An eight part series on reading the Bible

Fr. Ted's blog has an excellent series that "look[ed] at the Scriptures focusing on some methods and means by which the Patristic writers interpreted our Scriptures." Here's a snippet from the final posting. If this whets your appetite, I suggest reading them from the beginning here.

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In reading through some of the Patristic Biblical commentators, we do see the variety of meanings they felt were put into the text by God Himself. Their goal was always to come to the full revelation of God – to completely understand the text as God intended us to comprehend it – and to get all the possible meanings that God had put into the text. Theodoret of Cyrus (d. 457AD) was a bishop in the Antiochian tradition of biblical studies. Generally the Antiochians downplayed the use of allegory in their interpretation of Scripture, but in their writings we also can see that the differences between a typological reading and an allegorical reading can sometimes be slim. They knew full well that St. Paul himself used both typology and allegory in his own reading of interpretation of the Jewish scriptures...