Jewish Scriptural Interpretation and Early Christian Pneumatic Reading: Reconsidering PaRDeS for Christian–Jewish Relations

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between Jewish scriptural interpretation and early Christian hermeneutics by proposing PaRDeS Pneumatikon as a retrospective analytical model. While the fourfold PaRDeS schema emerged in medieval Jewish tradition, it is employed here heuristically—as a conceptual lens—to identify interpretive tendencies already present in Second Temple Judaism.

By engaging forms of Jewish interpretation such as midrash, pesher, allegory, and inner-biblical exegesis, the study argues that early Christian interpretation did not constitute a rupture from Jewish tradition but a historically situated refiguration of inherited practices. The ministry of Jesus and the apostolic community reoriented these interpretive modes within a Christological and pneumatic horizon, in which the Holy Spirit functions as an epistemological agent of understanding, remembrance, and discernment.

The article concludes by suggesting that this framework offers a constructive and dialogically responsible account of Scripture for contemporary Jewish–Christian hermeneutical discourse.