I AM NOW REVISING THE NEW TESTAMENT PORTION OF MY BIBLE INTRODUCTION, AND THOUGHT THAT SOME OF THE SECTIONS IN IT MAY BE OF BROADER INTEREST. AND SO I WILL POST A FEW OF (WHAT STRIKE ME AS) THE MORE INTERESTING PARTS HERE ON THE BLOG OVER THE NEXT WEEK OR SO.

THE FOLLOWING IS HOW I BEGIN THIS SECOND SECTION. BEFORE THIS PORTION ARE AN OPENING EIGHT CHAPTERS DEVOTED TO THE HEBREW BIBLE. THEN THERE IS THIS TRANSITIONAL CHAPTER, FOLLOWED BY FIVE ON THE NT. TO GET GEARED UP FOR THE NT, I START AS FOLLOWS. THIS WILL SOUND FAMILIAR TO YOU IF YOU’VE READ SOME OF MY OTHER BOOKS

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Throughout our study so far we have seen why it is important to know the context of a biblical writing if we want to interpret it correctly. You cannot understand what Isaiah meant when he said that “a young woman has conceived and will bear a son, and you will call him Immanuel,” without knowing that he spoke these words in the context of the Syro-Ephraimite war against Judah; you can’t understand the bizarre visions of the book of Daniel – e.g., the fourth, terrible, beast with a little horn with human eyes and a mouth that speaks arrogantly – without realizing that he was writing in a time of severe persecution and suffering during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria. The same is true of all the prophets and historical books. Knowing the context of a writing is fundamental for understanding what an author meant.

This is no less true for the New Testament than for the Tanakh. Here too we have to place the writings of the biblical authors in their appropriate context if we want to make sense of what they mean. Probably most readers of the Bible do not realize this. That would be one reason there are so many different interpretations of the Bible by people who consider themselves “experts” (just turn on the TV any Sunday morning and you’ll see what I mean!). Readers of the Bible who are not trained in history tend not to think in terms of historical context, and so simply read the words of these ancient authors as if they were writing in twenty-first century America. But these authors were not American, and they were not writing in modern times. They lived in a different part of the world, in a different culture, with different customs, and different assumptions about the world and life in it. If you pretend that they were writing in our own context, instead of theirs, you take their words out of context. And anytime you take a text out of context, you change its meaning.

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