Wayne Leman commented in another post that:
“The lack of a Christological interpretation in translation of passages in the O.T. is a mark of objective biblical scholarship […]; we should translate [at] the level of what did the original author intend to mean by what he wrote.”
Obviously trying to understand what “original intent” is/was in the case of the Bible has been the subject of endless scholarship. That said, in thinking about a host of tangential issues that Wayne’s comment prompted, I was struck by two images of interacting with Biblical text:
Is the Bible like an onion, with a pure core (Ed. Genesis 1?) that has been successively covered with layers of interpretation (Ed. beginning with Genesis 2?), such that if we were able to peel off the layers, scholarship can/will eventually reveal the true/original Word? This image is incremental, each stage of interpretation adds to but doesn’t change the substance of what came before it, though it can change our understanding of previous layers by the distance in time and thought created by accretion (Ed. this would be different from dispensationalism in that nothing is being replaced, just added to, right?).
Or is the Bible like a hologram wherein each part of a holographic image contains a reflection of the entire image? Such that it’s impossible to look at the epistles of Paul without seeing their OT context and it’s equally impossible to fully read Davidic passages without understanding their fulfillment in Christ. Original authors may not have understood or even seen the entire image. I’m not sure about the application, but I liken this analogy to the understanding that time is not time to God – everything that was is everything that is is everything that will be.
Whereas in the image of the onion, Genesis 1 might be viewed as “the core”, in the analogy of the holograph, the entire Bible is contained in Genesis 1…
Just a few random thoughts for a Friday…
Thanks for your analogies. Maybe the Bible is something of both. Yet the hologram seems like a better analogy. When we look at the Bible, we’re looking at aspects of a whole. In looking at Psalm 22, we can and should look at it from David’s perspective, but if we don’t also look at it from a New Testament perspective, we’re almost certainly missing the most important part of it.