Protecting Sola Scriptura from Sophism, Part III: Relying upon Multiplying Referents for Successful Interpretation

 I stated in the last post the following: "What this all ultimately means is that the key to understanding the text is authorial intent and the key to understanding the authorial intent is reference-filled context of the author’s literary work and the author’s world his words reference."

I want to now argue that this fact limits the modern interpreter to only those interpretations that argue from the context of the literary work as it is situated in the language of the original audience. What this ultimately means is that one is at a sever loss of any ground for a reliable interpretation of the Bible unless he knows the original language of the author and his intended audience. 

Now, one might agree that the original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek must be learned in order to have grounding for a reliable argument that supports any given interpretation, and he would be right to do so. However, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, as is English or any other language, are dependent upon the author's use of them to point to his intended referents within his world. In other words, if I were to attempt to understand a document written to ancient Mayans during the fall of the Mayan Empire, I not only would need to learn the formal aspects of ancient Mayan language (i.e., grammar, syntax, and English glosses for Mayan words), I would have to also learn ancient Mayan culture during that time period and locale in order to understand the references to which the author was pointing his audience toward in order for what he intended to communicate to be understood. 

If I instead insisted that cultures are universal and so all I needed to learn was the formal language but not the cultural referents intended, I would be simply replacing the context with my own and completely misunderstand what was being communicated. In fact, I would argue that since the formal language includes lexicography that points to things within the conceptual world of the author, one has not learned the Greek language Paul is using, for instance, until he learns the referential concepts within Second Temple Judaism to which Paul is referring. One has not learned the Greek language that John is using until he learns the ancient Gnostic concepts and practices he is referencing or the genre of apocalyptic and its symbolic references to which he is pointing. 

In other words, language is more than its formal symbols. One must also know to what those symbols refer in the mind of the author, and because of this, the modern interpreter must learn not only the formal language but the author's referential use of that language. This is because without the larger argument of his literary work, the understanding of the genre he is using, and/or the ignorance of worldview concepts within his cognitive universe and the cognitive universe of his audience, the likelihood of the text being misunderstood when worldviews collide is astronomical.

Now, it needs to be understood that there are enough cultural similarities between most cultures that the Bible is not a completely foreign entity even to the interpreter who uses only an English Bible. So the overall message, the historical-redemptive message, once the Bible is translated by competent scholars, as it has been many times, can be understood by the average reader. This is what the Reformers referred to as the perspicuity of Scripture. However, this doctrine is obviously reliant upon teachers who have learned the language as noted above. This doctrine assumes that texts have been translated correctly and that the ambiguities of the receptor language, like English or German for instance, are not so great so as to obscure the overall message of the Bible. (And, of course, no who claims to understand the Bible on their own without the languages is able to just read a Hebrew and Greek Bible when it is handed to them. Everyone needs it to be interpreted and translated first, so theirs is an interpretation built upon an interpretation.)

Having said this, beyond the main message of Scripture, it is possible that many texts can be misunderstood due to a lack of cultural continuity between the cultures, languages, time periods of the original author and audience so that teachers who learn these discontinuities are able to bridge the gap between them and argue for the probable interpretation of a text within its literary and cultural context.

Going back to the main point of this series now, it becomes imperative that teachers learn the original languages of the Bible and that includes the larger arguments of the authors' literary works as well as the cultural concepts that the languages of these authors reference. 

It reminds me of someone who recently said that they don't need to know Hebrew and Greek because they can interpret the Bible for themselves. But this is an illusion. The Bible is written in Hebrew and Greek so what they really mean is that after scholars have learned the languages for them and told them what the Bible is saying, they can now interpret it. I would agree, that is, in so far as they have understood the intended meaning of the translators and not hooked their interpretations onto an ambiguity in the receptor language or a referent that they have inserted from their own culture due to a cultural discontinuity between the two civilizations.

Now, context is such that the more context given to a text, the more likely that text can be deciphered by anyone (that is, if he or she is paying attention to the context). This is simply because our brains are able to decipher the logic of a text the more referents are supplied by an author or the more texts with which the interpreter is familiar. In the case of the Bible, because it consists of 39 books that come from the ancient Israelite context and 27 that come from the Hellenistic Jewish context of first century Judean Greek, an interpreter may do just fine without having read any of the literature from the ancient Near East or extrabiblical texts that come out of 2d Temple Judaism. 

However, as said above, more referents provide a greater clarity toward the author's intended meaning, so the more one can read ancient Near Eastern and 2d Temple Jewish literature, the greater advantage he will have in interpreting a text accurately. 

Having said that, can one still interpret a text accurately without them? Of course. Due to what I also said above, so much context is given because the Bible provides so many pieces of literature from those time periods that, as long as one is paying attention to the flow of the author's argument and context, no further context outside of the Bible is needed. But it does add support and help substantiate what an interpreter may have already understood from the Bible itself.

My point of this post is simply to point out that an argument that is filled with the understanding of the language and all of its referents is made by an interpreter, it is to be favored as working within the author's communicative process rather than outside of it. Those arguments for interpretations that work outside of it must be rejected as establishing no support toward a legitimate interpretation and often may be seeking to establish support through an illogical and eisegetical means, often unbeknownst even to the unskilled interpreter who is attempting to do it.