Note: This article continues our Wednesday series about the Bible. You can check out previous entries here.
What did the scriptures mean to their original audience?
Can we really know? Does it matter?
According to How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, correct interpretation requires that we do our best.
We’ve looked at translating the actual words, which turns out to be harder than it appears (The Bible: Chapter And Verse?, When Words Aren’t Quite That Simple).
Last time (The Bible: Who’s The Audience?) we looked at a ten-dollar word, EXEGESIS. Distilling a big word into simple terms, exegesis means we need to know the original audience.
More than that
But exegesis means more than just knowing just the original audience. I’ll admit that I was surprised by this statement:
Scripture can’t mean what it never meant to its original audience.
I don’t think I’m taking that out of Fee & Stuart’s context. The principle, I believe, is that there are no secret codes, no hidden messages, no special interpretations waiting for us to uncover with some sort of magical decoder ring. The writers of scripture, inspired by the Spirit, wrote what they meant and meant what they wrote to their original audience.
This insight was quite a surprise for me. I think I had the impression that some people saw things in scripture that were invisible to the rest of us, that there were obscured interpretations open only to a special few.
I also know from subsequent discussions that some folks disagree with this notion of exegesis. A friend, for example, is absolutely certain that Song of Solomon refers to the relationship between Christ and His bride (the church). I’m certainly not smart enough to argue one way or the other.
I’m just trying to figure it out. So what are your thoughts?
Do you think about Scripture in light of its original meaning to its original audience?
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