The Supreme Court is looking at the possibility of regulating gun ownership. Some of the judges believe in originalism. This is the notion that the interpretation of constitutional law has been drifting too far and that one should go back to the origins of those laws. We should adopt stricter interpretations that reflect more accurately what the writers of the constitution and its amendments were envisioning at the time of their writing.

So, let’s see how this intellectual frame of mind would play out if confronted to a similar problem, namely the interpretation of the Bible. There are at least six Catholics or ex-Catholics among the nine judges of the Supreme Court. They are not professional exegetes but surely appreciate the essential role still played by the Bible in our secular times. Would they be willing to apply the legal principle in question–––originalism–-–to the Bible? The interpretation of the Bible, whether Jewish, Catholic, or Reformed, has long hesitated about that matter and still does, at least in certain congregations. Must it keep to conservative readings, or can it develop meanings that take into account new events, formulations, or needs. Even the most traditional Jews would frame their Torah study obligations as a duty to reveal the multiplicity of meanings meant by the divinity to be discovered over time.

Let us look at one famous story, that of the Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37. It cannot be properly explained without having an inkling of the Greco-Roman surroundings and more importantly of the long development of the notion of neighbor in Israelite and Jewish society after the earlier catastrophic collapse of their small kingdoms and the temple. In other words, I am suggesting that the value of the story of the Samaritan cannot be appreciated without having a sense of the development of the concept of neighbor. In fact, the expansion of the notion of neighbor to the whole of humanity has its roots in that story. That notion and its expansion, if one adopted the principle of strict originalism, would become impossible to understand. It would require belief in a Jesus entirely bereft of his Jewish and Israelite background. It would make it impossible to appreciate the profound value that the story and its biblical background have had and continue to have on the development of compassion and care in a complex, unfolding world. So, this is not a purely intellectual matter. One may actually ponder how much slower the development of hospices and hospitals would have been in past centuries if the notion of originalism had been the main guiding principle and had killed the expanding notion of neighbor.