tradition; sometimes judged, especially by Bart Ehrman, as a form of literary forgery.
- Terminus ante quem / terminus post quem
- Latin for “limit before which” and “limit after which” — the latest and earliest possible dates a text could have been composed, established from internal references or external evidence like manuscript finds.
- Vaticinium ex eventu
- Latin for “prophecy after the event” — a text written to read as though predicting events in advance, when it was actually composed after those events occurred. Most commonly discussed regarding the book of Daniel’s detailed depiction of the Hellenistic era.
- Hapax legomenon
- A word that occurs only once within a given body of text, such as the entire Hebrew Bible. Because there’s no other biblical usage to compare, its precise meaning can be harder to pin down and is often reconstructed from cognate languages.
- Ipsissima verba / ipsissima vox
- Latin for “the very words” versus “the very voice.” A distinction between a saying preserved in a source’s exact original wording (verba) and one preserving its accurate gist or substance in different wording (vox) — often raised regarding how precisely the Gospels record Jesus’s own Aramaic speech in Greek.
- Chiasm (chiastic structure)
- A literary pattern arranging ideas in a mirrored A-B-B′-A′ order, common in ancient Hebrew and Greek writing. Sometimes cited as evidence for a passage’s original literary unity, or used as a key to locating its interpretive center.
- Composite text
- A text assembled by combining separate underlying sources or documents into one, as opposed to being written by a single author in one sitting — a description often applied to books like Genesis or Daniel by source-critical scholars.
- Tendenz
- German for “tendency.” A text’s discernible theological slant or agenda, shaping how it presents events or people. Especially associated with F. C. Baur and the 19th-century Tübingen School’s reading of conflict and bias into the New Testament writings.
- Etiology (etiological narrative)
- A story told to explain the origin of a name, custom, or phenomenon — for example, why a rainbow follows rain (Genesis 9), or why humanity speaks different languages (Genesis 11).
Canon & Transmission
- Canon / canonicity
- The officially recognized list of books a religious community treats as authoritative Scripture, and the historical process and criteria by which some books were included and others excluded.
- Apocrypha
- From a Greek word meaning “hidden” or “obscure.” Books included in some Bibles — traditionally the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament — but excluded from the Jewish and Protestant canons.
- Deuterocanonical
- The Catholic and Orthodox term for the books Protestants call the “Apocrypha,” meaning literally “belonging to a second canon” — a label meant to describe their later, disputed acceptance rather than imply lesser authority.
- Homologoumena
- Greek for “agreed-upon [books].” New Testament writings, such as the Gospels and most of Paul’s letters, that were accepted as canonical by the early church almost universally and from very early on.
- Antilegomena
- Greek for “spoken against.” New Testament writings — including Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude, and Revelation — whose canonical status was debated or disputed by parts of the early church before eventually gaining wide acceptance.
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