21. Ep. 137.1.3–5.18 (CSEL 44:99–123); trans. Parson, FOTC 20:19–34 (modified). (continued)
he sees, while one who teaches literacy does so in such a way that others, too, learn how to read. Both instill the know-how they have received. In a similar way, [a preacher] who explains to hearers what he understands in the Scriptures acts a bit like one in the office of reader, articulating things he gazes upon, while one who teaches others how to understand the underlying principles of Scripture is like a person teaching literacy. Someone who knows how to read has no need of another reader whenever he comes upon a book, no need to have someone tell him what is written in it. In a similar way, someone who has learned the principles that I am proposing here, whenever he comes upon some obscurity in the Scriptures, learns to observe certain rules, as he did in reading, and does not require another interpreter to lay open for him whatever is obscure. Instead, by following certain clues, he may arrive at the hidden meaning on his own, without any false step, or, at least, without falling into some absurdly misguided view.
([Book 1] 1.1) There are two things that the whole treatment of the Scriptures depends on: a method of discovering what we need to understand and a method of presenting what we have understood.22
The Biblical Canon
The first step is obvious: The exegete needs to read the entire Bible. But that is only the beginning. Like other early Christian exegetes, Augustine was convinced that the best way to interpret the Bible is with the Bible. This method presumed that one had the entire Bible at one's fingertips, that one had, for all practical purposes, memorized it. But which Bible? The Bible, Augustine recognized, is a library, not a book. The question, therefore, is which books make up its canon (that is, the list of books Christians officially regard as the word of God).23 The canon of the Hebrew Bible—what Christians came to think of and speak of as "the Old Testament"—only began to be settled in the late first century. Early Christians embraced the longer canon of Greek-speaking Jews embodied in the Septuagint (more on this below). The canon of the New Testament was largely settled by the late second century, in part, because of a pitched debate with gnostic Christians
22. Doc. Chr. praef. 1–9; 1.1.1 (Green, 2–12); my trans. "Method of discovering . . . method of presenting": This is the basic outline of De doctrina christiana: Bks. 1–3 focus on "discovery," that is, his exegetical principles; Bk. 4, as we saw, focuses on "presentation," that is, his rhetorical principles and reflections. "Discovery" (inventio) refers to the subject matter of the address. On this, George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
23. See Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Joseph T. Lienhard, The Bible, the Church, and Authority: The Canon of the Christian Bible in History and Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995).