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In 1941, a Philadelphia Presbyterian minister named C. E. Macartney conducted a poll to see whom his local fellow Christians thought to be "the ten greatest men in the Bible." Isaiah came eighth on this list—not, presumably, on account of any record of his life (there is none), but on the strength alone of the book that bears his name. The opinion of prewar Philadelphia Presbyterians, it turns out, was remarkably consonant with the opinion of earlier ages. Moreover, it tallies with that of the postwar generation in every Christian denomination from Catholics to the Salvation Army. But the Isaiah who loomed in the imagination of the Presbyterians, suggests John F. A. Sawyer, may bear surprisingly little relationship to the Isaiah cherished by either medieval or postmodern theologians. The "fifth Gospel," it appears, has been an unusually protean text, warm wax in the hands of many a maker of images.
Though Sawyer does not stress it, there is nonetheless a strong thread that binds most of the diversity together: messianism. Divergence among interpreters through the centuries is usually about what messianic deliverance might mean.
A quick overview helps establish the point. For Saint Jerome (A.D.. 342-420), Isaiah "should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet because he describes all the mysteries of Christ and the Church so clearly that you would think he is composing a history of what has already happened rather than prophesying about what is to come." Saint Ambrose and his star pupil, Saint Augustine (a.d. 354-430), echo this view, emphasizing additionally Isaiah's role in "the calling of the Gentiles." The Wycliffe Bible Prologue follows suit ("not only a profete but more, a Gospellere"), and so, with varying emphasis, do the Reformation writers Luther and Calvin, for whom, above all, "the word of God abides forever."
Jewish traditions also feature Isaiah centrally, not only in lectionaries—in which, at least, since the Middle Ages, about half of all haftaroth (weekly readings from the prophets) come from this book—but particularly in Zionist writings since the nineteenth century and visibly on Holocaust memorials such as the magnificently somber Yad v'shem in Jerusalem (cf. Isa. 56:5), where the emphasis is on the restoration of Israel. And for quite other purposes Isaiah is a staple of Catholic liberation theologians and "swords into plowshares" revolutionaries such as Daniel and Philip Berrigan, as well as of feminist theologians like Susanne Heine, Phyllis Trible, Rosemary Radford Reuther, and Dorothee Soelle.
Of the two works reviewed here, Sawyer's is the book most useful for reflection on these hermeneutical questions, simply because it is a history of Isaiah interpretation in Christianity. Sawyer believes that the myriad formal commentaries on Isaiah in our own time are often barren with respect to the affective power of this richly poetic part of Scripture; obsession with "the original meaning of the original text" has blinded the commentators to the value of a rich interpretative tradition found not only in earlier formal commentaries but in preaching down the centuries, in hymns and other music, and in art and literature. What Sawyer offers as antidote is a lively and cross-disciplinary Rezeptionsgeschichte, a review of how Isaiah has been understood and, especially, used by its Christian readers. As a variant on reader-response criticism, the primary source material for a contextualizing of Isaiah's text is these past readings "in preference to archaeology and ancient near-eastern parallels." The result is an impressive scholarly resource, sobering in its implications for exegetes, and at the same time an entertaining and culturally enriching survoler of the development of certain aspects of Christian theology.
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