Protecting Sola Scriptura from Sophism, Excursus II: Why We Need to Understand the Ancient World and Its Texts in order to Help Us Understand Scripture

 One of the objections to what I have argued above is that the Bible should be self-sufficient and we should have no need to learn anything that is external to the Bible in order to understand it.

There are a couple things I want to say to this. The first is that I don’t think the Bible itself teaches this idea. I think it stems from a misunderstanding of sola Scriptura and confuses it with what Keith Mathison would refer to as solo Scriptura. 

But the second thing I would say is that I think the Bible can be understood by itself without using anything external to it. The problem is not the Bible's communication but our lack of understanding it due to our having inserted our own cultural and linguistic concepts into the Bible. In other words, we tend to read an English translation of the Bible and think we are reading the words inspired by the Holy Spirit and forget that the words inspired were Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. We tend to read into it all sorts of cultural assumptions that stem from our worldview instead of from the author’s. 

The problem is that I do not know ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, or Koine Greek as a native language. I could spend years trained as a linguist and decipher the language on my own from the Bible itself without ever having to use a grammar, syntax, or lexicon external to the Bible. In many ways, I still do this when I study the Bible. However, it is not unfaithful to the Scripture to trust that others have done this already so that reliance upon these external sources to understand the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, or Koine Greek text is perfectly in keeping with faithfulness to the text of Scripture as being self-sufficient. 

The further problem, however, is that I am not a native of the ancient cultures in which these texts were written and so must learn the worldviews, idioms, and literary devices and signals (including any genres not shared by our cultures) of those ancient cultures in order to understand a text written within them. 

Again, I can do this by using the Bible alone, since the Bible has so many books that give us a conceptual sampling of these things. The problem, however, is not the deficiency of the Bible, as stated before, but the deficiency in our own understanding due to our having already put so much of our modern cultural concepts that come from our worldview, idioms, literary devices and signals, genres, etc. into the text. We have eisegeted so much of our understanding into the text that we are simply not careful enough to notice that the Bible teaches within another world that is not always in continuity with our own. Because of this, the more we can immerse ourselves in the ancient world, the more we can dislodge what we have ignorantly assumed about the text and the more we can pay more careful attention to what the text is saying. 

To put it plainly, a study of external texts to the Scripture is not because the Scripture needs help in communicating its ideas. It is because we need help seeing our externally cultural ideas with which we have twisted the Scripture. The person who refuses to immerse himself in these cultural contexts will most often lack the ability to see how he has distorted the text with his own ideas. 

As I have argued earlier, the logic of language functions off of referents. When we change the referents of a text, we change the meaning of the text, and we end up with alternate interpretations of the text that were unintended by the author. When the modern interpreter reads a text and subconsciously adds his own cultural referents to it, he ends up changing the text he is reading into something else. In other words, the Bible he is reading is no longer the Bible that was written but a new text that has been rewritten in his head.

Examples:

1. A linguistic example would be the oft cited text of Proverbs 29:18, which in English reads: "Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he who keeps the law prospers." One might remember many a sermon on this text that supports a church building project or new civic programs for the church to follow. This is because our English word "vision" can refer to a plan that someone has as a future goal. The problem is that the Hebrew word here is חָזוֹן, which refers to a revelatory vision, i.e., revelation from God, not some human plan or goal. The adversive parallel to the clause is that which follows, "but he who keeps the Torah prospers." This is because the Torah is revelation from God that instructs God's people so that they do not perish. 

Without understanding the language, the text is misread and becomes a completely different statement, and therefore, a completely different idea that will now be believed by the modern reader to have divine authority as a part of what the Bible teaches. There are numerous examples such as these.

2. There are numerous verses about the "heart" throughout the Hebrew Bible. David is a man after God's own heart, the heart is sick above all things and who can understand it, the thoughts of the heart of man is evil from his youth, God will give His people a new heart, etc. 

We read this word and interpret all of these in light of our own cultural referents. To us, the heart is the seat of emotion and desire. Hence, we tend to interpret all of these passages as having something to do with desire or longing. For instance, a man after God's own heart means a man who wants to desire as God desires and to be like God in that way. The heart being sick above all things and incomprehensible to us has to do with our sinful desires. The thoughts of the heart of man being evil from his youth refers to his wants and desires being evil, and God replacing the heart of His people has to do with giving them new desires.

Now, none of these are necessarily untrue theologically speaking, but they are not the emphasis of the text, and therefore, not to what the text is referring. Instead, if we were to just look closely at all of the texts throughout the Hebrew Bible, we would see that the heart often refers to the mind of the person. The Scripture itself could teach us that "thoughts of the heart" or "he said in his heart" are obviously talking about the mind, not emotions. He said in his emotions? Thoughts of his emotions? We don't really need any external witness to tell us that we have been reading these texts wrong because the texts are unclearly communicated. Instead, what external witnesses, like reading ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian literature for instance, help us to do is to ask the question as to whether we are reading the texts of the Bible as closely as we should. If I go to Egyptian concepts of the heart and see that they see the heart as the seat of the mind rather than the seat of emotion, it causes me to ask the question whether the biblical concept is different or the same as that of the Egyptian culture. In fact, it causes me to realize that there even is a different concept of the heart that I did not even know about before I read that literature. When I go back to the Bible and read it more carefully, it seems clear that the concept is very similar. This is not correcting the Bible but my flawed assumptions that I have been placing into the texts that I have been reading and with which I have been unknowingly changing the Bible.

3. There are a lot of similarities between the genres the Bible uses to communicate its messages and the various genres that we use but there are a couple genres that we do not use, and with which we are just flat out unfamiliar. One of these is apocalyptic literature. We have literature that we refer to as apocalyptic in our culture but they are not the same as the types of apocalyptic literature found in the Bible and 2d Temple Judaism. Because of this, the modern mind naturally seeks to read texts like Daniel or Revelation with the next best genre with which it is aware, which is largely as a type of prophetic-narrative that describes the future (or within preterist circles, a type of prophetic-narrative that describes the past). This is because the mind is seeking understanding with the tools that it has. It reminds me of a computer that wants to open a file but doesn't quite have the right program so it defaults to some file that frankly just does not do the job well. 

Now, can I understand apocalyptic literature by just reading Daniel, Revelation, some of Zechariah, etc.? Sure. But since I am not familiar with the genre in my modern context, it would be immensely helpful to me to read all sorts of apocalyptic literature external to the Bible like 1 Enoch and the various forms of apocalyptic literature one sees in the Pseudepigrapha and Dead Sea Scrolls. The Bible even quotes from 1 Enoch, an external text to the Bible. Why wouldn't I read it and try to understand it in order to understand what the Bible might be doing? Again, this is a method of correcting myself and my misguided interpretations. It does not add or take away from the Bible. It adds or takes away from what I have been assuming about the Bible and possibly interpreting or misinterpreting it with. In other words, it adds or takes away from what I have already been adding and taking away from the Bible via my modern cultural assumptions.

I say all of this to argue that arguments that include the reading of ancient texts are not additions to exegesis or eisegetical when handled logically. They are a helpful part of deciphering the language used by an author, to figure out his cultural referents, and to correct the modern assumptions we have already sewn into the text. They can be the seam rippers that remove the thread that binds our cultural ideas to the text and allow us to see the text as the author intended. 

This means that a good argument that keeps in line with the logic of the language will seek to understand a text within its linguistic and cultural environment and any interpretation that merely assumes the meaning by using modern concepts through the method of soundslikegesis is to be dismissed as unsupported by the text.