This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 641: Restoration Theology 7: Interpreting Scripture in Its Literary Context

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

Audio file
641 Restoration Theology 7.mp3

Transcript

00:00
Hey there, I'm Shan Finnegan and you are listening to Restitudio, a podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today.

00:12
What's the difference between reading the Bible and studying it?

00:15
Well, reading the Bible is like surfing on the waves, following the general flow of thought as you go.

00:21
Studying the Bible, however, is more like swimming underwater, perhaps with scuba gear to enable you to investigate matters thoroughly.

00:30
Today we're doing the second one.

00:32
You're going to learn how to interpret a biblical text in its literary context using the grammatical-historical hermeneutic.

00:40
This includes learning about genre,

00:43
scriptural additives, context, and intertextuality.

00:47
Our goal is to understand the authorial intent of a scripture so that you interpret it accurately.

00:53
Here now is Episode 641, Part 7 of our Restoration Theology class, Interpreting Scripture in its Literary Context.

01:10
Today, we broach the topic of interpretation.

01:14
Interpretation breaks into two main parts.

01:17
There is hermeneutics, which is the set of assumptions, principles, and rules you use to do exegesis, and exegesis, the application of your hermeneutic to interpret a text and explain what it means.

01:33
Whereas hermeneutics are the framework, exegesis is the application.

01:39
Now, these words are not, perhaps not familiar to you, but they are the standard words we use to talk about the subject of interpretation.

01:48
Hermeneutics being this collection of rules, and exegesis just being a fancy word for explaining what the verse means.

01:56
Now, the question comes up, where do you get the rules?

02:01
Who decides the rules?

02:02
How do we know what the hermeneutic is?

02:05
And

02:07
In order to explain that to you, I want to go over a few different hermeneutical systems.

02:12
So first up, the devotional approach.

02:16
The devotional hermeneutic basically focuses on connecting with God, emotion, and just a small section of scripture.

02:28
The devotional hermeneutic is not interested in what the original audience thought,

02:34
The approach is more about what you're getting out of the text as you're reading it.

02:38
Examples of this, where you take like a single verse or a phrase from a verse and you repeat it and you really meditate on it, are worship songs.

02:47
A lot of our worship songs do really a devotional approach.

02:50
There's no mention of a context of where the verse is coming from.

02:54
You know, you're just kind of repeating a word over and over or a line over and over.

02:58
We do this in scripture meditation and also in memorization.

03:02
Then there's the allegorical approach.

03:04
The allegorical approach seeks meaning beneath the surface.

03:09
The idea is that God has hidden treasures that the reader must dig out, and the text may or may not have a literal meaning, but the real focus of an allegorical approach or an allegorical hermeneutic is to understand the metaphorical or the deeper or the spiritual meaning of a text.

03:28
Then there's the historical critical hermeneutic, which is also called higher criticism.

03:34
This is something that's been around since the 18th century.

03:37
The idea there is that the Bible is merely a collection of ancient documents written by humans.

03:42
It's A mixture of history and myth.

03:45
People who approach scripture with a historical critical method are very skeptical of the possibility of any kind of miracles or inspiration by God.

03:56
For example, if they were studying the story of David and Goliath, they would say, well, there's no way this could have happened because

04:05
we don't have any actual bones of somebody as big as Goliath, therefore it couldn't have happened.

04:11
And who's to say there even was a historical David in the 1st place?

04:14
It was probably just made-up as a myth.

04:16
That's the historical critical approach.

04:19
Although actually that has been disproved because there was a inscription found at, I think it was Tel Dan, a David inscription.

04:27
So we do actually have historical evidence of David in stone.

04:32
So that's the, you could tell I'm not really a fan of the historical critical method.

04:37
Going on to the next one, we have the postmodern hermeneutics.

04:41
This is the idea of reader response criticism.

04:44
The focus is on how the reader interprets the text as she or he creates meaning.

04:51
So it's not that the scripture has its own meaning.

04:53
It's more that you generate the meaning as you read it yourself.

04:59
This is where the person deconstructs.

05:02
the scripture and ask questions like, what was the assumption of the person who wrote this?

05:09
Are there any contradictions?

05:10
What are the assumptions?

05:12
And it can be a very critical approach of the Bible as well.

05:16
So for example, there is the feminist approach, the liberation approach.

05:20
There's post-colonial readings, queer, critical race theory approaches, among others.

05:25
The focus is reading the Bible from a particular perspective.

05:29
The concern is not for the original audience or the authorial intent, but on how it affects women or the poor or people of color or those who suffered through colonialization.

05:40
Those are all post-modern approaches to reading the Bible.

05:43
Then there's the grammatical historical approach, the approach that I like the best, which that's why I put it last, because you go through the other ones and then you do your favorite one last.

05:53
This is like the allegorical approach in that the hermeneutic takes the 66 books of the Bible as God-inspired and authoritative.

06:01
It's like the devotional approach in that it seeks to hear God's voice through the text.

06:06
It does have some commonalities with the historical critical method in that it really does seek authorial intent and interpretation within the context, but it also has some similarity to the postmodern approach in that the grammatical historical method focuses on reading from a particular perspective.

06:25
But it's not from your perspective, it's from the perspective of the original audience.

06:30
And so the grammatical historical approach is what I intend to look at with you in the rest of this session.

06:37
It's the standard approach used by restorationists, people who recognize the scripture as being inspired and are testing their beliefs against the scripture.

06:47
And that's the approach we're taking for this class.

06:49
Daniel Hayes and Scott Duvall in their book, Grasping God's Word said,

06:53
Our goal is to grasp the meaning of the text that God has intended.

06:58
We do not create meaning out of a text.

07:00
Rather, we seek to find the meaning that is already there.

07:05
So that's going to be our focus.

07:07
Today we're going to look at the grammatical side of it, the literary side of it, and then next time is the focus will be on the historical aspect of it.

07:16
So let's talk about method.

07:17
I've got 7 steps of interpretation for you.

07:21
Pray for illumination,

07:23
That's #1.

07:24
Number 2, determine the genre.

07:26
Number 3, establish the text.

07:28
Number 4, study the text.

07:29
Number 5, explore the larger context.

07:32
Number 6, consider the book as a whole.

07:34
And #7, investigate biblical intertextuality.

07:39
So are you ready?

07:39
We're going to go through all these seven and just explain them very briefly.

07:44
And then you'll have a step-by-step method for literary interpretation.

07:48
All right, #1, pray for illumination.

07:51
We believe the text of scripture is inspired by God through the Holy Spirit.

07:56
Think about that for a moment.

07:57
So when you encounter the scripture, as you read it in your Bible,

08:01
We believe that the scripture itself is the product of something that the Holy Spirit did through the author, such that what God wanted written was written.

08:12
And so we find the Spirit lurking just beneath the surface of the text.

08:17
And then we ourselves believe the Spirit is within us as we are reading it.

08:23
In other words, there should be a connection made between the Spirit that is inspired or in spirited text

08:30
and then the spirit that is within us.

08:32
There should be a connection made when we study scripture.

08:35
And this is nicely put by Andreas Kostenberger and Gregory Goswell in their biblical theology book.

08:41
They say, the spirit is the agent of inspiration.

08:45
On the human side, what corresponds to divinely inspired revelation is spirit-illumined interpretation.

08:52
Thus, the spirit's role is vital in both inscripturation and interpretation.

08:58
As we read the inspired words, we pray that God will illumine our understanding through the Spirit within us.

09:05
This is an obvious step.

09:09
And yet so many of us skip it.

09:11
So many of us just dive into this text of Scripture.

09:14
We don't pray.

09:16
We don't ask God.

09:17
We don't activate faith in any way.

09:18
We just carry on reading.

09:20
We're selling ourselves short in those cases.

09:24
Psalm 119, 18 says, open my eyes so that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.

09:32
That's the prayer that we want to pray.

09:34
Open my eyes.

09:35
Help me to see.

09:38
John 14, 26 says, but the advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you.

09:48
So the Spirit is here to teach us everything.

09:51
Ephesians 1.16 says, I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know Him.

10:05
We don't come to the scripture with a desire to critique it.

10:09
critiques us.

10:11
We don't seek to expose inconsistencies within scripture.

10:16
The scripture exposes inconsistencies within us.

10:20
We don't come to the scripture standing over the text to judge it.

10:23
No, it stands over us and judges us.

10:26
And that's the approach that we're taking.

10:29
The correct posture toward a library, a divinely inspired literature, is to ask God, help me to understand.

10:38
All right, #2, step of interpretation.

10:41
Determine the genre.

10:43
What style of writing is this?

10:47
Different genres have different rules for interpretation.

10:51
And it's important to start by figuring out what the genre is.

10:54
And don't worry, it's pretty easy most of the time.

10:56
It's pretty straightforward.

10:58
But I'm just going to list out for you a bunch of different genres.

11:02
But before I do that, I want to mention this class that I taught called Read the Bible for Yourself.

11:06
It's available at lhim.org.

11:09
And in this class, I go into great depth.

11:12
I'm going to just cover this very quickly and then move on.

11:15
If you want to learn more about genre and how

11:17
how different sections of the Bible work.

11:19
Take a look at the class.

11:20
Read the Bible for yourself.

11:22
Number one, 50%, roughly, of scripture is historical narrative.

11:28
Historical narrative is the easiest genre.

11:30
It's straightforward.

11:32
It's just telling you stuff that actually happened.

11:35
It's important that when we read it, we don't subtract out miracles or try to moralize the text.

11:42
That's what we do to fables, right?

11:44
When you read a fable,

11:46
there's a moral point to it, but you don't take it literally.

11:50
No, I think we should take it literally.

11:52
If it's historical narrative, it's what actually happened.

11:56
Now, we have to grant that ancient people had different standards of precision than we have today.

12:02
That is true.

12:03
Just think of an old pixelated video versus a modern, crisp, high definition video.

12:10
Both videos are accurate and they correctly portray the scene

12:15
to the standards of the day.

12:17
Ancient historians were just less concerned about precision than we are in modern times.

12:22
All right, on to the next one, poetry.

12:24
About 25% of our Bibles is poetry.

12:27
And there's totally different rules for poetry than history.

12:31
I'm sure you know that.

12:32
Poetry focuses on, poetry uses sparse figurative and emotional language.

12:40
And that's what's so great about it.

12:41
But that's also what's so hard about it because it's so sparse that sometimes we have to really puzzle over something to understand what it's saying.

12:49
And poetry is all about structure.

12:52
So especially Hebrew poetry, within a verse itself, you're going to have parallelisms.

12:57
And so you have one line and then a second line in the same verse.

13:02
A lot of times in synonymous parallelism, they'll have one line and then the second line says the same thing as the first line, but in different words.

13:10
And then you have antithetical parallelism and synthetic parallelism.

13:13
There's all different ways of doing this.

13:15
And then there's structure within, say, for example, a psalm.

13:18
There are stanzas and there are refrains.

13:20
And sometimes even every verse of a psalm starts with a different letter from the Hebrew aleph bet.

13:26
So it's literally going A, B, C, D, E, but in Hebrew.

13:31
And so poetry functions on structure.

13:33
So figuring out the structure is really helpful for interpreting

13:37
Hebrew poetry.

13:38
And then there's the prophets.

13:41
So much of what the prophets prophesied is written in a poetic structure.

13:45
And so that's important too.

13:47
Then we have epistles.

13:48
About 10% of our Bible is letters written to a group or individual for a specific reason.

13:54
If you're reading an epistle, you should ask yourself the question, or really research the question, who is writing this and why?

14:03
That's really important if you're reading an epistle.

14:06
Often the result of the author hearing about a problem is an epistle written to a church, like in 1 Corinthians.

14:14
Paul had heard lots of problems from the church at Corinth, and he writes this epistle, giving them instruction and reproving them, and maybe some encouragement too, on what's going on in their situation.

14:26
And then other epistles are just general instruction, like the epistle to the Ephesians or the general epistle of James.

14:33
Then we have prophecy, which is about 9%.

14:36
Michael Lawrence writes in his book, Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church, the prophets arrive on the biblical scene as attorneys for the prosecution, arguing God's case in a covenant lawsuit against Israel for breaking the covenant.

14:52
Okay, that's not all the prophets do, but that is a lot of what they do.

14:55
Basically, they're ancient preachers, and they're calling the people to faithfulness.

15:00
They're calling them back to God to repent, and they're oftentimes

15:06
isolating and specifically mentioning sins that the people are doing and telling them, this is a sin, don't do this.

15:12
Just kind of like what preachers do today.

15:16
That's most prophecy.

15:17
Now there is also predictive prophecy.

15:20
And a lot of that prediction will be predicting judgment, especially if the people are being disobedient.

15:25
But then there's also predictions of restoration that typically follow the judgment.

15:30
Prophecies tend to use symbolism a lot.

15:33
And they're really providing A God's eye perspective on an issue.

15:38
So the question is not like, what's really going on here?

15:41
The question is, what's God's perspective on what's really going on here?

15:45
And that's prophecy.

15:47
Then we have the law.

15:48
About 7% of the overall Bible is law.

15:53
When I say law, I mean mitzvot, commandments.

15:56
God gave Israel many commandments.

15:59
Some were apodictict.

16:01
Apodictic commandments are short, direct, categorical commands.

16:07
You should not murder, right?

16:09
Don't murder people.

16:10
Don't steal.

16:11
Like those are apodictic statements.

16:13
And then you have case law or casuistic law.

16:17
And these are situational.

16:19
And so they'll have if and then statements in them.

16:22
And look, when you're reading law, read it the way you would read law in our time today.

16:29
It's not primarily to give historical instruction.

16:33
It's to curb behavior so that you don't do certain things and you do do other things.

16:40
But when it comes to the biblical law, there's actually a lot more to it than what we would call criminal law.

16:46
There's also civil, economic, and religious law, and there's a great deal of focus on holiness.

16:54
for the sacrificial system, the priests, the Levites, and even the people.

16:57
And so the function of Torah in ancient Israel is to make the people holy so that God can be near them.

17:04
God can be proximate to the people.

17:06
And it's also to keep them separate from the nations, to avoid mixing with the religious ideas of the people around them.

17:14
Then we have parables.

17:15
About 2% of the Bible is parables.

17:17
Not too much, but still significant.

17:20
These are short fictional stories.

17:22
to teach a particular truth or moral.

17:25
And parables are tricky because, well, Jesus loved to tell parables, so they're important.

17:31
And there's a couple of parables in the Old Testament too, so it's not like Jesus invented it, but he definitely focused on it a lot.

17:39
Some of the parables of Jesus, he'll tell to explain something and give a beautiful explanation for it in the story.

17:47
And then others of the parables, he'll tell

17:50
to criticize his enemies and their zingers.

17:54
And his enemies don't know that he's telling a story about them until he gets to the end of it.

17:58
And then they're like, they're rather taken aback by Jesus's boldness.

18:03
And then other parables he tells specifically to hide truth, especially when he's speaking to a mixed crowd, just like a large crowd.

18:11
He'll tell parables and people will just think he's telling nice stories.

18:15
And his disciples come up to him and say, why do you talk to the people in parables?

18:18
And he's like, because seeing they don't see and hearing they don't hear.

18:22
he's fulfilling a prophecy from Isaiah 6 in that time.

18:26
So the bottom line for parables is they don't all do the same thing.

18:30
You have to read it and see what's happening.

18:32
Don't take them literally, but get the point or moral of the story.

18:36
And then last of all, we have Proverbs.

18:38
Proverbs are truisms.

18:40
They're general statements on how to live when the world is working correctly.

18:47
The world does not always function rightly.

18:50
Sometimes the world's broken, right?

18:53
But Proverbs are wisdom from God that is to help us to have general principles.

19:00
And the famous example of Proverbs 26, 4 and 5 is that sometimes Proverbs will actually contradict each other.

19:09
And that's totally fine.

19:10
In Proverbs 26.4, we read, do not answer fools according to their folly, lest you become a fool yourself.

19:18
And then verse 5, answer fools according to their folly, lest they be wise in their own eyes.

19:24
How could both of these statements be true?

19:26
You know, should we just get rid of the Bible?

19:27
It's full of contradictions.

19:28
No, you're missing it.

19:30
It's a genre issue.

19:32
This is not legal code.

19:33
This is a proverb.

19:34
There's a difference.

19:35
In legal code, you can't have contradictions.

19:38
How would you know who to punish or what to do, right?

19:41
But in the Proverbs, you can have contradictions because sometimes if you answer a fool according to his folly, it's bad.

19:49
And other times it's good.

19:50
It depends on the situation.

19:52
And the wisdom is to know when to do it and when to not do it.

19:57
And that's the book of Proverbs.

19:59
All right, that's enough for genre.

20:00
Let's go on to our third step.

20:02
Oh, by the way, before we go on to our third step, if you're adding those up, it's over 100%.

20:08
And that's because there's overlap between genres.

20:11
It's not mutually exclusive.

20:14
All right, on to our third step, establishing the text.

20:18
We begin by determining the extent of the text.

20:21
All right, so let's say you are working on a verse in the Bible.

20:26
You have to figure out the boundaries for that verse.

20:31
Okay, so if you're in a historical narrative and you're working on a verse,

20:36
Basically, you want to establish what is the extent of the scene, the event itself.

20:42
If you're in a legal context, what's the extent of the commandment or set of commandments?

20:47
If you're in a poetic section, what's the stanza that your verse is in?

20:52
If you're in a theological passage, what's the extent of the thought?

20:56
The extent of the text will often be a paragraph or more, though if you're like in Proverbs or something, it can be just a verse.

21:03
And then what you want to do after you establish the text is subtract the additives.

21:09
We all are obsessed with food additives these days.

21:13
Everyone's so concerned because in America our foods are just loaded with preservatives and additives and it's just so bad for us.

21:21
But what about scripture additives?

21:24
So let's think about that very briefly.

21:27
We need to distinguish between what is original and what has been added by translators and publishers.

21:32
Now, first up is book order.

21:34
The book order often differs from what we have today in ancient manuscripts.

21:39
The Jewish people have a different book order for the old, what we call the Old Testament than Christians have.

21:45
And then some Christians in ancient times had a different book order for the New Testament than modern Christians have.

21:52
And so book order is not something that is necessarily inspired by God, the books are, but with book order, you have to be careful with it.

22:00
So for example,

22:02
Let's say you're reading the Gospel of John.

22:03
You finish the Gospel of John.

22:06
Nice job.

22:07
You flip the page and it's the book of Acts.

22:09
You say, okay, well surely the Gospel of John and the book of Acts must have some sort of connection.

22:16
No, they don't.

22:17
There is no connection between them.

22:19
The book of Acts has a very, very strong connection, but it's not to John.

22:23
It's to the one before it, Luke, because they're both written by the same person.

22:28
And whoever decided the book order way back when,

22:31
It was not the person that wrote the books, obviously.

22:33
It was just later tradition that came along.

22:36
they put it that way and they had their reasons for it.

22:40
But those reasons are not authoritative for interpretation.

22:43
Well, let's look at another one.

22:44
Chapters.

22:45
Chapters are not in the original text.

22:48
Section headings.

22:50
A lot of our Bibles have these section headings.

22:52
They're very helpful, but they're not authoritative for interpretation.

22:56
Paragraphs.

22:58
The original manuscripts do not have paragraphs like our modern Bibles do.

23:02
Verse numbers, these are added later as well.

23:05
Punctuation, added later as well.

23:08
And then footnotes, added later as well.

23:10
These are all helpful things.

23:12
I'm not against them.

23:12
I'm just telling you that when it comes to interpretation, you may find that at the end of 1 chapter, your sentence really continues to the beginning of the next chapter.

23:23
You see what I'm saying?

23:25
Just because there's a chapter mark there doesn't mean that the thought has necessarily stopped.

23:30
The chapter guy might have gotten that one wrong.

23:32
The chapter guy is not inspired by God.

23:34
He just added this stuff in to be helpful.

23:38
All of these additives influence.

23:40
how you interpret the text.

23:42
But none of them have any authority from God.

23:46
All right, once we're sure what the actual text is, we have to study the text.

23:51
To study the text, we read it over and over, and we look up words we don't know.

23:56
Michael Lawrence says in his book, Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church, he says, the primary question that the historical grammatical method is seeking to answer is not

24:06
what does that word mean?

24:07
But what does that sentence mean?

24:10
In answering that question, we quickly realize that context is king.

24:16
So the first step of exegesis is to read the text, the whole text, over and over again.

24:23
Interpretation actually begins with the whole, not the part.

24:28
Then in the context of the whole, we work backwards through the parts, back to sentences, back all the way down to individual words.

24:37
That's the way you study the text.

24:40
You study the unit itself.

24:42
You establish a text, subtract out the additives, and then study the unit itself.

24:47
As you're studying the unit itself, observe the details.

24:52
Don't just read for an emotional connection.

24:54
That's great too, but that's not really the grammatical historical method.

24:57
Here, the grammar actually is part of the method itself.

25:01
So here's some things to look for from the Grasping God's Word book, chapter 3 and chapter 4.

25:07
Repetition of words.

25:09
Look for contrasts, comparisons, lists, cause and effect, figures of speech, conjunctions, verbs, pronouns.

25:16
Pronouns are super important.

25:17
A lot of times you'll have pronoun, pronoun, pronoun, like he, he, he, and you're like, well, who's the he?

25:22
Or she, she, she, she, who's the she?

25:24
you've got to look at the context and trace it back and you'll figure it out who it is.

25:28
General and specific statements, questions and answers, dialogue, purpose, result statements, means by which something is accomplished, emotional terms, conditional clauses like if, then, action, roles of people and of God.

25:43
Tone.

25:44
Is this passage happy?

25:46
Is it sad?

25:46
Is it encouraging?

25:47
Is the person writing it exasperated?

25:50
This is all important stuff for you to take note of as you read the text.

25:55
I'm going to show you how I do this.

25:57
is an old Bible of mine.

26:00
And I was reading Romans 8, 14 through 23.

26:06
And what I noticed is that the word son and children showed up a lot in this text.

26:14
So we had sons of God, and then sons, and then children of God, and then children

26:21
And so what I did is I circled each one and I drew somewhat clumsily lines in between them.

26:26
It's not my best work.

26:28
But the point is, this is an instance of repetition within a text.

26:33
Here's another example from a different Bible of mine from Romans chapter 6.

26:38
Here, what I noticed was that the word sin and the word death occurred a lot in the very beginning of Romans chapter 6.

26:46
So I put a box around the word sin and I circled the word death.

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died and buried and dead.

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Because, I was noting the repetition of multiple words.

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And then you can see on this other side here, I started using a squiggly line for slaves and a straight line for righteousness, right?

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So, you can get creative with it.

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Here's another scripture from the same Bible.

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This is Psalm 37.

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And what I did here is I noticed that in Psalm 37, every verse, or sometimes it's just part of a verse, was either talking about the wicked or talking about the righteous.

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So verse one, fret not yourselves because of evildoers, be not envious of wrongdoers.

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Well, that's talking about wicked people.

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And then verse two, for they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb.

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That's talking about wicked people.

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So I just put a W in the margin for each of those.

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And then I put R for the righteous in the margin after that.

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And I was just trying to note

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the structure of the Psalm.

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there's wicked, wicked, then righteous, righteous, righteous, righteous, righteous, righteous, and then wicked, wicked, right?

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And then all the way through the whole Psalm.

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And then the other thing I did is I put together a profile of the wicked, just in my sloppy handwriting there.

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And these are straight from the Bible.

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The wicked carries out evil devices.

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The wicked plots against the righteous.

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The wicked gnashes his teeth at the righteous, and so forth.

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And then I talked about the destiny of the wicked.

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And I noted that over and over again, the scripture is saying they're going to be cut off.

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They're going to fade like grass.

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The Lord's going to laugh at them.

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Their sword will enter their own heart.

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Their arms will be broken.

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And then I did a profile of the righteous.

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So that's what I mean by study the text.

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You see what I'm doing here?

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Study the text.

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Work it.

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Don't just read it in one eye and out the other.

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Get your pen out, get a highlighter, get a little ruler if you're a nerd, and make straight lines if you want, you know, and really engage with the text of scripture so that you really notice stuff.

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Here's another example.

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This is from a Greek Bible of mine on the book of Colossians.

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from chapter 1, verses 15 through 20.

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And what I noticed here was a lot of structure.

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And so this one phrase at the top of verse 15, I noticed occurred way down here in the middle of verse 18.

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So what I did was I drew lines between different sections.

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And then I looked at the next word after that and I said, oh wow, that word

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that word shows up again over here, right?

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And so when I started noting by recognizing repetition, obviously it's not English, it's Greek, so you know, you can't read it necessarily, maybe you can, but you know, the point is you can still with your eyes see the pattern of repetition.

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And then, you know, I used a little cloud outline here for this phrase because the same exact phrase showed up down here.

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And this is what showed me that there was two, that there were actually 2 stanzas in Colossians 115 through 20, which was a huge thing to understand considering the fact that Bible verses don't necessarily show you this.

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Okay, and they have their reasons for that, which we're not going to get into.

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But that's what I mean by study the text.

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All right, on to explore the larger context.

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Because we live in a soundbite culture, it's easy to focus on a single verse and ignore its context.

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Instead, we need to understand it within the little context, the paragraph, and the big context, the chapter or chapters.

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So if you're working on, say, Romans 10, 9, if you believe Jesus died and confessed with your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved, this verse.

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If you're working on that verse, Romans 10, 9, you say, okay, what's the context?

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the immediate context is right there for you.

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But if you zoom out to the larger context, what's the larger context?

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Well, as it turns out in Romans, chapters 9, 10, and 11 make a unit.

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It's a special unit of thought.

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And so really the appropriate thing to do is not just to interpret it within its immediate context, but then also to explore that larger context and say, okay, well, in light of what Romans 9 through 11 is doing, how does Romans 10, 9 fit that?

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if that makes sense.

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We want to figure out how this section of the book relates to the other sections.

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So in order to do this, a lot of times what you really, there's really no way around it.

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You have to make an outline of the whole book of the Bible and recognize what the different major sections are.

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As you're doing that, Grasping God's Word Chapter 5 once again has some helpful things to look for.

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Look for connections between paragraphs or episodes.

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Look for story shifts and pivots.

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What came before and after?

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Look for interchange.

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Does the passage shift between multiple scenes?

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Look for chiasm, especially in poetry, which is the structure A, B, C, C prime, B prime, A prime.

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Look for inclusios, which is where the passage starts and ends with similar statements.

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So these are some things to look for in the larger context.

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And then consider the book as a whole.

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Who wrote the book and when?

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Who was the original audience?

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What was the occasion for writing the book?

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What was the author seeking to accomplish this purpose by writing the book?

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How did the author go about accomplishing that purpose?

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And so these are questions to ask about the book itself.

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And then on to the last step, investigate biblical intertextuality.

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Because the Bible is really not a book, it's a collection of 66 books, there are lots of

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interconnections between them.

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So take the book of Deuteronomy.

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If you don't realize that Deuteronomy is an update of Exodus 40 years later, you're just missing out on certain things, right?

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The Torah was given in Exodus at Mount Sinai, right?

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But then Deuteronomy was given 40 years later, it's the last month, they're about to enter the promised land, and there are literally updates

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of laws that were in Exodus, more information is added on in Deuteronomy or 2nd Corinthians.

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You are not going to understand 2nd Corinthians if you haven't read 1st Corinthians, right?

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So understanding biblical intertextuality is also really important.

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Does our text include direct quotations or allusions?

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Allusions are like paraphrases where one scripture will quote another scripture.

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You're supposed to recognize that.

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Those are links.

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Are there other books by the same author?

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For example, Paul has 13 epistles.

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That's incredible.

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13 epistles.

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And not all the epistles are necessarily connected to each other in the same way.

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So for example, if you're reading Ephesians, you really need to read Colossians with it.

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Ephesians and Colossians go together.

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If you're reading, for example, something like 1 Timothy, you should also read 2 Timothy and Titus because those 3 epistles go together.

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Or if you're going to read one of the books of Moses, there's five books of Moses, right?

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Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, you should read all five.

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So by now you may say, all right, Pastor Sean, too much information.

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Too much information.

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Why are you filling my head with all these rules?

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Let me tell you why.

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Because when most people put together a case for a doctrinal position, do you know what they do?

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They just pick a verse.

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They just pick a verse

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here and a verse there, and there's no system.

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They're sloppy, it's undisciplined, chaos.

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And they make God's holy inspired, authoritative scriptures say what they do not in fact say.

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This is a problem.

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So look, I know this is a lot of work.

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Okay.

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It is a lot of work.

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But if we don't do the work to interpret the Bible accurately, then it's like messing around in a nuclear power plant.

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Would you go in a nuclear power plant and just start flipping switches and pushing buttons?

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Of course not.

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Because you could cause some serious, serious damage.

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And so the Bible is powerful, just like a nuclear power plant is powerful.

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The Bible is powerful.

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You don't just mess around with it, right?

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You want to put in the work, do the due diligence to have an understanding that makes sense.

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We dare not treat scripture casually like an internet meme.

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All right, so let's review.

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We've seen there are many different hermeneutics.

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We looked at the devotional approach, the allegorical, historical, critical, and we settled on grammatical, historical as our approach.

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But, you know, we've been looking at just the grammatical side of it, so we need to look at the historical side too.

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Restorationists use a grammatical, historical hermeneutic, which involves seeking out authorial intent for the purpose of applying it to your life today.

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We're currently not talking about application at all either.

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We're going to look at that in the future as well.

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All right, so we covered 7 steps of interpretation.

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Pray for illumination, determine the genre, establish the text, study the text, explore the larger context, zoom out again, consider the book as a whole, and then last of all, investigate biblical intertextuality.

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I realize this is a lot, so you may want to go back and watch or listen to this

36:29
again.

36:30
And again, if you want to go deeper, take a look at my class, Read the Bible for Yourself, if you want to go in depth.

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There's much more to say about each one of these, but that's all the time we have for today.

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We need to move on and talk about historical context and see how that can help us gain a better understanding of what we read as we continue in our class on restoration theology.

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that brings this presentation to a close.

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What did you think?

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Come on over to restitudio.org and find episode 641, Interpreting Scripture in its Literary Context, and leave your feedback there.

37:11
Now in last week's episode, 640, Bible Translation and Detecting Bias, Manny wrote in, he said, hey, what's up, Sean?

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I'm really enjoying this class.

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This week's class on bias in translation really helped open my mind on looking at different tribes of Bibles.

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I currently use the y'all, yes, I said that correctly, y'all version.

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It's super helpful with using Yahweh instead of the Lord, and it capitalizes he, him, and other pronouns when referring to Yahweh.

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It also uses y'all for second person your.

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I use it for main, I use it for my main personal reading along with the NRSV UE.

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You hit a good point on looking at the Jewish and Catholic tribes of translations, which I'm adding to my YouVersion app.

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Looking forward to the rest of the series.

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Well, hey, Manny, thanks for writing in.

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I have never heard of the Y'all version.

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But hey, it doesn't surprise me.

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This is actually a major issue with the English language that we have an ambiguity with the second person singular and the second person plural.

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You referring to one person and you referring to a group of people.

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At least we have this ambiguity in the north.

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In the south of the United States, it's more common to say y'all instead of you as a plural.

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And this is actually quite relevant, believe it or not, to many parts of the Bible where we as Western individualists are going to assume a singular you because that is our default frame of reference rather than a plural you.

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And so, for example, in Paul's epistles, they are overwhelmingly plural.

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And in Greek, there is a different word for you plural than you singular.

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So

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As much as my northern sensibilities cringe when I hear it, I guess it makes sense to have a y'all version of the Bible.

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I also like that the translator, I looked it up, put the name of God in, although he forgot the vowels.

39:24
How awkward.

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Can you imagine that if somebody took the vowels out of your name and included 7,000 almost references and in each case the vowels are missing?

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That's so awkward.

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I don't know why people do that.

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If you think Yahweh is the best pronunciation, then just say Yahweh.

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Don't write Y-H-W-H.

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That's just confusing and visually difficult.

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Anyhow, on the subject of Jewish and Catholic Bibles, man, on the Jewish side, I am really divided.

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I wouldn't know just one Jewish Bible to recommend.

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I personally love the Shotkin Bible.

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It's the translation done by Everett Fox, and it is very literal, very

40:08
refreshingly accurate to the original languages, but it does make it a little bit harder of a read as a result.

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And the whole Bible's not done, just the first, maybe third of the Bible is done.

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But the Torah for sure is done, and many of the historical books as well.

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Then there's Robert Alter's version.

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Robert Alter is a very brilliant scholar out of California, and his version is just called the Hebrew Bible.

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Ironically, it's

40:38
translation into English.

40:40
She really called it the English translation of the Hebrew Bible, whatever.

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But if you look up Robert Alter, A-L-T-E-R, then you will be able to find his translation.

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I don't know if it's available digitally yet.

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I would hope that that's going to come around soon.

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And his version is often paired, at least the three volume set I have, is paired with extensive commentary, which varies in its helpfulness.

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But it's a very fresh translation of the Jewish text, of the Masoretic text.

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And then there's the NJPS, that's still the gold standard, New Jewish Publication Society.

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The main text for that was updated in 1985 from the one in the early 20th century.

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And they just came out with another update called the JPS Tanakh Gender Sensitive Edition.

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and I think they just tweaked some of the pronouns to be more inclusive.

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I'm not really sure what exactly that, I'm not really sure if that's just in the standard vein of how other translations are already doing that for many years or if this is more of a liberal progressive agenda type thing.

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I'm not really sure.

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So you guys will have to take a look at that one and let me know.

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But the NJPS from 1985, that text in particular is considered to be a standard Jewish translation, probably the most definitive.

42:12
And then for the Catholic translation, definitely get the New American Bible.

42:15
It's really, it's really good.

42:18
You will be shocked at how good this translation is.

42:20
New American Bible, revised edition, NABRE for the Roman Catholic edition.

42:27
Another person wrote in, Jordan, on last week's episode as well.

42:30
He says, Sean, thanks for this great class and many others.

42:33
When comparing different translation camps, are all translation camps created equally?

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For example, should a Jewish translation hold the same weight as an evangelical?

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And if not, how can we be that balance?

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I think he meant to say, how can we, I don't know.

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I get your point.

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All right, all translations are not created equal, obviously.

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Some are pretty shady, and some are

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full of bias.

43:04
take like the NLT, the New Living Translation.

43:07
Like it's actually getting less biased as time goes on, because originally it was called the Living Bible, which was kind of a guy's paraphrase, and then they made it a little more accurate, but still very biased.

43:17
And then I think they updated it again, and now it's actually fairly decent, although a lot of times it's just the interpretation getting confused with translation for that one.

43:29
So I tend to shy away from the NLT personally.

43:32
It's hard for me to tell you like exactly why this translation is better than that translation, because we're talking about the Bible here and there's just so, it's just so big and there's so many different issues.

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And really, unless you know the original languages, a lot of what I would say wouldn't even make sense.

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But let's just say there are two main issues to consider.

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One is the text that the translation is using,

43:57
and the other is the translation philosophy itself.

44:01
So when it comes to the text, Jewish translations do not avail themselves of the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, or Dead Sea Scrolls very much, if at all.

44:12
Most of the Jewish translations just translate Leningrad,

44:16
or Aleppo.

44:17
Those are two codices, 2 manuscripts of the Old Testament from 1000 years ago.

44:22
So their base text is not as accurate as translations that look at the much older manuscript families of the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

44:32
So textually, I think Jewish translations tend to be a little weaker.

44:37
But if the translation issue is not a textual issue, it's a translation issue, then it is helpful to look at the Jewish translation because they have a Jewish bias instead of a Christian bias.

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And as Christians, we don't even know what the Christian bias is until the Jew comes along and says, hey, I read it this way.

44:56
And that's totally different than how Christians are reading it.

44:58
So it's really helpful.

45:00
And you have to watch out for that too when it comes to anything related to Jesus, right?

45:05
So Messianic prophecies,

45:07
that could possibly fit with Jesus of Nazareth, they're going to be majorly downplayed in any Jewish translation.

45:13
Whereas in a Christian translation, the translation is going to be put in just such a way that it, as clearly as possible, does refer to Jesus, right?

45:23
And that's just part of the bias.

45:26
Other translation camps, they have other biases, but with respect to messianic prophecies, it's a fairly short list of verses that this affects, and the majority is unaffected.

45:37
Now, as I mentioned above, you should also look at the Catholic translation, the New American Bible, as is a completely different bias than the Jewish or Evangelical, but they are going to have a Catholic bias, right?

45:48
So you have to, so the idea is to read Bibles in contrast to each other so that you can see what your own bias is and what other people's biases are.

45:56
And then at least you have a chance of knowing what the issue is.

46:00
But unless you learn the original language, I don't see how you are going to really come to the bottom of it.

46:07
in any kind of definitive way.

46:10
But you can ask AI.

46:12
You could say to AI, I'm interested in Bible translation bias on this verse.

46:19
I want you to analyze this verse in its original language and translate it as precisely the most unbiased manner as possible.

46:29
and explain to me what words could mean different things.

46:34
Something like that.

46:34
And AI will do it.

46:36
AI is incredible at translating the Bible or anything really.

46:40
So that would be my advice on how to get to the bottom of some of these more difficult verses.

46:45
Now, of course, 90 plus percent of the Bible is perfectly straightforward and it's just about the same in any translation you pick up, right?

46:54
We're talking about the 1% here.

46:56
We're talking about that tiny little bit

46:59
that there is genuine controversy over.

47:02
And for those, we have these translations.

47:06
All right, well, that's going to be it for today.

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If you'd like to support us, you can do that at restitudio.org.

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Thanks to those who are supporting us.

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We'll catch you next week.

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And remember, the truth has nothing to fear.