Lewis Ayres gave a wonderful paper on early church hermeneutics at a recent conference at Regent College. Part of the point was to place the early fathers - Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, and Tertullian - in their original context, and ask what they were responding to. Predominantly, they were responding to Valentinian gnostics who read the Bible according to “parabolic” or “enigmatic” methods of reading, derived from the ancient methods applied by Greek critics to Homer. Valentinians used the gospels to discover metaphysical ideas in Jesus’ teaching, ideas that were not on the surface of the text.

In response, the early fathers developed a method of reading that prioritized the literal. They still allegorized and found “enigmatic” teaching in the Bible, but they applied a much stricter standard for determining when and how allegories should be derived from the literal text.

In other words: The church fathers didn’t invent allegorical exegesis; it was already around in abundant. Insofar as they were innovative, they were innovative in their insistence on reading ad litteram .