Discussion of the historical-critical method and its various methodologies and their application to Bible study and formation of doctrine.
A few days ago Wayne Leman blogged about translating Hebrew poetry, and referred to an article by Philip C. Stine Biblical Poetry and Translation. The article is really excellent, and nothing I’m about to say here is intended to criticize that article as such. I’ve been very interested in translation of Hebrew poetry, but I…
Ben Witherington comments on an attitude of skepticism on his blog in an entry titled Justification by Doubt. Dr. Witherington makes a number of good points, but I think the topic at a minimum needs more comment. I’d like to suggest you read his entire post before you read mine. I’m going to quote his…
Yesterday I wandered by the The Evangelical Outpost just to see what was going on, and besides finding a current thread on which I want to comment, I found an older one, Jefferson’s Jesus: An Appreciation of the Trilemma. In this post Joe Carter undertakes to defend the trilemma, a much maligned and yet much…
I’ve pretty much quit bothering with the KJV only folks since their arguments are so repetitive. Yet occasionally I run across one that so illustrates the failings of this entire movement that I want to take the time to comment briefly. Of course, you all know already that I rarely comment briefly . . ….
Now that we’ve looked at various critical issues about this passage, and I’ve discussed the dangers and difficulties involved with Biblical criticism, I’d like to summarize some of the things we can learn by examining the passage critically. We have identified a number of elements in the passage that have been strung together to form…
Now that we’ve looked over the text and found a set of transitions in it, we can start looking at how critical methologies will apply to this material. Will they help us interpret and apply the passage? This is a moment to look at some of the reasons I’ve been writing this series. Frequently, Bible…
Form Criticism involves identifying smaller units in a composition that might have been transmitted separately, especially orally, prior to being included in the composition you are studying. There are quite a number of sections in our selection (Isaiah 24-27) that can be examined in this way. Since I am writing this series to help people…
I’m approaching the textual issues for these four chapters from the point of view of English translations. I want to look for those textual issues that actually have an impact on major English translations. This is a procedure you can follow any time you study a Bible passage, assuming you don’t know Greek or Hebrew…
In a previous post, The Best Place to Teach the Bible, I discussed my view that home and church or other private organizations were the best way to teach the Bible. I’ve had a couple of comments to that post that I think deserve some comment, and since I don’t like to make post-length comments…
Many of the issues of Biblical criticism are illustrated in these four chapters from the book of Isaiah. The book of Isaiah as a whole is fertile ground for such study, but one has to take a reasonable sized bite for an illustration. What I want to do with these chapters is discuss how various…
