Interpretation and the Unstated

Interpretation is, we're often told, a matter of explaining what's in the text. Only eisegetes talk about what's not already there.

Discussing Matthew 1:1, Dale Allison offers this, much more accurate, alternative: "The interpretation of this line can be nothing other than the unfolding of what it not stated."

More expansively:

"all the words in 1:1 derive from tradition, and to understand them aright we must know their itinerary. Biblos geneseos occurs in LXX Gen. 2:4 and 5:1 while 'Genesis' came to be, in the Greek-speaking world, the title for the first book of Moses. As for Christos, it was firmly associated with Jewish eschatological expectation. So too huios David. And huios Abraam, likewise a fixed expression, also had its own special connotations. Now all this, which was undoubtedly known to Matthew's Jewish-Christian audience, is fundamental for interpretation. But Matt. 1:1 directly conveys none of this information. Rather it assumes that the requisite sensibility will pass from the explicit to the implicit, that it will go beyond what the words directly denote to what they connote - which is why the more Matt. 1:1 is engaged, the more it evokes. Words and phrases . . . are not simple things; nor is language ever born anew: it is always old. A combination of words is like a moving trawler, whose dragnet, below the surface and out of sight, has taken catch and now pulls along so much. Just as it would be erroneous to equate the function of the fishing vessel with what goes on in plain sight, so similarly can focus on what is explicit in a literary text lead one right past much meaning - above all in a book such as Matthew, beneath whose literary surface is the Jewish Bible, which is alluded to far more than expressly cited. . . . The truth is, our evangelist had no need to trumpet the manifest, and the allusions to Moses were . . . manifest enough to those who lived and moved and had their being in the Jewish tradition."

Put it this way: If interpretation is merely explaining what's on the surface, why do we need interpreters?

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, July 05, 2006 at 12:36 PM

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