Exegesis, a Greek term meaning the exposition or interpretation of any writing, but almost exclusively used of the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. The term Hermeneutics is frequently applied to the science of the interpretation of the Bible, and it is usual to distinguish it from exegesis as the interpretation proper or discovery of the true meaning of the text, while the latter is more strictly the exposition of the meaning so discovered and its practical doctrinal and moral applications. But it may be said that the term exegesis is now in pretty general use as applied at once to the science and the art of the elucidation of Scripture. It includes both the study of the text or form in which the scriptural revelation has reached us and also the scope and doctrinal bearings of that text and the conclusions that may reasonably be deduced from it. The materials for the critical study of the Old Testament are scanty as compared with the New, hence the difficulty of attaining to certain conclusions is correspondingly greater. Critical materials are mainly of three kinds: MSS., versions, and quotations. Of these the New Testament scholar has enough, but the student of the Old Testament is worse than slenderly equipped in all. For the present Hebrew consonantal text is hardly earlier than the 2d century of our era, the vowel signs being some centuries later; while, as for the versions, the Syriac, the Targum or Chaldee, and the Vulgate are substantially mere reproductions of the Hebrew text we possess, the difficulty in the case of the Septuagint being increased by the undoubted corruptness of its own text, as well as by the fact that it is itself a translation into Greek of an earlier Hebrew version now unknown to us. Nor can we supplement our knowledge to any extent from the source of early quotations, as the Fathers, with the exception of Jerome and to some extent of Origen, were ignorant of Hebrew, and, besides, were hopelessly given to quoting Scripture very loosely and inexactly.
Thus the task of the exegete is a labour of great and complicated difficulty, and he must needs be a scholar, competently equipped for grammatical and philological inquiries into the signification of words, the force and significance of idioms, the modification of the sense by the context and the comparison of parallel passages, no less than into the character of the writer and the persons he addressed, of the circumstances in which he wrote, and the immediate object to which his work was directed. To these linguistic and literary qualifications he must add adequate knowledge of contemporary external history, but above all he must have something of that spiritual sympathetic insight by which he can project his own imagination into the mind and feelings of an earlier age. Without some measure of this incardiness no scholar, however brilliant, can be a great exegete; but, when it is superinduced upon extensive and exact learning, we have an exegete of the first order—a Chrysostom, a Calvin, a Bengel, a De Wette, a Meyer, or an Ewald. Thus Schleiermacher's saying, that 'in a certain sense the interpreter has to deduce more than the author introduced,' is true; for the exegete, exercising the synthetic as well as merely analytic faculty, reconstructs for himself the mental attitude of the writer in order to deduce much that influenced the latter half-unconsciously in his composition.
All exegesis of Scripture, however closely it follows the ordinary methods of literary and historical criticism, depends greatly upon the views entertained as to the nature and degree of inspiration, and the share of the conscious human element in the progressive revelation. The old theory of dictation or verbal inspiration is no longer held by any intelligent scholar, and it is the peculiar merit of our 19th-century exegetes to have been the first to establish a satisfactory critical modus vivendi—by their insisting upon the human element in the Scriptures without ceasing to uphold their divine authority.
It is hardly necessary to point out how absurd is the assumption of some sects that a scholarly interpretation of Scripture is superfluous to the Christian, whose sole aim is the shortest cut to salvation. For, not to speak of the inherent difficulty of Scripture itself as a series of compositions extending over hundreds of years, and treating intimately of many things long forgotten, and that often in figurative and symbolical phraseology unfamiliar to a modern ear, has not God in his providence seen fit to give his revelation in languages which demand the exegetical praxis of translation? And do not the immense divergencies of honest opinion about the interpretation of Scripture give the individual such a wholesome distrust in the infallibility of his own opinion that he feels the need of every possible support that he can gain from scholarship to buttress it? For the sincerity of a conviction is no proof of its absolute truth, since honest men have been sincerely convinced of the truth of opinions the most opposite. At the same time it is true that the things of faith essential to salvation are perfectly plain to the reason and judgment of every man, and that Scripture is of necessity itself intelligible and sufficient, if studied with diligence and a candid mind. The precious right of private judgment is perfectly consistent with the need for a scientific exegesis, the interests involved in the correctness of the interpretation being so momentous.
The fundamental distinction between Roman Catholics and Protestants depends upon the extent to which the private judgment of the individual is to be controlled by external considerations, such as the authoritative interpretations of the Fathers, and the dogmatic definitions of councils and popes. The former, of course, do not consider the Scripture as containing the whole of God's revelation, and therefore, just as Protestants admit that one passage of Scripture may be modified by another, so they believe that the scriptural revelation itself may be modified by other revelations of God conveyed to us through other mediums, as by that of tradition. Unfortunately, tradition is far from consistent, and is not always even intelligent; and the traditionalist frequently finds himself under the necessity of bowing down his judgment to the exegetical conclusions of an age devoid of real scholarship, and slavishly subject to an allegorical or other fantastic method of interpretation.
The Jewish exegesis of the Old Testament is seen in the voluminous Talmudical writings, the Mishna, giving simplifications and explanations of the law, and the Gemara, giving further explanations of earlier explanations, the latter itself existing in the two forms of the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. The earliest Jewish Scripture interpretation was the Midrash ('study'), divided into legal and homiletical exposition. The legal, Halacha ('rule by which to walk'), was mostly confined to an amplification of points not explicitly set forth in the Pentateuch, from which it deduced the collection of precepts designated Halachoth; while the homiletical, Hagada ('opinion'), discussed the whole Old Testament, and aimed at applying it to ethical and social as well as to religious questions. It became so popular that it was styled distinctively the Midrash, and, with much practical value, contained many fantastic interpretations, the result of a distinction between the natural and the derivative or allegorical sense. Side by side with this, however, there grew up during the middle ages a more rational exegesis, which gave really sound results in the hands of such enlightened rabbis as Jarchi, Rashi, Kimchi, Maimonides, and Abarbanel.
The hermeneutics of the Hellenistic Jews had sought by thoroughgoing allegorical interpretation to make an arbitrary reconciliation between the traditions of Hebraism and the results of Greek philosophy. The greatest master of this perilous art was Philo, who formulated definitely the two-fold teaching in the Pentateuch—the verbal sense for the illiterate, the figurative for those gifted with the insight to see it. The allegorical system of interpretation was adopted by the Alexandrian school, and carried far by Clement and the great Origen; yet the latter also established a basis for sound grammatical exegesis by his separation between the literal, the moral, and the mystical senses. The same influences, although to a less extent, show themselves in such western teachers as Hippolytus, Hilary, Ambrose, and Augustine; but, in marked contrast, the school of Antioch, as represented by Diodorus of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Chrysostom, and Theodoret, aimed rather at a grammatical and historical criticism, that at its worst degenerated into a bald and unspiritual interpretation. Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa show a similar preference for the objective reading of Scripture, as also the learned Jerome, who advocated the grammatical and historical sense as the fundamental, with the figurative interpretation where necessary, in opposition to the allegorical. Meantime, in the Western Church, theologians, in the face of the divergencies of heresies each based upon its own reading of Scripture—and that mostly always allegorical—had been finding the necessity of an authoritative exegesis of Scripture as an ultimate standard of appeal. Already, under this necessity, in Irenæus and Tertullian we see the growth of a simpler and more rational spiritualising of Scripture as a reaction against excessive abuse of arbitrary and fanciful allegorising; together with that increasing respect for authoritative explanation of the sense. This finally culminated in the conclusion of the Council of Trent, that the sole right to interpretation was inherent within the church herself, and in the assertion by the Vatican Council of the personal infallibility of the pontiff. The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lerins established the doctrinal supremacy of Scripture, but, from its inherent difficulty and the vagaries of individual interpretation, maintained the necessity of the tradition of the church to supplement and expound it. His famous 'Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est' may still be accepted as the axiom that dominates all Roman Catholic exegesis. Independent interpretation went gradually out of use, and was supplanted by the well-known Catena, consisting of expositions of books of Scripture strung together from the writings of such Church Fathers as Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine. These were themselves prepared by such divines as Procopius of Gaza, Cassiodorus, Hrabanus Maurus, Sedulius, Theophylact, and Aquinas. The middle ages gave its intellect to abstract theological speculation—in exegesis it bound itself voluntarily in the shackles of tradition. The Postillæ, or brief commentaries, of Nicolaus de Lyra was a symptom of a reaction towards the obvious and objective that soon showed itself also on the philological side in the Humanists, Laurentius Valla, Reuchlin, and Erasmus, and in the bolder spiritual applications of the Reformers. Their intense religious experiences supplied the real inwardness that was lacking to the Humanists, and accordingly in Luther, Melanchthon, Beza, Bucer, Ecolampadius, Zwingli, and Calvin we find a series of great exegetes whose influence is even now more visible in the recent biblical criticism of Germany than it was at the time of the Reformation itself. Among the greatest of their more immediate successors were Grotius, Calovius, Calixtus, and Cocceius. Little further progress, however, was made till about the middle of the 18th century, as scriptural exegesis was mostly allowed to degenerate into mere edification, which it was not given to every scholar to harmonise so happily with real science as Bengel did in his famous Gnomon Novi Testamenti (1742). The revival of a real exegesis is due mainly to Ernesti and Semler, whose inspiring impulse created a school of scholars who in a single generation contributed more to a sound knowledge of the Scriptures than all the theologians of sixteen centuries. Such were, in the field of Hebrew scholarship, Gesenius, Ewald, Olshausen, and Böttcher; in that of Greek, Winer, Buttmann, Lachmann, and Griesbach; and on the purely philosophical and theological side, Herder, Baur, Rothe, Hofmann, Lücke, and Schleiermacher. Since these a continuous chain of illustrious and more or less orthodox scholars have laboured at the direct elucidation of Scripture on sound scientific lines, of whom it may here suffice merely to mention the names of De Wette, Bleek, Hitzig, Hupfeld, Hengstenberg, Keil, Oehler, Knobel, Kalisch, Rosenmüller, Dillmann, Meyer, Lange, Tischendorf, Lagarde, Delitzsch, Gode, Holtzmann, Ellicott, Lightfoot, Perowne, Scrivener, Westcott, and Cheyne. At the same time the horizons of our knowledge of ancient Egypt and Assyria have been vastly widened by the labours of scholars like Lenormant, Maspero, Rawlinson, Schrader, and Sayce, who have cast a flood of light and confirmation upon the ancient history contained in the Bible, which has also been elucidated more immediately from the history of the Jews themselves, by the work of Ewald, Stade, Grätz, Stanley, Kuenen, Wellhausen, and Renan. The study of the New Testament history and of the life of our Lord—so characteristic a feature of the more modern theology—has contributed no less to our knowledge of the scope and contents of the New Testament books, through the work of Strauss, Renan, Lange, Hase, Keim, Weissacker, Leclercq, Hausrath, Schürer, and Weiss. No less valuable side-light for exegesis proper has been afforded by works specially devoted to the history of theological dogma and its progressive development, such as those of Dorner, Martensen, Nitzsch, Hagenbach, Ritschl, Pfeiderer, and Harnack.
See the articles BIBLE, CODEX, GOSPELS, and SEPTUAGINT; also the separate articles on the various books included in the canon of Holy Scripture, as well as upon the great exegetes themselves.