[...]
>Only for a brief period in Western history (roughly the 19th and early
>20th century) has it been axiomatically assumed that the only meaning a
>text may have is the meaning given it by its original receptors.  We don't
>read Plato purely in the manner of the Platonic academy nor even in accord
>with Middle Platonism or Neo-Platonism.  That Christians read the Hebrew
>Scriptures as pointing to Christ is central to Christian faith.  It is a
>bias, of course, but so too is any other reading of them.  That an utterly
>unbiased manner of reading the Hebrew Scriptures is possible is itself
>something of a pre-judgment.
[...]

Dear Dennis,

I may be insufficiently informed, but I am not aware of any school in
exegesis, philology or literary criticism in the 19th or early 20th century
where it was "axiomatically assumed that the only meaning a text may have is
the meaning given it by its original receptors". If we could replace
"original receptors" by "author", the description would match more or less
with an understanding of historical philology which, although not being
exactly new at the time in question and although not being entirely obsolete
today, nevertheless had reached a certain predominance. For historical
philology, the meaning as understood by the original receptors (a group
itself not easy to define and in its understanding of the text not always
easy to investigate) is only of secondary and heuristic interest, either as
an obstacle (because also original receptors may deviate) or as a means to
approach the understanding as intended by the author. Not in the early, but
mostly in the second half of our century, apart from an 'onthological' line
of thought which did put or still puts the meaning as 'existing in the text
itself' in the first line (because the author may have failed to textualize
the meaning which he intended, or may have created potentials of meaning he
was not aware of), it was namely a school or rather several schools of
'reception oriented' criticism which reacted to this line of
historical-philology and also to the 'onthologist' view and which maybe come
close to **your** description. They denied the ontological status of meaning
as existing in the text itself, did not regard the early or later reception
only as a means to approach the 'original' understanding as intended by the
author and gave up, more or less, the objective to reconstruct this
'original' meaning in its exclusivity, opening thereby maybe the doors (or
some more doors which had not yet been opened by the 'onthologist' view) to
all these more recent trends I myself am no longer familiar with and which
seem to regard the meaning of a text exclusively as the one or many
determined by the user.

I would also like to point out that from the viewpoint of historical
philology it is not a 'bias' to avoid assumptions of divine inspiration
anticipating future events: historical philology does avoid them not because
they are not true, but because they cannot be proven to be true by means of
philology and therefor are no good working hypotheses for this discipline. I
would say that philology notwithstanding its defects and limits works
remarkably well without theology, whereas theology (if somehow based on
scriptures) maybe would do less well without philology.


  Otfried

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