Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §6.4
caution against a too hasty uprooting of the text from its historical context and assumption
that such a text transplanted in a different context (as, for example, in
service of a later dogmatic pronouncement) will still be the same text.
It should be noted that I am not talking here in terms of 'intended meaning'
as that has mostly been understood. Criticism of the 'intentional fallacy' was a
reaction against Romanticism's hope to enter into the creative experience of
authorial composition, the intention seen as behind the text, bringing the text into
being. 64 The goal of 'plain meaning', however, focuses on the text itself. To reassert
the importance of the 'plain meaning', therefore, is not to deny the importance
of authorial intention. Rather it is to focus on authorial intention as
entextualised. 65 It is the text as embodying that intention, as a communicative act
between author and intended readers/auditors, to which attention is given. In discussion
of biblical texts too much importance has traditionally been placed on
the 'moment' of inspiration, and not enough on the 'moment' of reception. The
text was (and is) precisely what mediates between the two. The writer did not
write into a vacuum, but with a view to how his text was heard. 66 Readerresponse
did not begin in the twentieth century! It was already one half of the
communicative act which was the text. It should not surprise us, then, that a need
has been felt within contemporary hermeneutical theory to reintroduce the author
in terms of 'the implied author'. 67 This is simply to acknowledge that in most
cases the text itself bears testimony to its own integral intentionality. Since we
may assume, on most occasions, that the implied intention is the intention which
the real author wished to imply, the outcome may be little different.
d. The Hermeneutical Circle
Hermeneutics has long been fascinated by the fact and problem of the
hermeneutical circle. In its initial form it was the circularity of part and whole,
already noted by Schleiermacher: the parts can only be understood in terms of
the whole; but understanding of the whole is built up from the parts. As
64. See above, chapter 4, n. 44.
65. Meyer, Reality and Illusion 94-98. Authorial intention 'is to be understood not as
some subjective occurrence lying behind the text but as the principle of the text's intelligibility',
'as primarily embodied in the words the author wrote' (Watson, Text and Truth 112, 118).
66. It should be added, of course, that Paul's letters (the most obvious examples in the
NT of intentional texts) were not always effective communication, in that the response they
elicited was not as he would have wished. But the fact that so many of them (some were lost)
were respected, retained, no doubt read and reread, pondered, circulated, collected, and finally
gathered to become part of the NT canon attests their overall effectiveness.
67. Above chapter 5, n. 143.
118