When I’m studying the Bible with people, I like to use verses like Acts 17:10-12 about the Bereans examining what Paul said in the Scriptures and 2Tim 4:3 about people not putting up with sound doctrine but instead listening to what they want to hear. I know that even the most “Berean” person will have a difficult time examining what I’m telling them and putting it into context. I’ll ask them questions to see if they’ve “done their homework,” but in the end I get this feeling like, “well at least they’re safe with me studying the truth.” But I realize that’s still the truth as I know it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you can make the Bible say anything—but you can make it say a lot of different things.
There’s much to be said about being able to put a passage in context. It’s really the purpose of my blog: to educate spiritually-minded individuals on the importance of interpret passages in their original context. Before I started trying to do this on my own, I thought “context” simply meant to read the text above and below a given passage to make sure someone not trying to make it say something it’s not. This is important, but is just one dimension of context, textual context. There are other important types of contexts, many of which even Christians with decades under their belt are unfamiliar.
I would tell people occasionally to look at who the audience of a passage was. For example, in John 8:31, I would ask the student, “To whom is Jesus talking?” This is because the verse happens to state it, “To the Jews who had believed him”. Often the student would answer, “To the Jews,” to which I would ask, “Right, but which Jews in particular?” So I really wasn’t wanting them to know anything in particular about 1st century Jews, just that Jesus was talking to Jews who believed him.
Just knowing the ethnicity of the target audience is clearly just scratching the surface. You have to learn what made them tick, what distinguished them from other groups, what was their daily life like, and more. Since we are so far removed from 1st century Jewish culture, this is no simple task. Firstly, life has changed quite a bit in the last 2000 years. Secondly, we’re not just talking about any culture from 2000 years ago—we’re talking about a culture that was intentionally made by God to be radically different from all other cultures! The Jewish culture of today is an okay place to start, but things have also changed within the culture greatly since the 1st century, especially since the destruction of the temple in 70 AD.
Do you think the God caused the Bible to be written in such a way that the culture does not need to be taken into account in order to correctly interpret it? If the answer is “yes”, then by all means keep reading my blog, because that is precisely what I am trying to convince you of, namely, that one must understand the culture in which the Bible was written in order to correctly interpret it.
Could God have caused the folks who wrote the Bible to do it in such a way that culture and other contextual things did not matter? I guess so, but He did not. First of all, he’d have to make the language in which it was written not go dormant or even evolve. He did not, because Hebrew and Greek have changed significantly just like all languages of the time. Secondly, he’d either have to have the authors use no idiomatic speech or cause the idioms that were used to not change. Well the idioms most definitely have changed; and without the use of idioms, it would have been extremely difficult to express intangible things like spirituality and morality and emotion-related things like love and hate.
What God did do is allow us to still be able to know the culture of the Bible. And even more so today, as modern archeology unearths even more history and artifacts than ever. I believe it is even more important for us in the modern Western culture—it is so diametrically opposed to the 1st century Jewish culture, that we are bound to misinterpret and miss the point of passages in Bible with our plain eyes instead putting on the lenses of the 1st century Jewish church.
Therefore, it is possible for people in our present day to know about the 1st century Jewish culture!!
Then through what means? Firstly, the Bible itself. As I mentioned above, God made the Jewish culture very different from all other cultures. He did this by giving them a set of laws which caused every aspect of their culture to be different and, in most cases, completely incompatible with other cultures. It would serve all Christians to be well acquainted with the Mosaic Law. Really? (groan) Yes really. Even though I am not at all saying we are to live by the Mosaic Law–I am saying that it would greatly aid us in interpreting the Bible.
Most reading this blog will agree the Bible is God-inspired, but is it okay to use historical information which is not God-inspired to learn about Jewish culture? Yes, especially when it was not gathered with the purpose of proving some Biblical doctrine. I believe this applies to all of the cultural information that I have learned thus far. What other sources are there? Here are a few: archaeological discoveries, historical writings of the time, like the Talmud, and books and internet articles written by scholars on the subject.
It’s a bit counterintuitive, but believe it or not, as mentioned above–now more so than ever–archaeology can help us. Modern archeology has unearthed more historical Jewish texts in the last 100 years than in all the years since they were lost in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries. In her book, Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus, Lois Tverberg says on page 25 (by the way, this is an excellent book on this subject and I highly recommend it):
How much can we know about the world of Jesus anyhow? A wealth of literature actually exists that preserves the Jewish thought from the centuries before and after Christ. Best known are the Mishnah and the Talmud, two compendiums of discussion on the laws of the Torah…Other first-century documents like the writings of Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls shed light on Jesus’ world too.
Books like the one referenced above summarize important details and are awesome because the amount of literature on the subject is truly more than I could ever read.
If there’s such a wealth of information such that folks like me who are interested in the subject cannot read all of it, then how can I expect you to? Well, I don’t. Also from Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus, page 19:
You might think that you need to master whole textbooks before this kind of study starts to enrich your Bible reading, but I been amazed at how the smallest details can help connect the dots…The simplest cultural details can unravel knotty mysteries, sometimes with powerful theological implications.
Who has the time? Well who has the time to even read the Bible? I hope Christians do. I’ve spent about 30 minutes a day reading the Bible and other books on Christianity for the last 23 years—that’s over 4000 hours of study. Surely I could have worked some Jewish cultural study into that! And it is my strong belief now that this type of study should be done early on in a Christian’s walk as opposed to later. You might think it advanced, but since it is needed to interpret the Bible, as I argue, it is of utmost importance. If you are just starting to learn about the Bible and studying with a group, I’d be highly suspicious of any study series that does not highlight and explain the culture of the time with the studies themselves—especially topical studies (ones the jump around from book to book trying to teach a particular topic). Even as I write this, I realize the study series near and dear to me that I’ve used doesn’t even remotely qualify! (Time to rewrite that!)
In the next blog I’m going to introduce just a few 1st century cultural tidbits that have dramatically changed the way I interpret the New Testament.
This blog is quite a resource what can I say? Blessings?