Preaching is an activity that seeks to enable the community to understand what an interpreted text has to say to their own contemporary situation. This presupposes that the preacher and the audience come to a common understanding that governs the manner and means by which the text, originating in the distant past, can address the present. — Henning Graf Reventlow, The History of Biblical Interpretation, Volume 1, pp. 2-3.
If we might oversimplify a bit, any given book of Bible is the work of some author who had something to say about things that concerned them in their own time. Hundreds or even thousands of years later, a preacher has to enable the community to understand what the biblical author has to say to their own contemporary situation.
How do the preacher and the today’s congregation relate to the author and the earlier audience? This question, born out of the need to speak to the present through an ancient text, is the motor that drives over two thousand years of biblical interpretation.
According to Reventlow, the key idea for Jewish scriptural hermeneutics is the centrality of the Torah, while for Christians “the hermeneutical basis was the view that all of the statements of the Scriptures (Old Testament) referred to Jesus Christ” p. 3. This task is not an easy one, as it is not obvious on first reading that most of the Old Testament has all that much to do with Jesus.
Reventlow’s first volume traces the history of interpretation from the earliest beginnings through to Origen. In the Introduction to the volume, Reventlow takes care to point out that there is a wide gulf between the mental worlds of ancient readers in the Greco-Roman world and those of twentieth-century Westerners, and forewarns the reader that this may make much of the early exegesis of the Bible seem strange to today’s readers.