"An important book arguing for the retrieval of premodern sensibilities for proper interpretation of the Bible. Modern scholarship has quietly dispensed with the notion of divine authorship as being the basis of unity in the Scripture (or even a possibility), but Smith demonstrates through a survey of several early Christian writers that this idea has pervaded the vast majority of the church's history of biblical interpretation. Further, Smith does an excellent job of outlining the "method" of the use of Scripture by Scripture (specifically the use of the OT in the NT) which is usually unaddressed or insufficiently addressed by other writers. Through his survey of several early Christian writers, he demonstrates how Christians have historically viewed the Scripture as a unified whole despite meaningful distinctions within this broad point of view. Virtually all Christians attempting to do faithful interpretation of the Scripture have understood meaning-formation (specifically christological meaning-formation) as occurring as the result of God's divine authorship and self-revelation and history. The NT writers and the generations of interpreters immediately after them therefore understood Scripture as necessarily theologically unified and therefore unproblematic in its use of prefiguration, allusion, quotation, and application of a promise/fulfillment paradigm to the OT. "

"First part introducing premodern sensibilities was helpful, the exegetical examples he provides in part 2 are worth the price of the book. "