The Protestant Reformation brought with it the conviction that the Bible was, in William Tyndale's phrase, ‘that light [which] destroyeth darkness’ (p. 2). But next steps were not so easy. When it came to the thorny issue of biblical interpretation, as exegesis was practised to interpret Scripture's meaning, Calvin acknowledged that ‘dayly in reading we light upon many darke places’ (Institutes 3.2.4; Norton translation, 1561).
Knight's meticulously researched and highly interesting book provides ‘an exploration of early modern Protestant encounters with the “dark places” of the Bible; it seeks to reconstruct Protestant grappling with a Bible that could be confusing, ambiguous and contrary’ (p. 3). The words of Scripture were subjected to ‘lexically intensive approaches’ which sought to ‘unlock every possible meaning, and as confessional conflict planted stakes around those possible meanings, Protestant audiences were exposed to myriad textual, linguistic, and hermeneutic puzzles’ (p. 3).
Early modern studies have recognised the pervasiveness of Bible-reading. This was helped by the production of ‘cheap and portable Bibles’ (p. 4) in this time. Also, the Bible influenced early modern cultures – such as through writers such as Shakespeare, George Herbert, John Donne and John Milton. This meant that the Bible was pervasive. It formed, as Christopher Hill put it, the ‘idiom in which men expressed themselves’ and as Knight adds: ‘an idiom that adapted itself to every aspect of early modern life’ (p. 5).
This has meant there is the tendency to ‘create a picture of the Bible as a universal treasury, a straightforward source for doctrine, images, and phrases that early modern writers and readers might deploy’ (pp. 5–6). Yet, ‘although the Bible was understood to be a perfect and illuminating treasury that gave voice to believers and helped them to know and express themselves, it was not always experienced as such’ (p. 6). Adding to the difficulties were that exegesis itself assumes the Bible's meaning is ‘not always immediately clear’; reformers feared ‘“lay people would stumble and go astray at the dark places of Scripture”’. For ‘reading the Bible opened up the potential for reading it wrong, and fears that widespread reading of the Bible would breed contention, cast doubts, and sow heresies were frequently expressed in the formative debates of the Reformation’ (pp. 6–7).
Knight's focus is England. The English Bibles that emerged – the Coverdale, Matthew and Great Bibles – provided ‘little explanatory guidance beyond recommending in their prefaces that, when faced with “straunge maners of speakynge & darke sentences”, readers should wait for God to make the meaning plain or consult a learned person or clergyman’. The Geneva Bible (1560), however, contained ‘extensive annotation intended to explain “all the hard places” and a variety of other explanatory paratexts, such as concordances, tables, and diagrams’ (p. 18).
The ‘confused chaos’ that marked the period is detailed by Knight. Protestants who insisted on sola scriptura stressed ‘scripture's clarity in the essentials of faith … and thus its sufficiency to mediate its own difficult places’ (pp. 14–15). Others, such as Thomas More (Dyaloge, 1529), contended (against Tyndale) that ‘the entire Bible required the Church's mediation’ (p. 15).
Knight's book explores not ‘“points of controversy”’ themselves but ‘the features of biblical language that gave rise to controversy between the confessions and confusion in the individual reader’ (p. 26). She follows the order of the list provided by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine who contended that difficulties could arise from either ‘“the things that are said [or] the way they are said”’ (p. 27). Bellarmine's list, says Knight, ‘distils points of difficulty that form something of a consensus across Catholic polemic and Protestant commentary’ (p. 28).
Each of Knight's six chapters is immensely detailed. They explore the complexities of biblical texts – turning, in many instances, on the meanings and nuances of the Hebrew (and sometimes Greek) language of biblical texts which can steer understandings into differing directions.
The chapters, incorporating Bellarmine's formulations, are: Chapter i, ‘Contradiction’ – Scripture elements that seem contrary on first glance. Two biblical verses – Deuteronomy xxv.5 (prescribing marriage to a brother's widow) and Leviticus xx.21 (prohibiting such marriage) – were central to Henry viii’s attempt to annul his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. The saga here is complicated and Knight is a sure guide through it (pp. 40–72). She indicates that ‘neither Catholics nor Protestants claimed that scripture could contradict itself. Yet both admitted that it often seemed to’ (p. 38). Commentators ‘across the confessional spectrum agreed that scripture could never really be in conflict with itself, and any apparently contradictory parts could be reconciled’ (pp. 38–9).
In a broad sense, ‘the history of biblical interpretation is marked by contention over contrariety’ – for example, the third/fourth-century Trinitarian debates – ‘derived from’, writes Knight, ‘(among other things) Christ's seemingly contrary pronouncements in the Gospel of John that “my Father is greater than I”, and “I and my Father are one” (John xiv.28 and x.30)’ (p. 72). The question of the unity of Scripture is tested through examples of apparent ‘contradiction’.
Chapter ii, ‘Ambiguity’ – ambiguous words and speeches. Words can mean more than one thing at a time – ‘double speak’. Theologically: (Gr.) metanoia can mean ‘repentance’ or ‘penitence’; ek-klesia could mean ‘congregation’ or ‘church’ (p. 86). These ambiguities have theological implications. In theological controversies, ‘the same verses could be used to argue for each side of the divide’ (p. 86). In debates between William Tyndale and Thomas More, ‘While to Tyndale “church” (ekklesia) meant the body of all believers, to More it meant the institution of ecclesiastical hierarchy’ (p. 86). The upshot was that ‘Catholic and Protestant controversialists each argued that their adversaries seized the opportunity afforded by ambiguous New Testament terminology to sneak in wrong readings’ (p. 86). The concept of ‘equivocation’ developed. This moved beyond the term's basic sense of ‘multiple verbal possibilities’ to be carefully sorted out, to the sense of ‘active deception, coloured by the polarization that was a perennial feature of polemic’ (p. 86). Equivocation became a polemical weapon as Protestants and Roman Catholics contended with each other.
Chapter iii, ‘Defects’ – incomplete statements. What does one do when some words of a biblical text are missing so its sense is ambiguous? ‘“Defective” verses’, notes Knight, are ‘biblical texts that are missing something, that lack necessary elements to complete “the sentence”, both grammatically and semantically. Such defects are not merely inexact mappings of one language onto one another, they are gaps in information and grammar in the original themselves’ (p. 117). May one add words, ‘supplying words to fill gaps’? Two key verses in this regard are Romans v.18, ‘upon which hinged Protestant and Catholic versions of justification’ and Job xix.26, ‘a verse believed to prophesy the Resurrection, but which lacks key grammatical elements’ (p. 29).
Chapter iv, ‘Disorder’ – disordered statements. Scripture often proceeds in a disorderly fashion. How do passages ‘hang together’? What do interpreters do when texts prevent ‘a clear progression of narrative’? (p. 141). Attempts needed to be made to bring ‘disjointed passages into order’ (p. 30). Here, Gospel harmonies played a role. They were ‘a method of cutting printed Bible into individual components of text, and then rearranging, pasting, and pressing them into a continuous narrative with several forms of comparative presentation for cross-referencing’ (pp. 166–7).
Chapter 5, ‘Idiom’ – phrases belonging to the Hebrew. When phrases do not ‘transfer well between languages’ (p. 179) – does a translator seek to convey the original wording of a text or seek an accurate rendering of its meaning? With the appearance of various English translations, this question became acute. Some translations used glosses to explain idiomatic language. The Geneva Bible explained that ‘where as the Ebrewe speeches semed hardly to agre with ours, we haue noted it in the margent after this sort, vsing that which was more intelligible’ (p. 208). The Geneva Bible provided ‘both a literal rendering and an explanation of meaning’ for these instances. Its 753 marginal notes were primarily theological. But the tension was there between communicating the sense of a passage and the Hebrew text itself (p. 210).
Chapter vi, ‘Figures’ – figures of speech, tropes, metaphors, allegories, hyperbata, ironies and other things of this sort without number. The Bible's figurative language – over this range of types of figurative speech – questioned the Protestant emphasis on the ‘literal sense’ of Scripture as the primary meaning intended by the text's author. This chapter explores debates on how to tell if a verse should be interpreted figuratively or literally.
The fascinating complexities of these issues enable Knight's important book to expand the horizons of our understanding of biblical interpretation in this period in England. Her discussions point to the exercise of faith and to the challenges of finding biblical truths through the difficulties of the Bible's dark places. As Knight writes, ‘The Bible's dark places were more than stumbling blocks, although they made it difficult to find a clear path. They represented the rich depths and the marvellous heights; they challenged and frustrated, but they also inspired and delighted’ (p. 34). Can we ‘find forms of truth that will let the Bible's darkness sit alongside its light, in chiaroscuro’? (p. 278).
