This paper comparatively examines commentaries by sixteenth-century European reformers on the apostle Paul’s “allegory” in Galatians 4:21–31. Older scholarship on the reformers’ relationship to allegorical exegesis tended to view the reformers as strict literalists. More recent work, in contrast, has frequently argued that the reformers in fact continued to subtly interpret the Bible allegorically, even to the point that some are said to have regularly contradicted their theoretical opposition to allegory in their actual exegetical practice. Through analyzing a wide range of lesser-known reformers’ commentaries on Galatians 4:21-31, I challenge both of these interpretations.
While both camps of previous scholarship typically focused on the question of whether the reformers read the Bible allegorically, this paper points to a more nuanced set of questions that the reformers debated concerning the nature, status, and purposes of allegorical exegesis. In contrast to newer scholarship, I argue that understanding these sixteenth-century questions supports seeing a high degree of consistency between various reformers’ hermeneutical theory and their exegetical practice. In contrast to older scholarship, this offers a much richer set of consideration regarding the reformers’ spectrum of approaches to allegory than has typically been given. The paper therefore closes by offering four Protestant approaches to Galatians 4:21-31 that developed over the course of the sixteenth century, which together point to the diversity of early modern Protestant approaches to allegory.