Acts: An Overview The exegesis of Acts includes historical questions like, what happened? But also the theological ones such as, why did Luke select and shape the text in this way? When reading Acts you must think paragraphs, like in the Epistles, but also move beyond that to think whole narratives and sections of the [...]

The Nature of Narratives: Over 40 percent of the Old Testament is narratives and since the Old Testament constitutes three-quarters of the bible it is no surprise that the single most common type of literature in the entire bible is narrative. Narratives are basically stories. Stories that we refer to as God’s story—a story that [...]

The Basic Rule: When applying exegetical study to the practice of hermeneutics it is imperative to remember that a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or his or her readers. This is why good exegesis is important to do before attempting to discover what the text means to you [...]

The Nature of the Epistles: The Epistles are all of the New Testament except the Four Gospels, Acts, and Revelation. All of the Epistles are referred to as occasional documents, arising out of and intended for a specific occasion. They are also all from the first century. Almost all of the New Testaments letters were [...]

The Science of Translation: There are two choices that a translator has to make; textual and linguistic. The first has to do with the actual wording of the original text. The second has to do with one’s theory of translation. Because translators use a variety of methods for translating a text it has become a [...]

The aim of good interpretation is simple: to get to the plain meaning of the text. We tend to think that our understanding is the same thing as the Holy Spirit’s or human author’s intent. However, because of our backgrounds, knowledge, experiences, it is easy for our interpretations to become skewed from what God originally [...]

Over the next month I will blog through Fee and Stuart’s book, How To Read The Bible For All It’s Worth. My hope is this series gives some foundational understanding in reading our Bibles and prepares us for another blog series in the fall focused on reading the Bible Christotelically. The following content, and the [...]