In The Word

Ben Witherington, an author I know best from his books New Testament History: A Narrative Account and The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci has a wonderful post entitled Hermeneutics— A Guide for Perplexed Bible Readers

1) ‘What it meant is what it means’. Meaning comes contextually not from just having words in isolation but words in conjunction with one another in a specific sentence or larger context.

. . .

2) ‘Context is king’. One of the great, great dangers in modern interpretation of the Bible is proof-texting. What this amounts to is the strip-mining of certain key terms and ideas, linking them together with similar or the same words in other texts and contexts, and coming up with a meaning which none of the original texts had.

. . .

3) Genre matters. Before we can interpret a particular type of literature we need to understand what literary type or kind of literature it is. Prose should be interpreted according to the kinds of information prose is meant to give, poetry should be interpreted as poetry, historical narrative as narrative, parables as the literary fictions that they are, and apocalyptic prophecy must be interpreted as the highly metaphorical literature it is, and so on.

Good stuff! Be sure to check out the whole article. It’s short, to the point and informative.

(HT:Participatory Bible Study Blog )