3 Lessons from the Early Church on How to Read the Bible

Catholics have a bad reputation for never reading the Bible. The success of the Bible in a Year podcast has put some of that reputation to bed, but even though many Catholics now know what the bible says, many still feel unequipped to interpret it on their own.

Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church encourages private interpretation of Scripture. After all, the Church bases her teaching on the great biblical theologians of the Early Church who were themselves once “private interpreters.”

The Early Church Fathers were masters of Scripture and every Catholic should look to them to learn how to interpret the Bible for themselves.

Here are three lessons we can draw from the Early Church on how to read Scripture.

Lesson 1: Use the Fourfold Sense of Scripture

The Early Church Fathers’ biblical interpretation rests on understanding scripture as having multiple senses.

Consider the prophecy of Ezekiel seeing the temple (Ezekiel 40-48). In a literal sense, he is prophesying the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity. But in a spiritual sense, the temple is a symbol for:

• The coming of Jesus Christ

• The establishment of His Church

• The New Temple that will be built in Heaven

These three are called the spiritual senses of scripture: allegorical, moral, and anagogical. Together with the literal sense, they form the ”fourfold sense of Scripture.” Or, if you’re fancy, the “Quadraiga”

The literal sense forms the bedrock. It is what the human author is trying to communicate through the text. Some people mistake the literal sense for the surface narrative. For example, in the Parable of the Sower, the literal sense is not just a story about a sower. The literal sense is also what Jesus is trying to communicate through the parable, namely, that people receive the word of God differently.

The remaining three are “spiritual” senses of scripture. The literal is what the human author wrote, but the spiritual sense is what the Holy Spirit wrote. The Church Fathers used the spiritual senses to discern what the Holy Spirit was saying in each verse.

The allegorical sense connects Scripture to major figures in salvation history—primarily Christ, but also Mary, the Church, the apostles, and even evil like the world, the flesh, and the devil. This sense reveals how a passage points beyond itself to the great drama of Salvation History.

For example, the story of Esther is an allegory for all of salvation history. Haman tries to kill Mordecai and the Jewish people. Esther intercedes to King Xerxes and then Haman is executed on the gallows he built for Mordecai. Xerxes represents God the Father, Esther is Mary, Mordecai is Christ, and Haman is Satan.

The moral sense of scripture is the sense of the passage that tells us how we ought to live today. It is the ”what does this passage say about my life” sense of scripture, but it goes even deeper than that. The moral sense encompasses the whole of the human condition. It reveals who we are as mankind and how we can be brought up to God.

For example, the Good Samaritan is a story about how we ought to care for our neighbor, but it is also a story about the human condition. We are the man beaten on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem. The scribe and the priest pass by, representing how the Law and the Prophets could not save us. Only one man (Christ) did save us.

The anagogical sense addresses the end times: death, judgment, heaven, hell, and purgatory. The anagogical sense is a revelation of how Christ will come again, how we will be in the future, and what the final image of the Church will look like in eternity.

An easy way to remember the three senses is faith, hope, and love. The allegorical talks about what we should believe, the moral how we should love, and the anagogical, what we should hope for.

What does each passage say about what we should believe, how we should live, and what we should anticipate?

Another way is the past, present, and future. The allegorical talks about what happened in the past, the moral what we ought to do today, the anagogical, how we ought to live in the future.

What does each passage say about the past, present, and the future?

In the end, all three spiritual senses are about Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit inspired scripture to reveal the Son to us. You‘ll find it hard sometimes to separate the three spiritual senses. They interweave naturally—Christ yesterday, today, and forever. So do the connections to His Bride, the Church, yesterday, today, and forever.

Lesson 2: Embrace Numbers and Symbols

In On Christian Doctrine, St. Augustine focuses on explaining “signs” in scripture. A sign (or symbol) is a thing that points to a different thing. The Church Fathers approached Scripture with relentless attention to symbolic detail. They refused to accept any element as accidental or meaningless.

The Fathers tracked recurring symbols throughout Scripture: bread, oil, water, fire, wine, wind, fish, etc. These elements form a symbolic vocabulary that enriches interpretation across the Bible.

• Bread = the Eucharist, being nourished by God, basic human needs.

• Water = Baptism, cleanliness, purity, grace

• Oil = Anointing, kingship, priesthood

• Fire = The Holy Spirit, purgation, suffering, light, revelation

• Wine = Joy of life, blood, the Eucharist, marriage, intoxication.

• Fish = Mankind, the Church.

And so on.

Numbers are also symbols for the Church Fathers. Augustine himself had a way with numbers. For example:

• 1 = the oneness of God

• 2 = the twofold nature of Christ

• 3 = The trinity, the three virtues

• 4 = Mankind, the world

• 6 = Imperfection

• 7 = Perfection

And so on.

Augustine also liked to do math to take the number symbolism even further. He does something fantastic with the 153 fish caught by the disciples:

“The catch of fish tells us of the salvation of men, but man cannot be saved without keeping the 10 commandments. But, on account of the fall, man cannot even keep the commandments without the help of grace and the 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, the number 7 signifies holiness, since God blessed the 7th day and made it holy (Gen 2:3). But 10 plus 7 equals 17, and if all the numbers from 1 to 17 are added together (1+2+3…+17), they equal 153. Hence, the 153 fish signify that all the elect are to be saved by the gift of grace (7) and the following of the commandments. (10)”

Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 50, 9.

In his fish example, Augustine combined symbolism and numbers. The fish symbolized all of mankind and the number of fish symbolized what we need to be saved.

You can do this yourself. For example, take a moment to read the Parable of the Persistent Man from Luke 5. A man goes to his friend at midnight and asks for 3 loaves of bread because a visitor has come to his home. The friend refuses, but Jesus says the friend will eventually relent because of the man’s persistence.

The literal sense of this passage, Jesus is telling the disciples to be persistent in asking God for graces. But the numbers and symbols clue us into to the deeper spiritual senses.

Why bread, with its Eucharistic connections? Why three loaves specifically? After all the man only has to feed two people: himself and the visitor. Who is this mysterious visitor?

There is no ”one answer.” The Bible is multifaceted like a diamond. When you look at it from different angles, the symbols appear differently

For example, the persistent man may symbolize us asking God to give us gifts. But if the bread symbolizes the Eucharist, doesn‘t that come from Christ? So to interpret it allegorically, the persistent man is Christ appealing to the Father to bring the sacrament back to us, the visitor. Or to interpret it morally, it could be your priest interceding for you. Sometimes, if you look at a symbol a different way, the meaning of the parable can be seen in a new light.

This interpretive approach doesn't claim definitive or doctrinal authority. But it doesn’t need to. The point is to recognize the Holy Spirit's capacity to embed multiple layers of meaning simultaneously. The key principle demands we leave no stone unturned. Never assume you have exhausted a passage.

The danger of this kind of interpretation is coming up with wild doctrines based on these symbols. That’s why the Church Fathers were also committed to reading the bible in the context of the whole of Church tradition.

Lesson 3: Read in the Context of Tradition

The Bible belongs to the Church established by Christ—including the Old Testament. The Church predates the written New Testament and even the canonization of books in the Old Testament.

Prior to the Bible's canonization, disputes existed among the Jews, with the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes each having different lists of inspired books. Over centuries, the canon of scripture arose gradually from within the Church's life of worship and was eventually defined in the fourth century. Because Christ vested authority in the apostles generally and in Peter specifically to pass on his teachings, the Scriptures must be read from within the very body that canonized, interprets, and passes them on.

Scripture and Tradition are not opposed, as some Protestants suggest; rather, they go together, and Scripture is itself a kind of Tradition.

Tradition is simply the passing on of the apostolic faith throughout the generations. The only reason anyone recognizes a text as Scripture is because it has been passed on within the Tradition. Scripture is a part—rather than the sole source—of the deposit of faith, the Revelation He gave us.

Tradition encompasses the way the Church has interpreted Scripture and the oral tradition of the apostles. Because not everything can be written down like Scripture, monuments or landmarks of Tradition—creeds, liturgy, catechisms, and the writings of the saints—function as reliable guides.

“What if there should be a dispute about some kind of obscure question... must we not have recourse to the most ancient churches?”

St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.4.1

St. Irenaeus states that we must have recourse to the ancient churches and that Scripture is interpreted according to the rule of faith (regula fidei in Latin.) This rule is a summary of what Christians have always believed, serving as the standard to check one's interpretation of Scripture, much like using a ruler to check a measurement.

For people living today, the closest rule of faith is the living Magisterium, which is to the bishops and priests who are teaching today. This rule itself must be checked against the greater rule: the tradition of the apostles passed on throughout the centuries. This tradition is also expressed in our creeds, liturgy, and catechisms, which are everyday instruments used to test and keep private interpretations on track.

The liturgy provides clues to which senses of scripture—literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical—ought to be read into each passage.

Consider the book of Isaiah, which is read during Advent. Since Advent is about waiting for the birth of Christ, the allegorical sense in passages from Isaiah point to the Nativity of Christ. The Nativity itself is a symbol of Christ coming into our lives. So, the moral sense of Isaiah’s prophecies say something about the first light of Christian faith. For the anagogical sense, the Church's liturgy ties Advent to the Second Coming of Christ. So, the prophecy can also be understood in an anagogical sense, referencing Christ's return.

The liturgy is a great example of something called the “Monuments of Tradition.” These monuments are landmarks for us to check ourselves against the Church.

Tradition leaves tangible breadcrumbs for interpreting Scripture:

• Creeds and councils articulate doctrine, using words not found verbatim in the Bible, such as "Trinity" and "Transubstantiation," to describe scriptural realities.

• Liturgy ties passages to seasons; for example, daily mass readings often pair Old Testament passages with Gospels, revealing the Church's inner logic in linking them.

• The Catechism indexes verses and ties them to specific doctrines. You can look up a passage like Luke 1 in the Catechism's index to find every place it is referenced, showing how the Church has interpreted that verse.

• Other sources like patristic commentaries and homilies by saints can also be helpful. If an interpretation of a passage is repeated by multiple saints over the centuries, it is part of tradition, for example the healing of the man born blind is often tied to baptism.

I once had a conversation with a Protestant apologist on X about the Church’s authority on scripture. He asked why, after 2,000 years, the Church hasn't produced an exhaustive, infallible interpretive book like the Jewish Talmud, detailing how each verse should be interpreted.

The answer is found in the Bible itself: as John concludes his Gospel, he states that Jesus did so many more things that if they were all written down, the world would not be able to contain the number of books. (Jn 21:25)

Revelation is inexhaustible; there will always be deeper interpretations. Tradition grows like a city, building upon its foundation, expanding and improving, becoming grander and incorporating more people. So, the Church offers guiding landmarks rather than a definitive micro-commentary on every verse, allowing future generations to mine deeper riches while remaining anchored in apostolic foundations.