I’ve used the term phrase “divine-human combination” or something quite close to it several times over the last few days. It’s easy to make it appear that this concept of inspiration, sometimes called “incarnational” is largely a tool to deal with the difficult parts of scripture. When I read “love your neighbor as yourself” I…
I’d like to condense the major arguments with regard to the Bible and slavery, as it appears that at least a couple of people have missed the point at which I’m hooking into this debate. (Please resist the idea that because I use lists when summarizing that I’m actually trying to reduce this to formal…
My previous post, Does the Bible Condone Slavery?, has produced some interesting responses, and one very valid question is just how I think the Bible should be used in making decisions. I’m going to try to keep this brief, but I’m not very good at that, so bear with me! The most common analogy I’ve…
Tradition criticism is an overview method that encompasses all four of the critical tools I have discussed previously, textual, form, source, and redaction criticism. Tradition criticism differs in that it is an overview process of studying the entire history of the text, looking for ways in which the expressed tradition has changed, and the circumstances…
Ed Brayton, on his blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars, started a bit of an exchange over slavery and the Bible with his post Slavery and the Bible, which was answered over on In The Agora by Eric Seymour in his post Does the Bible condone slavery?. Just so you have the whole story, Ed…
After discussing Form Criticism and Source Criticism, Redaction Criticism is really quite easy to deal with. Redaction is simply another term for editing. It is the study of how an editor works the sources he has into a final document, the document that we would commonly refer to as the autograph. Again, it is important…
I was doing my morning reading a couple of days ago from the book of Hebrews. One of the verses that caught my eye this time was Hebrews 2:6-9, and particularly verse 7, quoted from Psalm 8:5 (all verse numbers from the English Bible, Psalm 8:5 is 8:6 in Hebrew). Now this quotation is an…
[Note, 3/25/06 — the original post was truncated due to a syntax error I made in the HTML. This is the corrected version.] (Continuing my series on Biblical criticism, from my last post From Criticism.) If Form Criticism can properly be called a “tree method” rather than a forest view, Source Criticism might be said…
One issue that is commonly neglected in comparing Bible translations is the text used. Translators are well aware that differences in translation can be the result of differences in the text used, but in modern times, the approach to the text used by most translations has been very similar, and thus tends to be ignored…
We’ll begin our discussion of specific tools within the historical-critical method by looking at form criticism. I’m going to try to present this in a way that will be useful to lay students of the Bible, so note that I will be ignoring the more obscure forms and some technicalities of the method. The general…