Cyril of Alexandria and the Literal Interpretation of Scripture: An Analysis of Cyril's Commentarius in Habacuc

by Timothy E. Saleska

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of graduate Studies, Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion 1999. First Reader: Professor Adam Kamesar. Second Reader: Professor Alan Cooper.

358 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Josef Muench · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars because of the obvious facility in languages demonstrated throughout, but on the whole this was a pretty disappointing read. Saleska promises to show how important the literal sense of Scripture was to Cyril, but nearly the entire dissertation is simply a comparative study of Cyril’s commentary with Theodore’s, Theodoret’s, and Jerome’s. Saleska at least shows Cyril’s unique brilliance as an exegete and lack of dependence on any of these sources (although Theodoret wrote after him), but that’s the most significant contribution of the work. The whole thesis about the importance of the literal sense suffers from a number of major shortcomings: 1) a glaring lack of definitions (the reader is practically left to guess what “literal” and “spiritual” and similar words even refer to), 2) Saleska admits that in his study, he deliberately skips over all the spiritual/allegorical sections of Cyril’s commentary (how am I supposed to believe a thesis that tells me in footnotes that it’s deliberately skipping over all the contrary evidence?), 3) a subset of point 1, namely that much of what Saleska labels as Cyril’s “literal” commentary would strike most modern exegetes as being quite non-literal indeed, 4) a lack of recognition that Cyril sees the entire “literal history” of Israel as a paradigm and shadow of Christian truth even if he doesn’t offer an allegorical reading of every verse, and 5) Saleska doesn’t bother to see how Cyril uses Habakkuk in any other of his voluminous writing outside of this commentary. Saleska clearly has great scholarly ability, but this dissertation leaves a lot to be desired.