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New Tools, Old Methods - How to Read the Bible E6
118 Plays2 years ago
Get your Indiana Jones hat on. Matt and Nick chat about recent discoveries that help us better understand the world of the Biblical authors. These discoveries offer both exciting new insight into the meaning of the Biblical texts, and a challenge to some of the long-standing assumptions made by Christians.
Theme Music: "Believe" by Posthumorous. More at https://linktr.ee/posthumorous
Interlude Music mixed and produced by the Re-Paradigmed team.
For more fun, check out www.reparadigmed.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Bible Reading Tools
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to the Re Paradise podcast. Today is the last in our series of conversations about how to read the Bible. We're discussing the tools and resources that we think could help you in your reading and understanding of the Bible.
00:00:28
Speaker
Hey, Nick. How you doing, Matt? Doing well. Long time, no scene. I know. I'm excited to talk about what we're gonna talk about today.
New Tools for Biblical Studies
00:00:35
Speaker
We're talking about new tools available for us today for doing good biblical studies.
00:00:40
Speaker
Yeah, we've circled around this a bit. I feel like in some of our conversations about extra biblical context and also some in the inner biblical context, or even in our last conversation, we talked about the better position that we are potentially in today to get to the original context of the writers of the Bible. And so I think we want to just take some time, talk about, well, what do we mean by we're in a better position today?
00:01:04
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. We've talked about the need to study the Bible with a good understanding of context. So we've gone through inter-biblical context, extra-biblical context. Now, today we're going to talk about some of the tools, especially around extra-biblical context, that are kind of more newly available, that are offering some really cool insight into how we understand the Bible. Love it, yeah.
00:01:27
Speaker
So I will start with just kind of a little talk
Understanding Biblical Contexts
00:01:30
Speaker
about history here. First, last time we spoke, we talked about a need to be a little bit cautious when we're looking at church history about just taking the understandings of people from church history and saying, okay, their understanding is now what I'm going to believe. We gave that caution because people from church history, just like us, can be removed culturally from the biblical authors. So just like we're not able to always read the Bible intuitively well, sometimes they're also not able to read the Bible intuitively well.
00:01:56
Speaker
If we're going to read the Bible today from a different cultural context and understand what the biblical authors were trying to say, we're going to have to rely heavily on contextual studies.
Language Shifts in Church History
00:02:06
Speaker
So doing the best we can to try to understand the context they were in so we can understand what they were saying. One of the unfortunate realities of church history is that this method that we're describing was not always done well. One of the examples of this is to look at the way that the languages were studied.
00:02:23
Speaker
So after about 300 years in the first church, people stopped writing significantly in Greek. They kind of moved over to Latin. So Latin became kind of this official language the church used. So throughout most of church history, if you're looking at kind of theological thinkers, everything's done in Latin.
00:02:43
Speaker
And that means that they're using Latin translations of the Bible, conversations are Latin, they're just really removed from even studying the Bible in its original languages. And that has some pretty significant impacts on just kind of removing you from even wanting to study that cultural context.
00:03:00
Speaker
or being able to, even if you did want to. Exactly. Yeah, if you're growing up in a culture where nobody around you knows Greek or Hebrew, and you don't have access to good materials for Greek or Hebrew, you're kind of out of luck. There's not really a good way for you to go study the Bible and its original writings, even if you wanted to.
Reliance on Translations vs. Original Texts
00:03:18
Speaker
The situation you find yourself in is playing the telephone game. Oh, yeah, exactly.
00:03:23
Speaker
You have translations of the Bible into one language and then discussion about theology and doctrine and everything surrounds that new language, but is not actually original to the language of the Bible, which is Greek and Hebrew. If you keep doing that over and over and over, I think you find yourself fairly far afield sometime from the original meaning of the Greek and Hebrew Bible. Exactly.
00:03:50
Speaker
So even if you're a great thinker, but you're playing this telephone game eight steps down, you're working with material that's really removed from the authorial intent of the Bible.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, which is where we say the meaning is found and where the authority of God is found. Exactly. So through a lot of church history, they were in this situation where they're super removed. However, the good news is that people have started doing a better job of saying, okay, we're removed culturally from the Bible.
Recovery of Greek Texts and Lexicons
00:04:16
Speaker
So the only way we're going to make sure that we're understanding authorial intent well is to go start doing all this study.
00:04:22
Speaker
to get back to reading the Bible in its original languages, to get back to understanding cultural context so that we can start to recover some of these meanings better. Makes sense.
00:04:32
Speaker
So this push to get back to the Bible and its original languages starts kind of in the 16th century. Got a guy named Erasmus in 1516 who goes and says, you know what guys, it'd be nice if we could start actually reading the New Testament in Greek. Like let's go back to something that was really old. I'm not going to keep just working in Latin. Let's do better. Back to the sources. Wasn't that the call of some of the reformers? Yep. So he puts together the best Greek manuscript that he can or like a new text.
00:05:02
Speaker
And because the church didn't value the languages for a long time, they didn't do a great job of keeping and finding and documenting the manuscripts that we had. Preserving those original Greek text or at least very early copies of those Greek texts. Exactly. Yep. It turns out that whoever had these, they just kind of got scattered around different libraries or monasteries and nobody had really kept track of them. They just weren't all that important. People didn't care that much about them.
00:05:26
Speaker
So he goes and finds the best ones he's got available and puts together this Greek text. You got about six years later that somebody puts together first lexicon of the Greek language. A lexicon here is basically a tool that's going to help you understand what all these words mean. You know, for a long time, people hadn't been studying or speaking Greek, so they're kind of like doing what they can now to get back into it.
00:05:47
Speaker
they had just the Latin translations that they've been working off and then they found some Greek. It's actually in some ways kind of having to work backwards from the Latin, doing the best that they can. So you get this first lexicon in 1522. This lexicon was 75 pages long and it was basically just a glossary list of words that are in the New Testament along with Latin translations. So it's not definitions, it's just like, hey, if this is the Greek word that you're looking at, here's the Latin equivalent.
00:06:13
Speaker
That's interesting. That seems like such a small step, but it was revolutionary at the time. Yep. I mean, today it's like our lexicons are so detailed and we've got so many. Yeah. People continue this work of trying to kind of recover our understanding of the biblical languages.
00:06:29
Speaker
And you move into the 1800s, 1900s, people start finding, and then I guess bringing to the public, some more older manuscripts. There's a couple of manuscripts in particular. And you're talking hand-copied manuscripts of the Bible. Yeah, handwritten copies from the very early church of the Bible. And these are way, way older than the manuscripts that Erasmus had been working off.
00:06:54
Speaker
we're pretty confident are actually much, much closer to what the biblical authors would have written. Didn't Erasmus' Bible famously not even have all of the Greek in it? He couldn't even find enough Greek manuscripts to translate from an original, let's say, full New Testament in Greek.
00:07:11
Speaker
Yeah, there were bits of revelation that he didn't have the Greek of, so he just did the best he could. He actually reverse translated from Latin to basically come up with a Greek text. That's crazy because he was doing the best he could at the time, but today we easily have all of the Bible many times over in the original Greek or all of the New Testament.
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's crazy that he was kind of a biblical scholar of his day and he just didn't have access to the full New Testament in Greek. So I think that goes to show just how little this was valued throughout a big chunk of church history. So we get these older biblical manuscripts that allow us to much better know what the biblical authors actually wrote in Greek
00:07:54
Speaker
That seems important. And then as people are starting to realize the importance of understanding these languages and understand the context, you start getting more archaeological work done.
Impact of Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Discoveries
00:08:03
Speaker
You start getting people who are like, OK, this is actually important stuff. Let's look for it. And you start finding some really, really cool discoveries. So late 1800s.
00:08:12
Speaker
We find this huge collection of papyri in Egypt, papyri in Ostrica. So papyri are like, you actually use a plant and you write on it and it preserves really well in Egypt. And then Ostrica is basically like chunks of pottery that people would like use as notepads.
00:08:29
Speaker
We start finding a whole bunch of this, and what's really cool is this was all written in the same Koine Greek that the New Testament was written in, and it's written in around the same time. So suddenly, we start having all this other Greek writings around the time, so we can start looking at this and be like, oh, look, how were they using the language? What were they writing about? It gives us a ton of interesting insight into the context of the Bible. Another discovery that I think most Christians are aware of are the Dead Sea Scrolls.
00:08:55
Speaker
at Qumran. Yep, so this is just a little east of Jerusalem. Bizarre discovery started in 1947 and then over the next about 10 years or so we kept finding more caves with more of these scrolls. And if you were going to sit down and be like, all right, what would be the best possible find for helping me understand the context of the Bible? You'd be like, well,
00:09:13
Speaker
Ideally, you'd get something from a group of Jewish people right up to and around the time of Jesus, writings in this culture, and that's exactly what we got. This is kind of a goldmine for contextual studies, and this is a huge, huge set of scrolls, famously a full scroll of Isaiah, and then a ton of other writings from this group. They're interacting with other Jewish sects, they're writing about
00:09:39
Speaker
the community rule. You get really interesting insight into the daily life of a Jewish person in the couple centuries before Jesus and then kind of right up through the writing of the New Testament.
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, so not only cultural insight into a sect of Second Temple Judaism, perhaps, but also insight into textual questions about the Old Testament, about the Hebrew Old Testament, like the preservation of certain manuscripts that were older than anything we had before, and the ability now to compare that with the translations of the time to see how much fidelity there was. And there was a decent degree, but just insights into all sorts of different things.
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah. One of the things that comes up a lot in Pauline studies is trying to understand what the Judaism that he was speaking to was. And for a long time, the only Judaism that people had to compare it to was much later rabbinical Judaism. And we've talked about how there's big differences there. Well, we know that those differences were there now because we have all of these writings from these Jewish groups that were before the destruction of the temple.
00:10:41
Speaker
Oh, interesting. So let's just put ourselves into the place of a reformer or something like that in 1650. So the Judaism that they are interacting with in their time and place is not the particular Judaism that Jesus was born into and that Paul was born into. Obviously, there's similarities. They both inherit the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.
00:11:05
Speaker
but there's a lot of differences as well. So one could not simply just go to one's neighbor that is a rabbi in 1650 Common Era and assume that he has all the same cultural understandings and even traditional and religious understandings as the Second Temple Jews at the time of Jesus and Paul.
00:11:28
Speaker
Exactly. Yep. If you did that, you'd end up with some weird understandings or maybe misunderstand some of what's going on in the New Testament. Sure. So we get all of these discoveries that now give us really interesting insight into what turns out to be kind of the crazy world of Judaism being up to the time of Jesus. Yeah.
00:11:58
Speaker
If we extend beyond just the Jewish context and think about all the recent discoveries post, let's say, 1800, that give us insight into ancient Near Eastern context in general, which tends to have a lot of cultural insight into what's going on in the Hebrew Bible, the earliest portions of our Bible.
00:12:18
Speaker
I think that's fascinating as well because here I've got this list in this book that I've been reading. I've got listed just dozens and dozens of different traditions, different manuscripts, very ancient Near Eastern pieces of literature.
00:12:32
Speaker
that we have found in modern times, post 1800. Like the hymn to Ta, the hymn to Ra, these are Egyptian writings, Enuma Elish stories, stories of Gilgamesh, insights into Exodus would be like the annals of Sargon I, the treaty between Ramses II, Ur-Namu, the code of Hammurabi, the Hittite code, Middle Assyrian code, stories of Balaam, annals of Shal-Mazur, yeah, okay. I can go on and on and on. Dozens and dozens and dozens.
00:13:01
Speaker
I was reading these out loud just to put names to pieces of literature that were found post 1800 basically in modern times that no one in church history was aware of before. That all helped us to understand the world of the Hebrew Bible better. I thought that'd be interesting to bring up in this context because you've been discussing
00:13:23
Speaker
New Testament primarily, yeah. But the same thing's going on with Old Testament. Exactly. The same thing's going on with the context to the Old Testament, so go on. I'll stop reading those. Yeah. And it's not like this is a finished process. There's still discoveries going on. And then even the discoveries that have happened, this takes a lot of time and work to assemble, to scan, to translate, to publish these, and then for people to go take time, read through them, and try to figure out, all right, well, what insight does this offer for our ability to understand the Bible?
00:13:49
Speaker
This is still very much an ongoing process that we're talking about and a process that we're excited to keep tracking and see where it continues to go.
00:13:58
Speaker
And all this work provides really interesting context that lets us better understand the Bible. So we can do better than our intuitive readings if we're willing to study this. What we find is that this work can help provide insight into the language of the authors, obviously. You see the way that words and phrases are being used in other contexts. You find out that, okay, well, this word being used this way in all these other places, and then, oh, look, it looks like it's being used a very similar way here. All of a sudden that helps me do better than somebody 400 years ago who just had
00:14:27
Speaker
a gloss that's saying, okay, maybe this word matches up with this Latin word. We've just got a lot more tools and ability to understand the language. And then obviously, a ton of insight into the cultural setting. If you're able to see what is going on in the world around the Bible, the story of Israel, and the specific history that we've got recorded, that offers really good insight into some of the stuff that is influencing the way the authors are thinking and writing.
00:14:51
Speaker
So all this information together can help us shape our understanding of what the biblical authors mean when they're writing these texts. Sometimes this information will raise new questions and open new possibilities. So you might get, hey guys, this word is actually being used in really specific ways that nobody had really considered before. Like actually it looks like maybe Paul or whoever's whatever passage we're looking at might be using this word in this way. And all of a sudden that sheds new light on their whole argument.
00:15:21
Speaker
Oh, maybe a passage that had looked really strange. We're like, I don't know what Paul's doing here. Passages that people have wrestled over for a long time. Also, you're like, oh, wait, if he's using this word or this phrase in this way that we see used in other writings, all of a sudden his whole argument suddenly kind of makes more sense. Yeah, it's illuminated. Yeah. Sometimes what you'll find is.
00:15:41
Speaker
you'll get scholars who are looking at all these different writings and scholars from different backgrounds who will start coming to kind of converging ideas on stuff. And that to me is where it's really cool because you'll get people from all different backgrounds and looking at different tools and contexts here who will start coming to shared ideas. And it's interesting because you start to see, okay, look, all of the people who are really looking closely at trying to understand the Bible in its context, like they're now kind of coming to some agreement.
00:16:09
Speaker
Not perfect agreement. The differences between scholars and their disagreements are always a point of emphasis, but you start to see some big underlying shared ideas. Wouldn't we expect that if the meaning of the text was assumed to be grounded within the author's intent? Yep. And if everyone was trying to get to that meaning, you would expect some overlap to start to emerge from across different Christian or religious traditions.
00:16:38
Speaker
Absolutely. As a single text gets taken into all these different cultural contexts, which is what's happened throughout church history, it shouldn't be surprising that we see this diverging and splitting set of ideas that has led to this splitting and diverging church.
00:16:53
Speaker
But when you get people who are now willing to say, OK, wait, wait, wait, let's go back and really try to understand this in its cultural context with all these new tools that we have available to us, you start seeing some convergence there.
Theological Reinterpretation Challenges
00:17:05
Speaker
I think that's exactly what you should expect. And that is sometimes what you see. And that to me is really, really exciting.
00:17:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's encouraging. I imagine this almost like a criminal investigation, like a cold case, one where we didn't have a ton of evidence for a long time. If you suddenly got a whole bunch of new evidence available, you would recognize that you need to go back and review some of the theories that had been made before that evidence came to light.
00:17:31
Speaker
you would probably find that some of the theories that people had about this cold case, you just have to throw out, like these hold no weight. We know now that the new evidence has disproven these theories. You probably have some theories that you're like, okay, well, it doesn't work the way it was, but we need to change parts of it. Maybe you'd get new theories that emerge, new evidence maybe points towards something that nobody had really expected before.
00:17:52
Speaker
what might be the most obvious conclusion based on the new evidence. Yeah. What you would not want somebody to do is go, well, I developed my theory before this new evidence was made available. And I really, really like this theory. This theory means a lot to me. Maybe I've invested my whole career into this theory. So what I'm now going to do is just work to discredit any new evidence that comes to light.
00:18:13
Speaker
If somebody did that, you'd say, OK, this is not really a trustworthy investigator. But they could argue, no, this theory that I came up with is based on the best evidence that we've had. Sure. And the pushback would be, well, at the time, but we've got new evidence. Why aren't you looking at that? Yeah. And then that's the decision point. OK, do we incorporate the new evidence into the theory? Mm hmm.
00:18:35
Speaker
let's say the new old evidence, right, into the theory, or do we stick with that theory that was based off of only a partial understanding of the case? Yep. And if this is a cold case that's maybe gotten cold for a few years, people would be pretty easily persuaded to change the theories to develop new theories. Yeah.
00:18:54
Speaker
The concern with church history is that we've got a case that sometimes has gone cold for 1,000, 1,500 years. So you've got deeply entrenched traditions now that can be challenged by new work and scholarship.
00:19:06
Speaker
new work in scholarship that is recovering older meanings. Exactly. More original meanings. Yes. So the idea is not, hey, this is a new idea birthed from my context. No one has thought of it before. Right. The argument is, no, the author of the Bible was thinking this. This is my evidence for that.
00:19:25
Speaker
Exactly. Which then implies that, hey, the idea that maybe has become central to your doctrine was actually an idea birthed out of some later history, some later cultural context, some intuitive reading of the Bible that was maybe mistaken somewhat because of the context. Hey, not your critiquing church history, don't you?
00:19:47
Speaker
So I think obviously there will be some pushback when these ideas start to come to light. If you get a new idea that comes out that's going to challenge some idea that people have had, there's going to be some concern and you'll get people who will have some criticisms that they're going to voice.
00:20:03
Speaker
And in conversations I've had with people, some of the concerns or pushbacks that they've given me, or maybe even I gave myself when I first started to encounter some of these ideas. It's not comfortable to change what you think. It's not a fun process. Especially your religious beliefs, which we affirm are like the most central. Exactly. So you'll get reactions like, well, this idea goes against my church history.
00:20:24
Speaker
or perhaps this doesn't agree with these influential thinkers, these great minds throughout church history, if a new idea that's coming out of this contextual understanding of the Bible goes against what some great thinker thinks, it's hard for some people to be like, oh, well, was this great thinker wrong?
00:20:42
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, am I really smarter than this great person? Yeah. Nobody's saying that we're smarter. What we're saying is we've got a lot more tools available to help us do better. And evidence. Yeah. You'll get some people whose pushback will basically be, well, this idea that you're proposing is not maybe consistent with some of these other beliefs I have.
00:21:01
Speaker
Oh, that poses a unique challenge because then that makes one start to rethink those other beliefs. And then people are afraid that their whole system will come apart and no one wants that experience. Yeah. Either they have to rethink their whole system or they're just going to say, no, I'm going to reject this because I trust my whole system. So therefore I can't accept an idea that challenge is a part of my system.
00:21:25
Speaker
some people's pushback will be that, well, these ideas are coming from non-biblical resources. Yeah, we've extensively talked about extra-biblical resources which shed light on the Bible. Exactly. So you and I, we're looking at a whole bunch of stories that you and I would never argue are inspired. Right. What we're arguing is that these stories help us to better understand what was going on in the mind of the biblical authors when they wrote these pieces. The pop culture of the time of the biblical writing. Right.
00:21:52
Speaker
So when you look at the work of scholars who are doing this, they'll look at these extra biblical resources and look at passages and look at the way words and phrases and ideas are being used. They're not then taking those ideas and saying, okay, this is now the truth that we want to hold on to. No, they're going to say, okay, this word is being used this specific way. So now let's go back into the biblical context and see if that helps us understand the Bible. So these extra biblical resources are being used as tools. They're not being used as the source of truth in any of this work.
00:22:20
Speaker
The pushback you'll get from some people is that these ideas you're proposing are new, which these might be ideas that are new to the church, new for the church from those past thousand years, maybe. But we're certainly not arguing that these ideas are new to human history. The whole point here is we're trying to do the best work we can to understand what the biblical authors meant and what this would have meant in their context.
00:22:42
Speaker
This is why it's important that we talk about this because I've actually had that same experience in talking to folks about some, I guess modern and let's just call them modern interpretations of the Bible. And that's the pushback. So are you saying that the church for the last 2000 years has been wrong? That no one has thought of this before?
00:23:02
Speaker
And I would say yes to the former, no to the latter, meaning yes, it's definitely possible that the church for the last 2000 or whatever, 1500 years has been not quite right on this doctrinal issue. But that does not mean that no one has thought of it before. It just means that, I mean, my argument is that we are going back to the original meaning based on we have really good evidence to think that this quote, new reading is the original reading. Yep.
00:23:29
Speaker
And if that was lost on church history, that's not my problem. My obligation is just to get to the original, even if church history up until now has not done so for one reason or the other. That's got to be our goal. The other pushback you get from some people is, well, this idea or this translation you're proposing doesn't match the translation I'm using.
00:23:47
Speaker
Oh, which in some people's minds can basically be the equivalent of, well, your idea is not biblical. Because look, I can open up my English Bible and the translation that I've got here doesn't match what you're telling me that Paul meant in this passage, which is really just an appeal to the translators.
00:24:03
Speaker
right, which are influenced by a church historical tradition. Absolutely. And there's a reason that translators will want to update translations. And part of that is because these new tools that we've been talking about start to become available. It allows to do better job of translation. Yes. Most modern translations, I mean, even older translations sometimes will get updated based on new research updates just for the language. But if you're going to point at a very specific translation and say, okay,
00:24:31
Speaker
know, any idea that challenges this, I'm going to get rid of. You're really just appealing to a very specific recent version of church history. Yeah. Yeah. And one way around that, just for common ordinary readers like me and you, one way around that to not get ourselves pigeonholed into one particular meaning that might not be original, might just be an English text issue, is just to maybe just read plenty of different English translations if you're trying to do Bible study. Yep.
00:24:58
Speaker
because sometimes you'll see differences in readings slightly, and it's probably in those differences that the original, that the Greek behind it, for example, or the Hebrew behind it is not very clean. And yeah, that might sound a little intimidating, but it can be helpful that we have so many good English translations.
00:25:17
Speaker
I also think it's helpful to know that some of the work going on right now is going to influence Bible translations that come out in the future. To talk about this being an ongoing process, we're able to keep doing a better and better job of understanding the authors, so we should expect that that's going to lead to better and better translations of the Bible, too. If more and more original readings of the ancient Bible… Exactly.
00:25:57
Speaker
Sometimes the objections that people will give will be related specifically to the person or organization doing some of this work. Well, I can't believe the work that person did because I know they also believe XYZ or because they don't affirm some doctrine that's important to my church. I won't believe the work of some person because they're part of another organization or because I think they're just trying to undo the work of somebody that I hold important. You get all these ad hominem attacks that are pretty common.
00:26:25
Speaker
And you and I have talked about this. We're certainly not claiming that any of these people are perfect. What we're saying is, well, let's first of all look at the conversation going on here. There's a lot of people doing work on these things. So let's look at the conversation and let's look at the work they're doing. Even if somebody's a bad person, but if they can do good work, let's be willing to
00:26:45
Speaker
to look at the work. And I think most scholars are not bad people, by the way. No, I'm not suggesting that. But it's not an uncommon way for people to get framed. If somebody's doing work that's going to challenge a doctrine that's very essential to a church, it's pretty normal to see that person demonized by some within the church. Certainly not everybody, but just encountering that idea like, oh, certainly don't trust whatever person, because for whatever reason, just be aware that that's a common reaction.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah, that goes back to our conversation last time just about church history and traditional affinity. We need to be careful for ourselves that we don't become tribal in our mindset and be like, oh, that guy's a whatever denomination. That is not mine. Yeah. Therefore, he can't do good work or she's a Presbyterian and I'm a Baptist. She can't do good work. Maybe even Catholic, like as a Catholic.
00:27:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this pushback and this kind of concern about these ideas that are coming out of scholarship really gets to be sticky when you start considering the fact that we've got big institutions that are in place. We've got big Christian institutions. Money, buddy. Yeah, we got money and power structures and educational systems, at least within the Christianity that I'm familiar with. These organizations tend to form around kind of a specific set of theological ideas.
00:28:09
Speaker
churches well don't all churches do that though i mean to some churches affirm that jesus is the supreme authority right that's kind of what it means to be a christian yeah every church that i've ever been a part of though has a much longer statement of faith longer list of essential doctrines yes exactly you're usually going on to page two or three the church is a part of
00:28:31
Speaker
So when a new idea comes out that just challenges an idea, maybe that's not a big problem. But if it challenges an idea that's institutionalized and has become a core tenet of a big group of people who've formed part of their Christian identity around this idea or this theological system, it gets to be a lot harder to change things. And the pushback against this inclusion of new contextual tools is going to be much more organized and firm.
00:28:58
Speaker
Yeah. There's a reason that this work from the 1890s is still taking a long time to make its way down to most Christians. Part of that is because you got institutions who are set up to preserve beliefs rather than help people do a better job of actually investigating authorial intent.
00:29:14
Speaker
even if that investigation of authorial intent would reshape some beliefs. Yeah, institutions definitely have a monetary interest actually in that not happening sometimes. Yeah, exactly. Which is what it is. I don't know if you can change that. Yeah, saying this specifically to be critical of organizations or institutions. No. It's just something I think is important for people to be aware of.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yep. So how can we start to interact with
Access to Scholarly Resources
00:29:40
Speaker
this work? If we've convinced you that this work is worth going after and that these ideas are worthwhile to investigate and to think about, how can you start doing this? Fortunately, you don't have to go learn other languages and start trying to dig up Ostrica in your backyard.
00:29:55
Speaker
You don't even have to start diving into super scholarly journals and articles. You don't have to go read super nerdy writings or going into really specific details and talking about the lone words into Hebrew.
00:30:10
Speaker
There's a lot of detail here that people spend their whole lives getting into. And fortunately, we don't have to get into that level of detail. We're pretty fortunate that a lot of scholars who are doing this work are also really passionate about making these ideas available to people who want to interact with them.
00:30:26
Speaker
even people without scholarly backgrounds, people with no training in languages, just people who want to faithfully serve Christ. And you've got scholars who are really excited about sharing these ideas. So they write books specifically to be read by anybody.
00:30:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's not an uncommon phenomena for a scholar nowadays to write his scholarly piece for the academic community and then to write another book and publish it. It's the same ideas, but kind of boiled down into the most essential form and in a more readable fashion for the popular level. And usually a lot cheaper too, which is kind of nice. A lot cheaper.
00:31:01
Speaker
Yeah so this kind of work is being made a lot more available both in books and then in podcasts too. Podcasts or even YouTube videos. Yeah. You're starting to find scholars who are wanting to make this information really really available so they're doing everything they can and doing this in really fantastic ways.
00:31:17
Speaker
So even if you don't wanna go read books, you can find this information through podcasts, through videos. In formats that are really easy to share with small groups and that are really easily digestible, you can go find podcasts where different scholars who have maybe done different work are having these discussions. Those are some of my favorite podcasts where you'll get a scholar or somebody who's interested in scholarly work will interview a bunch of different scholars and maybe they'll interview scholars who have
00:31:42
Speaker
similar work or overlapping work, and you'll start to see this conversation going on. So you'll start to find scholars who don't agree on everything, but they've done similar work and they're starting to find some big shared ideas that emerge out of the work. And that to me is where it gets really exciting because you're like, oh look, you have different scholars from different backgrounds who
00:32:02
Speaker
don't agree on every detail here, but there's big main themes that are emerging that are pretty central and shared across a lot of work. So if you're gonna go look for books or look for podcasts, I think we've talked about this before, but look for something that's gonna give a heavy focus on context, both biblical and extra-biblical. So if you're looking at something in the New Testament, obviously the Old Testament is gonna provide a ton of context to that. So you should expect to see interaction with that work.
00:32:28
Speaker
but also expect to see interaction with other work. Look at the Greek of the first century as it's used in a Roman context or in that Jewish context. Be looking for writers and thinkers who are emphasizing this work because that does a lot to help us understand the Bible better. Obviously look for work from reputable publishers, works that have been reviewed and responded to by other scholars, peer-reviewed type stuff.
00:32:52
Speaker
Yeah, inter-denominational critique as well is very important, lest we get stuck in just an echo chamber of, you know, my publisher that only publishes from my group and only gets critiqued from within my group. The chances that you stumble upon the truth in that context are very slim.
00:33:10
Speaker
Yep. And I would encourage people to interact with the work of a lot of different scholars, find scholars maybe from a similar tradition to yours, find scholars from traditions outside of yours, and start to look for the big shared ideas that are emerging from all this different scholarship. Because if you've got Protestant, Catholic scholars from all sorts of different denominations and backgrounds that are doing work, maybe they don't always come to the same conclusion. But like I said, you start seeing, ah, look, there's a clear idea that's emerging out of all of their work.
00:33:34
Speaker
as long as they're all affirming that the meaning of the text is found within the original context of the author and recipient. Yeah, exactly. Then those big shared ideas are like, oh, okay, that to me is where this gets really exciting. I think I keep saying that because I am really excited about it. Yeah, for sure. We live at the best time in church history.
00:33:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's really exciting to see, look, you can now trace through history all these different ideas or understandings about a piece of Scripture, and now these tools are starting to help us see what looks like might actually be the authorial intent or a better understanding of authorial intent on some of these passages.
00:34:10
Speaker
And it's not because some person in whatever context sat down and said, you know, this reading feels really good to me. Right. That's just arbitrary. It's because teams of scholars have dedicated their lives to understanding the context of the scriptural passages and to understanding the way the language is getting used, to understand the ideas that are being discussed, and then to go back and look at some of these biblical passages and go, okay, look, we can now trace these ideas
00:34:35
Speaker
out into the culture around it and see how this is all getting used and suddenly a new or slightly different argument that whoever's writing here is making starts to emerge and it's super illuminating it's like flipping a puzzle piece around until it finally fits and it's like ah okay that makes a lot of sense it's really really fun
00:35:09
Speaker
If you're feeling a little more nerdy, there's ways to go deeper into this.
Understanding Biblical Languages with Lexicons
00:35:13
Speaker
Lexicons are one of these super cool tools that have been put together. Somebody's taken all of this work that's been done looking at all this extra biblical context, the way all these words are used.
00:35:24
Speaker
and then assembling all this into what's often a massive volume of contextual tools. So you can go look up any word that's used in—I'm going to keep using New Testament here just because this is the work I'm more familiar with. Go pull up any Greek word used in the New Testament, and what you'll see are several different ways that this word gets used both within the biblical and the extra-biblical context, and then we'll give you references to all of these extra-biblical contexts that
00:35:49
Speaker
So you can go, if you're wanting to, you can go now like pull up the sibling oracles or go look at the works of Josephus and see how he's using these words. And it can give you really, really cool insight.
00:36:00
Speaker
And that is how you do a word study. Yes. Yes. That's a much better way to do a word study. You can go start finding scholarly books and journal articles. A lot of the stuff you can find online, you'll get more exposure to the raw research being done. Yep. We've talked about podcasts. There's a lot of podcasts that are meant for a general audience. There are also podcasts that will go a lot deeper into the scholarship being done. You can go deep into the scholarship. You can find podcasts specifically on like word nerds, people who are
00:36:27
Speaker
going through and understanding the way words are used and go deep into the languages. There are courses available online for people who are wanting to go into the stuff. You've also got scholars, lots of times who are also professors, they're teaching this stuff to their class and sometimes they'll make videos or podcasts available of their actual courses. So you can now for free go listen to these scholars who are presenting some of the work that they've done in a really well organized way in a classroom setting, which is pretty cool.
00:36:56
Speaker
And if you want specific recommendations, just email us. We're slowly amassing a pile of this stuff over here. You can also, if you want to, go start reading some of this extra biblical context directly yourself.
00:37:08
Speaker
I don't actually think that you should put that in the deeper dive section. I think more people can do this. It's very available and very readable. But okay, say what you're going to say. I think if somebody's not willing to go look at a lexicon, I don't know if they're going to be super willing to dive into some of this stuff. It's easy just to get yourself a Catholic Bible and start reading the intertestamental works, the Apocrypha. That's true. That's not that hard. That one is really readily available. So the Apocrypha, like Nick mentioned, is one.
00:37:37
Speaker
Even if you don't have a Catholic Bible, if you've got a Bible app on your phone, you can switch to certain translations that will include the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha provides a ton of really cool insight into the history between the two Testaments. Which again is typically Jewish literature from, I don't know, 400-ish BC until roughly the destruction of Jerusalem or the time of Christ.
00:37:59
Speaker
Yep, we had Bible study last night. We were looking at the idea of zealousy in the Old Testament, looking at Phineas, and then the way that idea gets used by Paul and his interaction with Jewish zealousy in the New Testament. And we looked at Maccabees, because the Maccabees dealt a lot with this. This is one of these books from the Apocrypha.
00:38:17
Speaker
And it gave a lot of really interesting insight into what Paul was dealing with in his day. So being able to trace this idea from biblical context into extra-biblical context back into biblical context gave a much cleaner understanding of what Paul was dealing with than if we had tried to just stick to the Bible itself.
00:38:33
Speaker
Yep. Maccabees was the pop culture of Paul's day. Yep. The Septuagint. We've talked about this before. So this is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. You can find English translations of this available online. You can get it through some Bible apps. Pretty easy to find a Septuagint if you're looking for it.
00:38:52
Speaker
A lot of these other extra biblical documents, you can find translations of them online. If you search for stuff, I'm pretty amazed by how easy it is to find some of this. You can go find works of Josephus, you can go find other translated works. We're super blessed to live in a time where there are a ton of Christians who have done a lot of work into this because they want to understand the Bible better and they want to make that work available. They're passionate about
00:39:18
Speaker
presenting this stuff and making it available. So we have incredible access to this stuff.
Access to Historical Texts
00:39:24
Speaker
There's also other collections of relevant works that you purchase online. You can go buy a big translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls really cheaply. I was shocked to see how cheap it is. Interesting. You buy it and then it shows up and you're like, oh, this is way, way bigger than I thought it was.
00:39:38
Speaker
I didn't actually want all of this. But I think it's fun because then if you're interacting with some of the scholarly work and they're going to be quoting, you know, all this comes out of 4Q MMT or whatever, it's fun to be able to go pull this up and be like, okay, I want to actually go see now the passage that they're talking about.
00:39:53
Speaker
I've got that in my library. We're all like ancient kings who had amassed these massive collections of very historical and prominent pieces of literature. That is just us. That is just your average person now. They can just buy all this stuff and have it all available, have the library bigger than the Alexandrian library. It's amazing what is available to us.
00:40:15
Speaker
Yeah. And it's cheap too. Yeah. I think back through some of these great thinkers of church history, the thinkers who we look at now and we're like, okay, they were kind of having to just work from an intuitive understanding of the Bible. So maybe we're going to take their ideas with a big grain of salt. Like a salt lick? A salt lick. You know, like one of those blocks you put in. Oh, yes. A very big salt lick. Okay. If they could have had access to the tools that we have available now, I think they would have been like, Oh my goodness, this is exciting. We can start doing so much better.
00:40:45
Speaker
And we have access to those tools right now, but there's still a big temptation for the church to just be like, well, let's just stick with the ideas of these people who didn't have any of this available. It's more comfortable. And like you said, we built our institutions kind of based on particular traditions and
00:40:58
Speaker
Yep. So I guess in summary, my plea for Christians is to be willing to engage in some of these new ideas that are coming out of scholarship, to be excited about the idea that we can actually start to understand biblical intent better if we're willing to do the work into understanding the language of the authors.
Respecting Authorial Intent
00:41:20
Speaker
And we hope that in this series, we have clearly outlined the method for understanding the Bible. When you're interacting with scholarship or anybody that has a podcast or writes a book or you're, you know, your favorite pastor or preacher or teacher.
00:41:35
Speaker
We are just simply advocating that you use this, what we think to be an uncontroversial biblical method of interpretation, and that is to try to respect the author's intent as much as is possible. To try to do that means to try to understand their culture and their context better. That's the only way in to understand the authorial intent of the Bible.
00:41:57
Speaker
If we rigorously apply that hermeneutical method, we should be able to sift through the vast wealth of information that comes at us today. And we should be able to choose to listen to people who are also aiming toward that same goal and providing us the tools to get there. It's pretty defined, I think.
00:42:17
Speaker
Yeah, we've got a way of doing this better. We've got tools available that almost everybody agrees are valuable, but people tend to be hesitant to want to start actually using them. It makes them nervous. That would be our push. If you agree with this method, if this hermeneutics series hasn't been offensive or challenging to you, if you've been like, yeah, this all makes perfect sense. I don't think we've said anything really controversial, to be honest with you. We started that first podcast off with looking at the statements on hermeneutics from lots of different Christian organizations, and everybody takes
00:42:47
Speaker
Authorial intent, authorial intent. Authorial intent, yes. So if we're going to be serious about that, then we're going to be serious about understanding intent through context. The reality is that we now have a vast array of resources available to us to understand that context that were not available that long ago.
00:43:06
Speaker
So if we're going to truly want to seek out a thorough intent, then we're going to need to be willing to utilize and value these tools and follow this thread where it goes, even if that starts to challenge some of the other traditions that we have held dear. Amen. Preach. Amen.
00:43:26
Speaker
On that note, I will say, too, the rest of our podcasts, we're going to talk about a lot of different theological issues or biblical issues or interpretive issues or societal issues or ethical issues. We're going to talk about a lot of that stuff just because it's interesting to me and you. And we have these conversations anyway, so we're basically just recording them now. We're not always going to outline our hermeneutical method.
00:43:48
Speaker
But we hope that this series clearly defines how we're reading our Bibles. If our listeners disagree with us on stuff, that is obviously just fine. And actually, we invite critiques to our theology and to our application of the Bible based on that hermeneutical method. So please critique our ideas on things, but critique them from within a rock solid hermeneutical method, which seeks to ground the meaning of the text in the author's intent.
00:44:16
Speaker
Yes, please. So send us emails. Thanks, dude. Thanks for outlining all of that. Yeah, it's really important just to say all these things out loud and just to make people aware of kind of the modern landscape that we're in. It is rather exciting, the time and place that we live in.
Preview of Future Topics
00:44:42
Speaker
This episode wraps up our introductory How to Read the Bibles series. We've got a lot more coming your way down the road. We've got a couple guest interviews that we're going to release for you in the next couple weeks. Then we're doing a short series on the image of God and implications on environmental care. Early in the new year, we'll be releasing a series of conversations with guest interviews discussing violence, power, and the kingdom of God. The ReParadived podcast, along with original music, is recorded, mixed, and produced by myself, Nick Payne, and Matthew Westlake.
00:45:11
Speaker
Our theme music is provided by the South Carolina band Posthumorous. Special thanks to Dr. John Walton and Dr. Theresa Morgan for their guest contributions to this series. If you'd like to interact with us more, please check out our beautiful website at reparedymed.com. No dash, just reparedymed.com. If you'd like to reach out to us, you can email us at reparedymed at gmail.com. Again, no dash, just reparedymed at gmail.com.