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“Sorry my friend, but I have spent WAY to much time applying scripture upon scripture and and having truth revealed to me by the Holy Spirit ..” ~ Anti-Hillary

‘It doesn’t take very long to realize that a thorough understanding of the Bible — and this would actually apply to any complex work from any culture — requires specialized knowledge, and a broad range of specialized knowledge in a variety of fields.

Obviously the vast majority of believers spend their entire lives doing little more than reading the Bible in English (or whatever native tongue) and importing into its words whatever ideas they derive from their own experiences. This process is very often one of “decontextualizing” — what I have here called “reading it like it was written yesterday and for you personally.” ....

Let’s anticipate and toss off the obvious objection: “Why did God make the Bible so hard to understand, then?”

It isn’t — none of this keeps a person from grasping the message of the Bible to the extent required to be saved; where the line is to be drawn is upon those who gratuitously assume that such base knowledge allows them to be competent critics of the text, and make that assumption indifferent to their own lack of knowledge — what I have elsewhere spoken of in terms of being “unskilled and unaware of it.”

And is my observation to this effect justified? Well, ask yourself this question after considering what various fields of knowledge a complete and thorough (not to say sufficient for intelligent discourse, though few even reach that pinnacle, especially in the critical realm) study of the Bible requires:

Linguistics/language — indeed three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Criticizing the Bible in English is a hallmark of critics, who must inevitably resort to one of several excuses: “The translators obviously thought this was good enough, so that settles it.”

It never occurs to them to ask why a certain translation choice was made, or to make a critical study of the word in question as needed; in a most extreme case — veteran readers know to whom I refer — we have persons who think that it is impossible for there to be any new insights into ancient languages, and will openly reject out of hand any more recent study suggesting a word or words have a more nuanced or different meaning than the chosen English word.

It is also wrong to assume that even the matched English word can be vested with the same contextual significance as the original word — any bilingual can attest that there are plenty of examples between languages of words that do not adequately capture all nuances when they are used to translate another word.

Literature — One prominent critic advises people to “read the Bible like a newspaper.” That is absolutely the worst advice that can be given for reading any text that isn’t a newspaper. The genres of the Bible include narrative, poetry, proverbial literature, wisdom discourse, a treaty (that’s what Deuteronomy is), legal codes, genealogies, biography (that is what the Gospels are), personal letters and general letters, rhetoric (an art form in the ancient world), riposte, and apocalyptic.

Treating each one as a newspaper — written yesterday and with our own ideas in mind — is a mistake constantly made by critics who impose their own genre-demands on the text.

Textual criticism — this is a specialized field of determining the original state of a text.
Archaeology — a field with many sub-fields of it’s own, which may involve knowledge of geography, geology or chemistry.

Psychology — the study of human behavior, essential to understanding the motives of persons in a text; yet most people do not even have basic knowledge of their own psychology. This aspect is complicated by the variance in human behavior we note in our next entry:

Social sciences — it is in this field that we have found the most lack among critics, and not much less of it in others. It would shock the average Christian to be told such things as that: persons in the world of the Bible did not have what we would call an internal conscience; or that Biblical society was heavily focused on honor, much like Japan’s culture.

No, most assume that people everywhere and at every time have been pretty much the same. That’s one of the biggest mistakes a critic can make.
History/historiography.

Theology/philosophy.

Logic — most critics think they have a handle on this one; but most have done little more than memorize the names of a few fallacies, and then look for them everywhere they go. Sadly this is the one area in which people are mostly “unskilled and unaware of it” — or else, they presume that this is all they need, and never bother to study in any other area.

Miscellaneous — I may think of more later, but as a catch-all, for example, you may have to learn a bit about biology (for example, if someone says the Bible teaches wrongly about the ostrich’s living habits) or other areas.
That’s quite a list, but there’s one more note to add — the holistic ability to put all of it together. How serious is this? Very. A carefully crafted argument about a text being an interpolation can be undermined by a single point from Greco-Roman rhetoric. A claim having to do with psychology can be destroyed by a simple observation from the social sciences.

Not even most scholars in the field can master every aspect — what then of the non-specialist.... Should they be recognized as authorities?

No, they deserve calculated contempt for their efforts. By this, I do not mean emotional or behavioral contempt, but a calculated disregard for their work from an academic perspective. They have not even come close to deserving our attention. .....

So, in closing: Don’t take any critic’s word in an age when any person with typing skills can post a website claiming just about anything. Chances are they haven’t done a fraction of the homework they need to do to be a reputable commentator. -JPH Here: http://www.tektonics.org/af/calcon.html