Many Biblical scholars believe that the Gospel of John was intended to be the first book in the New Testament [NT] (the arrangement of books occurred after the books were written). Here are some passages from John:
1:1-5: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
/ The same was in the beginning with God. / All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. / In him was life; and the life was the light of men. / And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
1: 14: And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.
8: 12: Then spake Jesus again unto them [the Pharisees], saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.
Q: Can you see reasons why The Gospel of John would be an appropriate way to begin the New Testament? Think back to our discussion of Genesis.
Q: Consider the last chapter of the last book of the New Testament. Here are a few passages from Revelation 22:
22: 10: Then he [God] saith unto me [John], Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand.
22: 13: I [Jesus] am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
22 : 18-21 [the last four verses of the NT]: For I [John] testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: / And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. ‘ He which testifieth these things, saith, [Here Jesus speaks] Surely I come quickly. [John resumes] Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. / The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.
These verses reveal some central features of the NT’s teaching about language.
- The word (logos) is tied to living speech, not to the written text . Thus, the ‘truth’ of the word–its full meaning–exists outside language. (Compare with Plato’s Ideal Essences.) Consider this famous passage from St. Paul (II Cor. 3:1-3, 6):
- The language is profoundly metaphorical . "I am the light of the world" is similar to many other phrases in the NT (e.g., "I am the door: be me if any man enter in, he shall be saved" [John 10: 9]; "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?" [I Cor. 3: 16]). It’s obvious that to Christians, such metaphors are not mere ornaments of language. Neither are the other figures of speech that thread through the NT, such as metonymy ("Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for grace" [I Peter 1:13]) and simile ("For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass" [I Peter 1:24] . . . but these figures tend to slide over to metaphor: the latter passage is followed by: "The grass withereth, and the flower thereof fadeth away: [25] But the word of the Lord endureth for ever."]). Note also that Jesus frequently speaks in parables.
- The language is *intertextual –that is, it refers to/quotes/alludes to/revises previous texts. The texts in question, of course, are the books that, to Christians, form the ‘Old Testament’ [OT]. Christianity teaches that the NT ‘fulfills’ the meaning of the OT and that the proof, or a truth-guarantee, of the NT is its prediction by the OT. Scholars call this biblical intertextuality *typology, in which an event or passage in the OT [the type, from Greek typos, which also means figure–as in rhetorical figure] predicts an event or passage in the NT [the antitype, the prefix here meaning ‘occurring later in time’].
Do we begin again to commend ourselves? Or need we, as some others, epistles [letters] of commendation to you, or letters of commendation from you? / Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: / Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God : not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart. [. . . God] also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.
Think about the following:
Jesus lived during a time of great political unrest, when Israel was occupied by the Romans [this period was at the height of the Roman Empire]. Jewish prophecy had become increasingly, urgently messianic [‘messiah’ is Hebrew for ‘anointed,’ which refers to a legitimate king; the Greek translations is ‘Christos’] messianic for the couple of centuries–in a secular sense, calling for a strong king to overthrow Roman rule; in a religious sense, calling for a divinely authorized leader to unite squabbling factions, to protect/renew a sorely tested faith, and/or to bring about the end of history (since the current historical order was not advantageous for the people of Israel). Some of the Gospels may have been written in Aramaic, but our first copies of them are in Greek, which was also the language used to Paul (it was the common trading/diplomat/official language of the Eastern Mediterranean). It was Paul who spread the message of Christ to the gentiles: in other words, to people removed in space, culture, and language from the Jews. As a proselytizing religion, Christianity kept expanding throughout the Near East and Europe, converting and incorporating an increasingly diverse range of people.
Q: How might these conditions relate to the attitude toward language manifested in the NT?
Certainly, the history of Christianity’s expansion has a lot to do with the development of practices regarding language and the Bible. Once translated into Latin (traditionally believed to have been done by St. Jerome), the Christian Bible was perhaps paradoxically inaccessible to most Christians. Instead, the priest spoke the Latin words to the people and explained its meaning in their own language (through sermons, homilies, and the like). Literacy was overwhelmingly the province of the clericy and the nobility. The common people participated in the community of Christians through sacraments (sacred rituals: baptism, mass, extreme unction, etc.), not through study of sacred writings (unless we think of medieval church architecture as a text).
Medieval theologians developed methods to ‘unpack’ the meanings of the Bible (these eventually filtered down to parish priests and thus into popular consciousness). Clearly, the Bible was anything but clear: its literal level (the ‘plain meaning’ of the words on the page or in memory) was overlaid with other levels of meaning. Therefore, Christian interpretation (often known as *exegesis) takes as a given that language is *polysemous. The difference between medieval and (post)modern polysemy may be understood spatially: traditional Christian thought about language was hierarchical–the levels are ‘stacked up’ vertically in order of importance; much of today’s literary theory thinks of meaning horizontally, as lateral slippage of meaning from *signifier to signifier. The difference, perhaps more importantly, centers on notions of essence: is there something outside of language that authorizes the truth and value of the word?
Here is Dante’s explanation of medieval/Early Renaissance exegesis:
"To elucidate, then, what we have to say, be it known that the sense of this work is not simple, but on the contrary it may be called polysemous, that is to say, "of more senses than one": for it is one sense which we get through the letter, and another which we get through the thing the letter signifies; and the first is called literal, but the second allegorical or mystic. And this mode of treatment, for its better manifestation, may be considered in this verse: 'When Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from a people of strange speech, Judaea became his sanctification, Israel his power.'[Psalms 114: 1-2]
"For if we inspect the letter alone [the first, literal level] the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is presented to us; if the allegory [here Dante divides the ‘allegorical or mystic level’ into three layers, with ‘allegory’ now meaning simple typology], our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace is presented to us; if the anagogical, the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory is presented to us."
To recapitulate, the four levels are literal (‘plain meaning’), allegorical or typological (how a passage prefigures a specifically Christian narrative or message), moral (the application to an individual’s spiritual life), and anagogical (the understanding of individual faith experience as part of a sacramental community, as part of Christian history in the largest possible sense).
The Protestant Reformation was political as well as theological, but for our purposes we should think about its profound shift in emphasis regarded the Bible. 
Two things are paramount: (1) the Bible was translated into local languages, and church services were conducted in those languages; (2) people were admonished to read the Bible for themselves, to wrestle with significance and faith in a direct encounter with the divine word. To what extent were the beginnings of mercantile capitalism (producing among other things huge growth in urban centers and a proto-middle class) and the not unrelated development of printing responsible for these changes–or if not ‘responsible,’ perhaps necessary conditions for them?