A hermeneutic principle that treats the original communicative intent of a text’s author(s) as a primary guide for interpreting a religious or scriptural passage, giving priority to what the author(s) intended to convey to their original audience over later readings that disregard that intent.

Principle

Textual meaning is anchored in the author's communicative intent; where credible evidence about that intent exists, interpretation should give it significant weight over unconstrained contemporary readings.

Demonstration

Illustrative scenario → Situation: A scholar encounters a disputed passage. Recognition: Historical and linguistic evidence indicate a particular communicative aim by the author. Action: The interpreter reconstructs the passage’s meaning using that contextual evidence. Consequence: The resulting interpretation explains textual anomalies and aligns the passage with contemporaneous usage, while remaining open to subsequent theological development.

Misapplication

Assuming access to a single, fully recoverable private thought of the author or treating every compositional layer as a unified authorial intent. The error conflates authorial intent with unverifiable private psychology or ignores documentary evidence of multiple redactional stages.

Consequence

Applied, it encourages methods (historical‑contextual, philological) that seek authorial setting and purpose, improving coherence and reducing anachronistic readings. Misapplied, it can produce forced reconstructions presented as authoritative despite insufficient evidence about the author's aims.

Reversal

Where authorial identity, date, or historical setting are indeterminate, or where a text is the product of multiple authors/redactors, the principle must be qualified; in such cases reception history, communal interpretation, or literary function may legitimately shape meaning.

Boundary

Clearly within: A single‑author epistle with corroborating historical data about audience and intent. Boundary case: A composite scriptural text with layers of redaction whose original intents diverge. Clearly outside: Approaches that treat meaning as located solely in contemporary reader responses without regard to historical intent.

Semantic Tension

Authorial intent ↔ reader‑response and tradition‑based approaches; privileging original intent can constrain theological readings developed by later communities.

Synthesis

Authorial intent provides an interpretive anchor that stabilizes meaning when reliable contextual evidence exists, but interpretation becomes multidisciplinary where authorial evidence is lacking or texts bear multiple compositional layers.