08/10/2022 – Death of the Biblical Author: Hermeneutics Part 1

So, a quick question. Do authors of the documents in the Bible really matter? We’re going to talk today about author-function and how it relates to understanding and interpreting Christian texts, and by extension, to all other religious texts as well…or basically all written texts…like…all of them. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. If you like religion and philosophy content one thing I really need you to do is to smash that sub button because it really helps out the channel. The transcript is available at TenOnReligion.com and I also have a ko-fi linked in the description if you’d like to help out the channel and help me keep this baby going.

Welcome to the introduction to our five-part series on hermeneutics, the art of interpretation and understanding. We’re going to get into Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, and Levinas, but first…the death of the biblical author.

So, why ask the question, do authors of the documents in the Bible really matter? When a reader reads any document or text of any kind there is always a time gap and often a cultural gap as well. In the case of biblical documents there is obviously both. When attempting to bridge the gap of understanding, what should be emphasized: the author’s intention, the cultural-historical context of the document, or the reader’s present situation and culturally and historically conditioned way of understanding the text? To try and investigate this we’re going back to one of the main founders of hermeneutics, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and then fast forward to Roland Barthes, a more recent thinker. Stick with us – this is some interesting stuff.

When we think about how we use language in a more general sense it’s obvious that words do not directly connect to either concepts or things in the material world. For example, there is a physical tree, which is different from the concept of a tree (I can think about a tree without the tree really being there), which is also different from the many ways humans have created words in different languages over time for the concept of a tree. Both of these relationships are arbitrary, meaning they are not fixed and could be replaced with something else. I mean, which language has the correct word for “tree?” The answer is, whatever language you happen to be speaking at that moment. So, if the connections between words, concepts, and things in the material world are arbitrary, might this also relate to what authors write?

Let’s apply this to written language. When a reader reads what an author has written in the past, the reader is reading a founding-sense event. But when the reader reads it, that is a present-sense event. How are the two connected? The connection is called hermeneutics, or interpretation and understanding. In the case of biblical texts, the important thing to understand is that from the time the author wrote the text to the time the reader is reading the text, the value relations have changed because the reader is living in a different time and a different cultural era. Thus, readers do not simply decipher or decode words on a page, they actually construct their interpretive meaning of a text based on their particular world, as in their historical and cultural situation.

Going back 500 years, the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther believed that biblical texts had literal meanings which had become lost over time. These meanings could be recovered by studying the original languages and doing the investigative philological and cultural analysis. Luther’s view was that scripture interprets scripture. It was a circular model of understanding because the meaning of one passage could be interpreted by another passage. God was the “author” of scripture which meant that scripture was somehow mystically unified beyond the intentions of the historical writers. The goal of the interpreter in the present day was to understand the fuller sense intended by God which may or may not have been consciously intended by the original authors. For Luther, this safeguarded the unity of scripture.

In the 1800’s, Friedrich Schleiermacher changed this. The goal of interpretation was to discover what the authors intended, but this undermined Luther’s unity of scripture by emphasizing the historical particularity of each individual author. The Bible was not a single narrative but many separate texts. To avoid misunderstanding, Schleiermacher held that interpretation was a two-pronged approach: grammatical and psychological. Grammatical hermeneutics was more general and focused on the language of the author. Psychological interpretation was more specific and focused on the mind of the author and motivation for writing. Schleiermacher believed the interpreter could understand historical authors better than they understood themselves. He also had a circular model in that the parts created and shaped the whole while the whole helped in understanding the parts.

When authorship was determined this had the advantage of stabilizing the meaning of a text. When a group of documents which were held to be written by a particular author on more solid grounding or evidence (such as the apostle Paul in the New Testament) a good idea of the whole of their ideas could be understood. If there was a difference of ideas, the apparent contradictions tended to be explained or somehow neutralized rather than ignored. In the example of Paul’s writings, when other works on less solid grounding or evidence contained ideas which did not seem to be in line with other known writings, the authorship tended to be questioned. Examples included Ephesians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus. The legacy of Schleiermacher is that the meaning is put there by the historical author. But why care about authors? Modern historical scholars have no idea who the specific authors are for many documents in the Bible. The gospel narratives are all anonymous and many of the epistles or letters were pseudonymous writings, meaning the author’s name in the text was not the true original author of the document. In such cases Schleiermacher’s method of psychological interpretation becomes impossible because the original, historical author is not even known.

Enter Roland Barthes from the 1900’s, who wrote in his most famous essay, “The Death of the Author,” that the text’s sense lies not in the author but in its destination, meaning any reader reading the text. History is recreating events and people on the basis of historical data and is always on a sliding scale of more or less probability, thus, historical authors are always cultural constructions. Because of this, the historical authors do not really control or limit the textual meaning in any way. Against what Schleiermacher thought, the truth of a message should not require the resuscitation of some historical author. Let’s reanimate the apostle Paul so we can ask him what he meant by this! Redonkulous. Barthes held that a text does not harbor a single meaning from the author. Who relates the meaning – the authority route of a religious leader, or a method of interpretation? Destabilizing the author-function causes one to rethink what it means to engage a text. Take the example of when one writes about a novel. Their writing does not “close” the meaning of the novel. Someone can always come along later and write something else to explain the meaning because the value situation has changed. The erosion of the author-function shifts the attention from author to reader. The unity of the text is not in its origin, but in its destination, or, as Barthes wrote, the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.

Earlier I mentioned the founding-sense event which is a combination of the author’s writing and language which are embedded in a particular world of social, cultural, and historical conditioning. This is contrasted with a present-sense event which is the significance of the founding-sense event for readers in their own time and place – their own particular world of social, cultural, and historical conditioning. The meaning is always determined by the historical situation of the reader. A text always goes beyond its author. Understanding a text is not so much characterized by reproducing the author’s intentions, which is ultimately impossible because history is a sliding scale of probability or improbability. Understanding is best characterized as a production of the reader. What implications do you think this has for understanding the Bible? Or any other religious text? Or just any other text? And don’t even get me started on political documents like the United States Constitution. Originalism? Seriously? What does that even mean? It doesn’t exist.

Okay, I hope you’ve enjoyed this investigation into the idea of an author-function and how it relates to religious texts. Leave a comment below and let me know what you think about the death of the biblical author. Next up in our hermeneutics series: Gadamer and dialogue. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.

[See outtakes on video episode]