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Jowett and the ‘Original Meaning’ of Scripture1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

James Barr
James Barr
Affiliation:
Regius Professor of Hebrew, The Oriental Institute, Oxford
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Extract

To read the Bible ‘like any other book’: that is one of the striking phrases in Benjamin Jowett's sprawling essay – it is over roo pages long – ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’ in Essays and Reviews (1860; cf. pp. 338, 375, 377, 404 of that edition, which is quoted without further reference throughout this article). Another memorable phrase concerned the ‘original’ meaning: ‘the office of the interpreter is not to add another [meaning], but to recover the original one; the meaning, that is, of the words as they first struck on the ears or flashed before the eyes of those who heard and read them’ (p. 338).

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 1982, pp. 433 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

page 433 note 2 So recently, for example, Professor Brevard Childs in ‘The Sensus Literalis of Scripture: an Ancient and Modern Problem’, in Donner, H., Hanhart, R. and Smend, R., Beiträge zur alttestamentlichen Theologie (Zimmerli Festschrift; Göttingen, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1977), pp. 80–93; reference to Jowett, p. 89.Google Scholar

page 434 note 1 ‘Jowett was never historical about the Fathers (or about much else)’: Chadwick, O., The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 150.Google Scholar

page 437 note 1 For another recent assessment of Jowett see Hinchliff, P., ‘Benjamin Jowett and the Church of England: or “Why really great men are never Clergymen”’, forthcoming in Balliol Studies.Google Scholar