How To Read The Bible
Bible Study
Hope For Tomorrow
What Jesus Would Say Today
Object:
It is above all through the Bible, the book of the Word revealed and incarnate, that God speaks, and personal contact with him is established. And when it is established, Bible-reading is no longer an irksome effort ... it becomes a personal dialogue in which the least word touches us personally.
-- Dr. Paul Tournier, Swiss psychotherapist
* * *
I must, I feel, judge the Bible by Jesus, not judge Jesus by the Bible, written as it was by fallible men who sometimes contradict one another, and who must sometimes have been mistaken in their estimate of him.
-- Leslie Weatherhead
* * *
The drama which makes up the Bible includes everything which is necessary for putting man in the right relationship with God.
-- Bruce Larson
How To Read The Bible
"They said to each other, 'Wasn't it like a fire burning in us when he talked to us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?' "
-- Luke 24:32
I recently saw a bumper sticker which warned "Read the Bible -- it'll scare the hell out of you." A bit blunt, perhaps, but not without its truth. The Bible is the basis of our Christian faith. More copies of the Bible have been sold than any other book. Almost every Christian home has one or more copies, and practically none of us has read much of what it contains. There's a practical reason for that: the Bible can seem extremely difficult to read and understand. It is written in unfamiliar thought forms, contains much material which seems irrelevant to us today, is totally disjointed in its composition, and often seems to report ideas and events which run directly counter to what we presume the Christian faith, with its teachings of love and kindness, to be about. Most of us who embrace the Christian faith rely on the local pastor to tell us what we need to know, perhaps relying also on some half-remembered teachings from Sunday school if, indeed, we attended. Yet the truth is, once discovered, the Bible can bring a new and healing power into the life of anyone who is willing to find its message. Jesus Christ will meet you there. It contains the Word of God. Here, then, is how the seeker after faith can find the way through that powerful book.
* * *
The Bible can bring a new and healing power into the life of anyone who is willing to find its message.
* * *
While the Old Testament is important, it's best to begin with the New Testament. The Old Testament is, to be brief, the history of an ancient people's search for God. Obviously, it's a very important background for our New Testament faith. Written over a period of several hundred years, it was dear to Jesus and provides background for an understanding of his birth and the history of his times. It has many stories familiar to all Sunday schoolers, stories which help us understand something of the ancient world and its culture. It is essential reading for the person who would go more deeply into a study of the Bible and its faith. There is much beauty, much religious power to be found in the Old Testament. Some of the Psalms, the book of Job, passages from the prophets -- but the Old Testament is also filled with writings of little or no value to the busy man or woman seeking a more powerful personal Christian faith while at the same time living a fast-paced life. Simply put, the Old Testament is the record of a people's search for God while the New Testament is the record of God's search for us. The Old Testament contains many ideas about God which are, at best, quaint in light of the New Testament. While some of the Psalms are beautiful, for example, others are filled with rage and the demand for a kind of justice which is simply not to be in our time. John Wesley, founder of early Methodism, once published a censored version of the psalter, observing: "Many Psalms are left out and many parts of others as highly improper for the mouths of a Christian Congregation" (e.g., Psalm 21:8-12). Let's agree, then, with sincere respect for those who find their faith there, to set aside the Old Testament and begin our studies with the New Testament. This is not to discourage Old Testament study, but I do encourage those as yet unfamiliar with the Bible to start as suggested.
The New Testament begins with what some people think of as four biographies of Jesus: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Perhaps a better word is "memoirs," for strictly speaking, the Gospels (which means "good news") aren't biographies since they cover a very brief period in Jesus' life. They don't all agree in detail, which means that while the writers were inspired by a higher Spirit, they were not mere human typewriters, recording ideas placed in their heads by God. On the contrary, the writers of the New Testament were ordinary people writing the truth as they perceived it, limited by some of their own prejudices and limitations. This doesn't mean they were wrong. I think they were mostly right, in fact. But they didn't know everything. We could use the example of four people standing on the four corners of an intersection, all witnessing a car accident. Assume all to be intelligent, honest people. When interviewed, it's likely the investigators would get variations in the four reports. Each would have seen what happened from a vantage point different from the others. But what would be unassailable is the fact that an accident did take place. The very differences in their reports would be convincing evidence that they did not get together in advance to make sure their stories agreed. So with the Gospels. To say it yet another way, the writers were inspired to write, but not told what to say.
* * *
"It lies at the very heart of the gospel message to affirm that the Kingdom of God has in a real sense become present fact, here and now."
-- Leslie Weatherhead
* * *
The earliest Gospel was Mark. As is true of all the Gospels, exact dates and authorship are not easily established. There is some evidence that Mark was a Gentile with access to the oral traditions of Christian people since the death of Jesus. Many of these traditions had probably been maintained in written form and, in all likelihood, Mark, as a dedicated Christian himself, wrote simply to tell people about the saving work of Jesus Christ the Son of God. "Its intended readers are already Christians," wrote biblical scholar F. C. Grant, "and already share the faith of the author." He continued, "Mark's purpose was accordingly not historical or biographical, but it was intensely practical. He was writing a book for the guidance and support of his fellow Christians in a situation of intense crisis." Although not all experts agree, the predominant opinion is that Mark wrote around 70 A.D. It would be nice to believe that the author was the same young man who accompanied Jesus in the courtyard, but this is unlikely (Mark 14:51).
Matthew and Luke have much in common in that both have used most of Mark's Gospel in writing their own. Matthew especially used Mark as a guide, adding other stories and quotes from another source which also appears in Luke. This other source is intriguingly called simply "Q." The actual document, if it really existed, has never been found and many a biblical expert has no doubt dreamed of finding it. But Matthew and Luke both report information not apparently known to Mark, and since the two authors clearly did not collaborate, there must have been a source of information about Jesus and his teachings which each possessed. Luke also had yet another source, sometimes called the birth narratives. Once again, both dates and authorship are in debate among the experts and we won't concern ourselves with any details here. What we do know is that both were writing primarily to a Gentile readership, and were, as with Mark, intending to tell the story of God's saving action in Jesus Christ, and were not intending to write history as such. Matthew includes a great deal of information about Jewish law and tradition, and it appears he was trying to demonstrate that Christian teachings were a fulfillment rather than a repudiation of those laws. Luke, perhaps the best writer of the three, was telling the story of God's activity in moving the new salvation story from its Palestinian locale out into the rest of the world. Luke's Gospel is, in fact, only half of his volume, the other half having been somehow divorced from the Gospel and included separately as Acts (see Luke 1:1-4 and Acts 1:1-2). Luke was probably a sometimes-companion of Paul on his missionary journeys (Acts 16:6-10). Matthew is not believed to have been one of the Apostles, though it's considered possible and perhaps likely that Matthew the Apostle maintained some written records obtained by the writer, which could account for the title. The two wrote at approximately the same time, about 80 A.D.
The above Gospels are often called the "Synoptics" because of their similarity. Some ten to twenty years later, another quite different report of Jesus' life and ministry was written: The Gospel of John. "It is indeed the Jesus of history and not some mythical Christ who is the subject of the Gospel," wrote scholar W. F. Howard, "but he is viewed in the light of the Easter faith as crowned with glory." John's singular emphasis was the fact that "the appearance of Jesus as revealer of God and savior of the world, 'the age to come,' is already here. Judgment is now at work...." It would appear that John had little interest in history for its own sake and was intent upon relating the Christ story, and witnessing to the power of God and the promise of eternal life. John was an educated man, and beyond that fact his identity is not known.
Following the Gospels is what is generally considered to be the second half of Luke's Gospel, The Acts of the Apostles. It is the story of the Holy Spirit's work in carrying the Christian faith out into the world beyond the local setting, and is filled with wonderful stories of God's action in people's lives. Then you'll come to a number of "epistles" or letters, arranged in a fairly haphazard order, mostly by Paul, earlier known as Saul, who never knew Jesus in his earthly life. However, he earned the title of Apostle because of an encounter with the resurrected Christ while on a trip to Damascus. You can read Paul's story in the ninth chapter of Acts. He was to become the leading evangelist of the Good News to the Gentile world.
Scholars disagree about which letters were actually written by Paul, but for our purposes we'll accept the favorite assumption that he at least wrote Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, the two Thessalonian letters, and maybe Philemon (one should be aware that most of Paul's writing was done before the Gospels were written). Paul's most significant contribution to our understanding of God is his insistence that we are saved, not by good works, but by "grace" which is ours through faith alone. That is, God accepts us because he loves us no matter what we do. Moral excellence is not a path to God; it is, one hopes, a result of our realization that God loves and accepts us (e.g., see Romans 4 and 5).
Also, Paul was an avid adventurer and traveler, an outdoor-man (2 Corinthians 11:16-33). He ventured under very rigorous travel conditions to many centers of known civilization of the time. He went to places like Ephesus, Rome, Corinth, and Philippi. He would assist Christian people to form cells, later known as "churches," then would move on, leaving local leaders in charge. Later, Paul wrote letters to these churches intended to be read aloud to the congregation in his absence. In view of Paul's daring personality, it's likely Paul was not trying to write deathless prose but rather he hurriedly wrote of the central truths of this new faith as he learned them in his travels. The churches later collected the several letters to be included in what we know as the New Testament. There follows a letter to the Hebrews, a sermon by a fellow named James, some brief letters by Peter and John, and finally a book you can skip: Revelation (a curious, coded bit of writing with only a few usable passages, like 21:3, 4).
How to read all of this? Simple, really. Get a Bible you can scribble in, one with wide margins. Start with the Gospels and underline any passage which speaks to you. This will make it easy to find those passages again. When you come up against something which makes no sense, as in the case of some of Romans, for example, skip it. Or, as one well-known author advised, mentally mark it as "awaiting further light." It's possible that later studies will open up some such passages. Others may never seem important. Peter Marshall, former Chaplain of the United States Senate, once said, "It isn't the passages I don't understand which trouble me. It's the passages I understand all too well that trouble me."
Now and then a Bible passage will affect you so much it will open up a new world of religious or spiritual feeling and understanding. Memorize it. Perhaps a biblical commentary will be helpful, one which explains some things it's helpful to know in order to understand certain ideas which are important but unclear. Some Bibles, The Serendipity Bible for example, contain footnotes to help the reader understand such passages. These are available through your church.
Keep in mind that Jesus, according to the custom of Jewish teaching, taught by use of stories, often called parables. These are not stories to be interpreted literally. Rather, they're stories, probably made up, to make a central point. Because his was a mainly rural farming and fishing culture, his stories were drawn from those people's common experience. We read of a man sowing grain on various types of soil, of a wealthy man selfishly placing all his wealth in the form of crops in outsized barns, or of a farm boy who leaves home, loses his money, and has to return only to receive a surprising welcome from his family. Almost always these homey stories are intended to illustrate something about our relationship with God. We'll see how this works as we consider some of Jesus' wonderful stories.
The Gospels also report many of Jesus' personal encounters, always reported with extreme brevity, sometimes leaving us wishing we knew more. However, the Gospel writers told us only what we need to know in order to learn the particular teaching to be derived from a given account. It's also important to be aware that Jesus frequently used exaggeration to emphasize a point, a technique quite familiar to his audience but sometimes misleading to a present-day reader. For example, he spoke of a camel passing through the eye of a needle (Matthew 19:24). He warned that a man might very well be wise to cut off his hand rather than commit some wrong with that hand, thereby incurring dire punishment (Matthew 5:30). There are stories of people actually doing that, having failed to understand that Jesus was only exaggerating for emphasis. We need always to be ready to look beyond the literal details of a story to ask ourselves, "What did Jesus really mean?" Any exasperated mother reporting her six-year-old's latest bit of childish misconduct saying (usually with a smile), "Sometimes I could kill that kid," should understand such hyperbole.
One caution is in order when it comes to group discussions about Bible teaching: avoid what's called "proof texting." That's the practice of using a single passage to prove a point. There are numerous Bible passages which can easily be misunderstood and must be held against the total message of the Bible. An example would be a passage such as we find in Matthew 5:22, where Jesus is quoted as warning that "whoever says, 'You fool!' shall be liable to the hell of fire." Jesus wasn't literally threatening his listeners with "hell" or "fire." He was simply warning that it's wrong to demean someone and there are severe consequences. A passage like that must be seen as over against a passage like Luke 23:34 where Jesus on the cross looks out at the jeering mob and prays, "Forgive them, Father! They don't know what they are doing." Clearly, Jesus would not consign one man to a terrible punishment for some thoughtless words while forgiving people who had not only tortured and were killing him, but were doing so to two other men alongside him as well.
Remember also that some New Testament writers occasionally allowed their personal opinions to creep in to their efforts to interpret the Christian message. So we find Paul, for example, in his letter to the Corinthians observing that "those who marry will have worldly troubles" (1 Corinthians 7:28), or Peter's questionable observation that "the Lord knows how to ... keep the wicked under punishment for the Day of Judgment" (2 Peter 2:9), a bit of Old Testament thinking we'll talk about later. It's unfortunately true that a misunderstanding of the Bible can do much harm. As noted Bible scholar J. B. Phillips observed: "As a matter of sober history, witch hunting, slave-owning and the inhuman policy of apartheid have all been justified by reference to the same Bible." In other words, one must get a sense of the overall message of Jesus Christ, then hold each individual passage against the spirit of that message. Since Jesus' fundamental message was about a loving, forgiving God, it follows that some Bible passages will not measure up.
Which Bible version to use? I urge the use of a modern version such as The Good News, The New English Bible, The New Revised Standard Version, or The Serendipity Bible (especially recommended for group study). A favorite among teenagers is The New International Version Life Application Bible. There are some other good ones as well. Without getting complicated, let's put those in perspective. The much revered King James Version of the Bible was published in 1611. Since then word usage has changed; most archeological investigation was done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which taught new definitions of early Greek words, and we just think and speak differently than we did then. A Revised Version was published in this country in 1904 which updated some of that; then in 1946 the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament became the "authorized" version for most Protestant denominations. Since then, excellent modern versions have been published which make an understanding of the biblical Word accessible to all of us.
The only way to start is to start. So start. In the following chapters, we'll consider some of Jesus' most important teachings and try to decide what they mean to us and how Jesus might have stated them today.
Questions For Discussion
1. What do you make of the difference between these two statements: "The Bible is the word of God" and "The Bible contains the word of God"?
2. Do you understand the necessity for research and scholarship in understanding the Bible?
3. How do you think language differs today from that of the time of Jesus and the writing of the books of the Bible?
4. What would be a good plan for personal Bible study?
5. What passages have you discovered by now which inspire your life?
6. Is it all right for us to disagree about Bible passages, accepting that there is no final authority to say "this is the only correct interpretation"?
-- Dr. Paul Tournier, Swiss psychotherapist
* * *
I must, I feel, judge the Bible by Jesus, not judge Jesus by the Bible, written as it was by fallible men who sometimes contradict one another, and who must sometimes have been mistaken in their estimate of him.
-- Leslie Weatherhead
* * *
The drama which makes up the Bible includes everything which is necessary for putting man in the right relationship with God.
-- Bruce Larson
How To Read The Bible
"They said to each other, 'Wasn't it like a fire burning in us when he talked to us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?' "
-- Luke 24:32
I recently saw a bumper sticker which warned "Read the Bible -- it'll scare the hell out of you." A bit blunt, perhaps, but not without its truth. The Bible is the basis of our Christian faith. More copies of the Bible have been sold than any other book. Almost every Christian home has one or more copies, and practically none of us has read much of what it contains. There's a practical reason for that: the Bible can seem extremely difficult to read and understand. It is written in unfamiliar thought forms, contains much material which seems irrelevant to us today, is totally disjointed in its composition, and often seems to report ideas and events which run directly counter to what we presume the Christian faith, with its teachings of love and kindness, to be about. Most of us who embrace the Christian faith rely on the local pastor to tell us what we need to know, perhaps relying also on some half-remembered teachings from Sunday school if, indeed, we attended. Yet the truth is, once discovered, the Bible can bring a new and healing power into the life of anyone who is willing to find its message. Jesus Christ will meet you there. It contains the Word of God. Here, then, is how the seeker after faith can find the way through that powerful book.
* * *
The Bible can bring a new and healing power into the life of anyone who is willing to find its message.
* * *
While the Old Testament is important, it's best to begin with the New Testament. The Old Testament is, to be brief, the history of an ancient people's search for God. Obviously, it's a very important background for our New Testament faith. Written over a period of several hundred years, it was dear to Jesus and provides background for an understanding of his birth and the history of his times. It has many stories familiar to all Sunday schoolers, stories which help us understand something of the ancient world and its culture. It is essential reading for the person who would go more deeply into a study of the Bible and its faith. There is much beauty, much religious power to be found in the Old Testament. Some of the Psalms, the book of Job, passages from the prophets -- but the Old Testament is also filled with writings of little or no value to the busy man or woman seeking a more powerful personal Christian faith while at the same time living a fast-paced life. Simply put, the Old Testament is the record of a people's search for God while the New Testament is the record of God's search for us. The Old Testament contains many ideas about God which are, at best, quaint in light of the New Testament. While some of the Psalms are beautiful, for example, others are filled with rage and the demand for a kind of justice which is simply not to be in our time. John Wesley, founder of early Methodism, once published a censored version of the psalter, observing: "Many Psalms are left out and many parts of others as highly improper for the mouths of a Christian Congregation" (e.g., Psalm 21:8-12). Let's agree, then, with sincere respect for those who find their faith there, to set aside the Old Testament and begin our studies with the New Testament. This is not to discourage Old Testament study, but I do encourage those as yet unfamiliar with the Bible to start as suggested.
The New Testament begins with what some people think of as four biographies of Jesus: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Perhaps a better word is "memoirs," for strictly speaking, the Gospels (which means "good news") aren't biographies since they cover a very brief period in Jesus' life. They don't all agree in detail, which means that while the writers were inspired by a higher Spirit, they were not mere human typewriters, recording ideas placed in their heads by God. On the contrary, the writers of the New Testament were ordinary people writing the truth as they perceived it, limited by some of their own prejudices and limitations. This doesn't mean they were wrong. I think they were mostly right, in fact. But they didn't know everything. We could use the example of four people standing on the four corners of an intersection, all witnessing a car accident. Assume all to be intelligent, honest people. When interviewed, it's likely the investigators would get variations in the four reports. Each would have seen what happened from a vantage point different from the others. But what would be unassailable is the fact that an accident did take place. The very differences in their reports would be convincing evidence that they did not get together in advance to make sure their stories agreed. So with the Gospels. To say it yet another way, the writers were inspired to write, but not told what to say.
* * *
"It lies at the very heart of the gospel message to affirm that the Kingdom of God has in a real sense become present fact, here and now."
-- Leslie Weatherhead
* * *
The earliest Gospel was Mark. As is true of all the Gospels, exact dates and authorship are not easily established. There is some evidence that Mark was a Gentile with access to the oral traditions of Christian people since the death of Jesus. Many of these traditions had probably been maintained in written form and, in all likelihood, Mark, as a dedicated Christian himself, wrote simply to tell people about the saving work of Jesus Christ the Son of God. "Its intended readers are already Christians," wrote biblical scholar F. C. Grant, "and already share the faith of the author." He continued, "Mark's purpose was accordingly not historical or biographical, but it was intensely practical. He was writing a book for the guidance and support of his fellow Christians in a situation of intense crisis." Although not all experts agree, the predominant opinion is that Mark wrote around 70 A.D. It would be nice to believe that the author was the same young man who accompanied Jesus in the courtyard, but this is unlikely (Mark 14:51).
Matthew and Luke have much in common in that both have used most of Mark's Gospel in writing their own. Matthew especially used Mark as a guide, adding other stories and quotes from another source which also appears in Luke. This other source is intriguingly called simply "Q." The actual document, if it really existed, has never been found and many a biblical expert has no doubt dreamed of finding it. But Matthew and Luke both report information not apparently known to Mark, and since the two authors clearly did not collaborate, there must have been a source of information about Jesus and his teachings which each possessed. Luke also had yet another source, sometimes called the birth narratives. Once again, both dates and authorship are in debate among the experts and we won't concern ourselves with any details here. What we do know is that both were writing primarily to a Gentile readership, and were, as with Mark, intending to tell the story of God's saving action in Jesus Christ, and were not intending to write history as such. Matthew includes a great deal of information about Jewish law and tradition, and it appears he was trying to demonstrate that Christian teachings were a fulfillment rather than a repudiation of those laws. Luke, perhaps the best writer of the three, was telling the story of God's activity in moving the new salvation story from its Palestinian locale out into the rest of the world. Luke's Gospel is, in fact, only half of his volume, the other half having been somehow divorced from the Gospel and included separately as Acts (see Luke 1:1-4 and Acts 1:1-2). Luke was probably a sometimes-companion of Paul on his missionary journeys (Acts 16:6-10). Matthew is not believed to have been one of the Apostles, though it's considered possible and perhaps likely that Matthew the Apostle maintained some written records obtained by the writer, which could account for the title. The two wrote at approximately the same time, about 80 A.D.
The above Gospels are often called the "Synoptics" because of their similarity. Some ten to twenty years later, another quite different report of Jesus' life and ministry was written: The Gospel of John. "It is indeed the Jesus of history and not some mythical Christ who is the subject of the Gospel," wrote scholar W. F. Howard, "but he is viewed in the light of the Easter faith as crowned with glory." John's singular emphasis was the fact that "the appearance of Jesus as revealer of God and savior of the world, 'the age to come,' is already here. Judgment is now at work...." It would appear that John had little interest in history for its own sake and was intent upon relating the Christ story, and witnessing to the power of God and the promise of eternal life. John was an educated man, and beyond that fact his identity is not known.
Following the Gospels is what is generally considered to be the second half of Luke's Gospel, The Acts of the Apostles. It is the story of the Holy Spirit's work in carrying the Christian faith out into the world beyond the local setting, and is filled with wonderful stories of God's action in people's lives. Then you'll come to a number of "epistles" or letters, arranged in a fairly haphazard order, mostly by Paul, earlier known as Saul, who never knew Jesus in his earthly life. However, he earned the title of Apostle because of an encounter with the resurrected Christ while on a trip to Damascus. You can read Paul's story in the ninth chapter of Acts. He was to become the leading evangelist of the Good News to the Gentile world.
Scholars disagree about which letters were actually written by Paul, but for our purposes we'll accept the favorite assumption that he at least wrote Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, the two Thessalonian letters, and maybe Philemon (one should be aware that most of Paul's writing was done before the Gospels were written). Paul's most significant contribution to our understanding of God is his insistence that we are saved, not by good works, but by "grace" which is ours through faith alone. That is, God accepts us because he loves us no matter what we do. Moral excellence is not a path to God; it is, one hopes, a result of our realization that God loves and accepts us (e.g., see Romans 4 and 5).
Also, Paul was an avid adventurer and traveler, an outdoor-man (2 Corinthians 11:16-33). He ventured under very rigorous travel conditions to many centers of known civilization of the time. He went to places like Ephesus, Rome, Corinth, and Philippi. He would assist Christian people to form cells, later known as "churches," then would move on, leaving local leaders in charge. Later, Paul wrote letters to these churches intended to be read aloud to the congregation in his absence. In view of Paul's daring personality, it's likely Paul was not trying to write deathless prose but rather he hurriedly wrote of the central truths of this new faith as he learned them in his travels. The churches later collected the several letters to be included in what we know as the New Testament. There follows a letter to the Hebrews, a sermon by a fellow named James, some brief letters by Peter and John, and finally a book you can skip: Revelation (a curious, coded bit of writing with only a few usable passages, like 21:3, 4).
How to read all of this? Simple, really. Get a Bible you can scribble in, one with wide margins. Start with the Gospels and underline any passage which speaks to you. This will make it easy to find those passages again. When you come up against something which makes no sense, as in the case of some of Romans, for example, skip it. Or, as one well-known author advised, mentally mark it as "awaiting further light." It's possible that later studies will open up some such passages. Others may never seem important. Peter Marshall, former Chaplain of the United States Senate, once said, "It isn't the passages I don't understand which trouble me. It's the passages I understand all too well that trouble me."
Now and then a Bible passage will affect you so much it will open up a new world of religious or spiritual feeling and understanding. Memorize it. Perhaps a biblical commentary will be helpful, one which explains some things it's helpful to know in order to understand certain ideas which are important but unclear. Some Bibles, The Serendipity Bible for example, contain footnotes to help the reader understand such passages. These are available through your church.
Keep in mind that Jesus, according to the custom of Jewish teaching, taught by use of stories, often called parables. These are not stories to be interpreted literally. Rather, they're stories, probably made up, to make a central point. Because his was a mainly rural farming and fishing culture, his stories were drawn from those people's common experience. We read of a man sowing grain on various types of soil, of a wealthy man selfishly placing all his wealth in the form of crops in outsized barns, or of a farm boy who leaves home, loses his money, and has to return only to receive a surprising welcome from his family. Almost always these homey stories are intended to illustrate something about our relationship with God. We'll see how this works as we consider some of Jesus' wonderful stories.
The Gospels also report many of Jesus' personal encounters, always reported with extreme brevity, sometimes leaving us wishing we knew more. However, the Gospel writers told us only what we need to know in order to learn the particular teaching to be derived from a given account. It's also important to be aware that Jesus frequently used exaggeration to emphasize a point, a technique quite familiar to his audience but sometimes misleading to a present-day reader. For example, he spoke of a camel passing through the eye of a needle (Matthew 19:24). He warned that a man might very well be wise to cut off his hand rather than commit some wrong with that hand, thereby incurring dire punishment (Matthew 5:30). There are stories of people actually doing that, having failed to understand that Jesus was only exaggerating for emphasis. We need always to be ready to look beyond the literal details of a story to ask ourselves, "What did Jesus really mean?" Any exasperated mother reporting her six-year-old's latest bit of childish misconduct saying (usually with a smile), "Sometimes I could kill that kid," should understand such hyperbole.
One caution is in order when it comes to group discussions about Bible teaching: avoid what's called "proof texting." That's the practice of using a single passage to prove a point. There are numerous Bible passages which can easily be misunderstood and must be held against the total message of the Bible. An example would be a passage such as we find in Matthew 5:22, where Jesus is quoted as warning that "whoever says, 'You fool!' shall be liable to the hell of fire." Jesus wasn't literally threatening his listeners with "hell" or "fire." He was simply warning that it's wrong to demean someone and there are severe consequences. A passage like that must be seen as over against a passage like Luke 23:34 where Jesus on the cross looks out at the jeering mob and prays, "Forgive them, Father! They don't know what they are doing." Clearly, Jesus would not consign one man to a terrible punishment for some thoughtless words while forgiving people who had not only tortured and were killing him, but were doing so to two other men alongside him as well.
Remember also that some New Testament writers occasionally allowed their personal opinions to creep in to their efforts to interpret the Christian message. So we find Paul, for example, in his letter to the Corinthians observing that "those who marry will have worldly troubles" (1 Corinthians 7:28), or Peter's questionable observation that "the Lord knows how to ... keep the wicked under punishment for the Day of Judgment" (2 Peter 2:9), a bit of Old Testament thinking we'll talk about later. It's unfortunately true that a misunderstanding of the Bible can do much harm. As noted Bible scholar J. B. Phillips observed: "As a matter of sober history, witch hunting, slave-owning and the inhuman policy of apartheid have all been justified by reference to the same Bible." In other words, one must get a sense of the overall message of Jesus Christ, then hold each individual passage against the spirit of that message. Since Jesus' fundamental message was about a loving, forgiving God, it follows that some Bible passages will not measure up.
Which Bible version to use? I urge the use of a modern version such as The Good News, The New English Bible, The New Revised Standard Version, or The Serendipity Bible (especially recommended for group study). A favorite among teenagers is The New International Version Life Application Bible. There are some other good ones as well. Without getting complicated, let's put those in perspective. The much revered King James Version of the Bible was published in 1611. Since then word usage has changed; most archeological investigation was done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which taught new definitions of early Greek words, and we just think and speak differently than we did then. A Revised Version was published in this country in 1904 which updated some of that; then in 1946 the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament became the "authorized" version for most Protestant denominations. Since then, excellent modern versions have been published which make an understanding of the biblical Word accessible to all of us.
The only way to start is to start. So start. In the following chapters, we'll consider some of Jesus' most important teachings and try to decide what they mean to us and how Jesus might have stated them today.
Questions For Discussion
1. What do you make of the difference between these two statements: "The Bible is the word of God" and "The Bible contains the word of God"?
2. Do you understand the necessity for research and scholarship in understanding the Bible?
3. How do you think language differs today from that of the time of Jesus and the writing of the books of the Bible?
4. What would be a good plan for personal Bible study?
5. What passages have you discovered by now which inspire your life?
6. Is it all right for us to disagree about Bible passages, accepting that there is no final authority to say "this is the only correct interpretation"?
