population and eventually a Christian population of considerable size. The Alexandrian Jew was bound to face up to

Greek philosophical tradition which held sway there, especially that of Plato, and for him the problem was to

reconcile this with his own national Scriptures (the Old Testament). His solution was identical with the Greek.

Dean Farrar writes:

`The Alexandrian Jews were not, however, driven to invent the allegorical method for themselves. They found it

ready to their hands' (History of Interpretation p. 134).

He continues on page 135:

`By a singular concurrence of circumstances, the Homeric studies of pagan philosophers suggested first to the

Jews and then through them to the Christians, a method of interpretation before unheard of, which remained

unshaken for more than fifteen hundred years'.

Apparently the first writer in this Jewish allegorical way was Aristobulus (160 B.C.). He asserted that Greek

philosophy borrowed from the Old Testament and that, by using the allegorical method, the teachings of Greek

philosophy could be found in Moses and the prophets. The outstanding Jewish allegorist was Philo (about 20 B.C. -

A.D.

He

of Plato and Pythagoras. By an elaborate system of allegorising, he reconciled his loyalty to his Hebrew faith and

his regard for Greek philosophy. Philo did not regard the literal meaning of Scripture to be useless, but rather an

immature level of understanding. He likened the literal sense of Scripture to its `body', and the allegorical to its

`soul', the literal being for the immature and the allegorical for the mature. He had around twenty rules which

indicated that a passage of Scripture was to be treated allegorically. A few of these were sound, but most of them

led to interpretation that was fantastic and erroneous. Philo's conceptions are a good example of what happens

when the grammatico - historical method of interpretation is abandoned. Spiritualising becomes a slippery slope

down which it is well nigh impossible to stop.

This system which sprang from the pagan Greeks and was copied by the Alexandrian Jews, was then adopted

by the professing church and largely dominated the interpretation of the Scriptures until the Reformation, with the

exception of the school at Antioch and the Victorines of the Middle Ages. The apostolic Fathers had as their Bible

the Septuagint, i.e. the Greek translation of the Old Testament. They saw that the Old Testament prefigured Christ

in type and symbol, and that the New Testament was full of direct and indirect references to the Old Testament. In

other words, they perceived that the Old Testament could never be fully understood apart from the New Testament.

This they sought to emphasize by allegory and spiritualisation. The motive was right, but the method wrong. What

they apparently did not realise was that the New Testament is the commentary par excellence on the Old Testament

and does not need any propping up by such methods, which only throw the door wide open to personal fancies and

There was a lack of historical sense in their method of exposition; they usually ignored the setting and

background of a passage of Scripture. They considered the Scriptures to be full of enigmas and riddles which could

only be satisfactorily explained by allegorisation. They confused the allegorical with the typical and thus blurred the

correct interpretation of the Old Testament. They professed to see Greek philosophy in the Old Testament, and

claimed that it was the allegorical method that discovered it. The pity of all this was that it obscured the true

meaning of the Word of God. K. Fullerton writes:

`When the historical sense of a passage is once abandoned there is wanting any sound regulative principle to

govern exegesis ... The mystical (allegorical) method of exegesis is an unscientific and arbitrary method, reduces

the Bible to obscure enigmas, undermines the authority of all interpretation, and therefore, when taken by itself,

fails to meet the apologetic necessities of the time' (Prophecy and Authority).

No wonder the Gnostics of the second century found this method so handy to propagate their false doctrine!