Chapter three.

Methodological Presuppositions.

A review of errors.

Throughout history Biblical scholars have made simple, but in terms of consequences, serious mistakes. This chapter reviews some of the simple basic errors made by scholars that have had massive influences on how academics have interpreted the texts of Scripture. The chapter seeks to show how these errors have left a deeply flawed understanding. We will then examine a mistake that is currently being made and that is having an equally devastating influence.

Linguistic errors.

Until recently scholars saw no difficulty in using etymology as the key to understand the meaning of Biblical words. Philologists would tell us what the roots of words were and it was naively assumed that the meaning was transferred across the centuries to the text that was being considered. It does not take a trained linguist to know that language is constantly changing. Thus to establish the meaning that a word had two thousand years earlier is of little help to understand its meaning when used by a completely different generation. What determines any words meaning is not what how earlier generations understood the particular word, but how the generation that has produced the text under consideration interprets it. This can only be known through carefully reflecting on both its immediate and its wider context. In retrospect it is a mistake so simple that it matches the massive mistake of failing to design computer software to handle dates past the end of 1999. At least theologians are not the only academics to make silly mistakes!

Conceptual errors.

Another mistake that should never have happened relates to the Greek language of the NT. The NT documents were written in the Koiné Greek that pervaded every level of the Hellenistic world. For centuries it was considered that the appropriate preparation for the study of NT theology was a thorough grounding in the Greek classics. Thus most NT scholars of previous generations followed this well tried and little questioned route into theology. Those who had this education were looked on as eminently suited to the task of NT exegesis. They had the great advantage of being able to fall back on the broad learning they had gained of the Hellenistic world, its thought patterns and its vocabulary.

Few saw that there was a flaw in this method. It was thought that the vocabulary of the NT could be found throughout the Hellenistic world, and of course it could. But what was not appreciated was that it did not have the same meaning when it was used in a religious sense within the Jewish community. Here the language had imbibed its own theological meaning as a result of the translation of the Hebrew Bible some two hundred years or so before Christ. The Hebrew meaning had been poured into the text of the Greek translation to produce a language that had its own particular lexicon. It was Greek in its alphabet and vocabulary, but Hebrew in its mindset and essential meaning. It was this very language that Judaism bequeathed to the