Any recommendations on this resource?

Ronald Quick

Is anyone familiar with this resource: The Interpretation of Scripture by Fitzmyer.

https://www.logos.com/product/56516/interpretation-of-scripture

You can't beat the price.

MJ. Smith

Is anyone familiar with this resource: The Interpretation of Scripture by Fitzmyer.

Yes, but I don't know what you are really asking. Assuming that you lean towards an evangelical/fundamentalist view of scripture, here is an excerpt that might give you a sense of the difference in perspective:

1. The Literal Sense of Scripture

A standard, modern definition of the literal sense of Scripture runs like this: “The sense which the human author directly intended and which the written words conveyed.”6 In such a definition three elements are important: the adverb “directly,” the phrase “the human author,” and the clause “which the written words conveyed.” “Directly” is used to prevent the meaning from being extended to the later use of the words, either in a quotation by some other author, or in a fuller sense, or in a canonical sense. “The human author” has to be understood as the last one responsible for the final form of the words in a given statement or story, whether he himself has written it (as did Luke) or dictated it (as Paul often did), or possibly used a secretary or “ghost writer” (as in 1 Peter), or in whose name a disciple may have composed something (as in the Pastoral Epistles). In antiquity, one also understood “author” as the one to whom a literary tradition was ascribed, as in the case of the Pentateuch, often called the Law of Moses. Finally, “which the written words conveyed” denotes the message that the words used carried to the first recipients of it; it thus gives priority to what has actually been written.
Such an understanding of the literal sense of Scripture is found in Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu: “Let interpreters bear in mind that their foremost and greatest endeavor should be to discern and define clearly that sense of the biblical words that is called ‘literal’ … so that the mind of the author may be made abundantly clear.”7 The same idea is found earlier in the classic discussion of Thomas Aquinas that “the literal sense is that which the author intended.”8 Thomas also called it “sensus historicus,” and subdivided it into “history, aetiology, analogy” (historia, aetiologia, analogia), a distinction that creates no trouble, even though one might hesitate today to agree with some of the examples that he cited from Scripture.9 He also recognized rightly that “the parabolic sense is contained in the literal; for something can be denoted by words properly, and something figuratively, and the literal sense is (then) not the figure, but that which is figured.”10 That means that, if Christ is called “the Lion of Judah” or “the Lamb of God” (John 1:36), he would not be an animal, a lion or a lamb, but that which “Lion of Judah” or “Lamb of God” stood for or figured. Similarly, the literal sense would include the imperative “Let your loins be girt” (Luke 12:35), a metaphorical expression for the disciple’s need of readiness for action. Thomas devoted a whole article to the use of metaphor in Scripture.11 Such an understanding of the literal sense, however, has encountered a number of problems, which must be considered.
The first problem emerges when one looks at the definition of the literal sense given in the Biblical Commission’s 1993 document, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, where one finds a slight difference: “The literal sense of Scripture is that which has been expressed directly by the inspired human authors.”12 The Commission was careful not to confuse the literal sense with a “literalist” sense, understood in any fundamentalistic way, and insisted on the literal meaning as that conveyed by the literary form used by the authors “according to the literary conventions of the time,” and even admitted that “a story” might “not belong to the genre of history but be instead a work of imaginative fiction.”13 Such clarifications are important today, but what is striking is the absence in this definition of any reference to the intention or mind of the human author. The emphasis is rather on what “has been expressed directly.”14
Behind this difference in the definition lies the conviction often expressed in modern literary criticism that the author’s intention is immaterial or inconsequential to the meaning of a piece of literature. This has been called the “intentional fallacy” or the “fallacy of authorial intention,” because it is maintained that a piece of literature can take on a meaning quite different from what the author may have intended. It can derive a meaning from the context in which it is used or from the perspective of the reader.”15 The Commission actually did not develop this aspect or even express itself on this matter, but simply restricted its definition to what “has been expressed directly,” which seemed to convey sufficiently what has always been meant by the definition of the literal sense.
This difference in definition, however, calls for at least three comments. First, since we are speaking about the Bible, hence about literature that has been composed by different authors or editors over a long period of time, at least a thousand years for the span of the OT and NT, and that has been put in its final form at least nineteen hundred years ago, “the mind of the author” is not easy to ascertain. The “author” in many instances is not known, and even the time of composition in often beyond our reach.
Second, a correct analysis of what “has been expressed directly by the inspired human authors,” as the Commission has phrased it, does yield in most instances something of the author’s intention. One can gauge something of what the author intended from what he wrote, even if that might not correspond entirely to his intention. This is what I understand to be meant by what Thomas Aquinas and Pius XII were implying. That is the proper object of exegesis and the goal of a properly oriented historical-critical interpretation of Scripture.
Third, even though one has to reckon with the position of the New Literary Critics, who insist that a poem or other piece of literature can acquire an autonomous existence and acquire a meaning that the poet or author did not envisage, this view of literature, if applied to the Bible without some qualification, would raise a major theological problem. One might agree that some of the poetic passages of the OT—for instance, some of the Psalms—might be shown to have acquired such an independent meaning, e.g., once they were associated with others in becoming part of the Psalter. It would, however, be difficult to sustain that view for every passage in the Bible. If the meaning of a biblical text could take on a meaning different from its originally expressed—and, I would add, originally intended—meaning, then how could one say that the Bible is still the source par excellence of divine revelation, the means that God has chosen to convey to generation after generation of his people what his plans, his instructions, and his will in their regard actually are. This characteristic of the written Word of God demands that there be a basic homogeneity between what it meant and what it means, between what the inspired human author sought to express and what he did express, and what is being said by the words so read in the Church of today. This, then, is the major problem that the literal sense of Scripture raises today, and one with which theologians and exegetes have to deal.
A further problem related to the literal sense is what the Biblical Commission has called “the dynamic aspect” of the biblical message, for this message should not always be limited to “the historical circumstances” of its composition. For instance, in a royal psalm the psalmist may have been referring to the enthronement of a certain king, but what he has expressed may envisage the kingly institution as a whole, as it actually was, or as it was intended by God to be in Israel. “In this way, the text carries the reader beyond the institution of kingship in its actual historical manifestation.”16 That dynamic aspect could lead to a spiritual sense (when the Psalm might be applied to Christ [see below]), but even apart from that dimension of it this aspect is a quality of the literal sense, because it expresses the openness of the text to a broader extension of its meaning. This, then, would be an aspect of the literal sense, of which the interpreter has to be aware.
Does the biblical text have only one literal sense? The Commission answers, “In general, yes; but there is no question here of a hard and fast rule.”17 An obvious exception is poetic passages in the Bible, where the author uses words that may have a multivalent reference; or some passages of the Fourth Gospel, where a number of statements have such ambivalence. A “plurality of meaning,” however, cannot be found everywhere in the Bible, and so one has to be cautious in this regard. The Commission has cited an example of double meaning from the Johannine Gospel, which calls for some comment. The Johannine passage to which it refers is 11:47–52, which reads as follows:

  47 So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, “What are we going to do? This man is performing many signs. 48 If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation.” 49 Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing; 50 and you do not realize that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish.” 51 He did not say this on his own, but being high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, 52 and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.

The Commission comments on this passage as follows:

  Even when a human utterance appears to have only one meaning, divine inspiration can guide the expression in such a way as to create more than one meaning. This is the case with the saying of Caiaphas in John 11:50: at one and the same time it expresses both an immoral political ploy and a divine revelation. The two aspects belong, both of them, to the literal sense, for they are both made clear by the context.18

What the Commission does not make clear, however, is that the second meaning of Caiaphas’s words, i.e., his prophecy, is not evident from the inspired recording of his words alone by the evangelist in v. 50. The prophetic character of Caiaphas’s utterance comes rather from the evangelist’s explanation offered in vv. 51–52: “He did not say this on his own, but being the high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.” Would any reader ever have come to such an understanding of Caiaphas’s words in v. 50, were it not for the evangelist’s added explanation? At any rate, the Commission acknowledged that this instance was “extreme,” and it gave no guarantee that any other biblical texts have more than one literal meaning. It is no guarantee that all—or even other—biblical texts have more than one literal meaning. One has to insist on that, even though one may still reckon with the dynamic aspect of some texts, especially OT texts, when they are subjected to relecture in the NT.
The literal sense is the goal of a properly oriented historical-critical interpretation of Scripture. By “properly oriented” I mean the use of that method with the presupposition of Christian faith that one is interpreting the written Word of God couched in ancient human language, with a message not only for the people of old, but also for Christians of today.


Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2008), 87–91.

In general the book is a tome pushing the historical-critical method that also delves into some of the internal battles within the Catholic Church e.g. Brown and LaGrange. It is oriented more towards history of interpretation rather than methods of interpretation.