Kenneth Bailey.net

Understanding the Bible — The Seven Sins of Bible Interpretation

In this particular study, we’re going to look at the seven sins of biblical interpretation. Sort of seven major ways in which across the centuries and in our day people have turned aside or have gotten lost, have come up with all kinds of things that are not intended by the spirit of God when it inspired the authors, but rather are ideas which have come out of our own minds. It’s very easy for us to superimpose on the scripture what we want to find there rather than allowing the authors of the text to speak through the text to what it is they want to say to us irrespective of whether that’s what we want to hear.

In a sense, studying the Bible is like beginning to build a house someplace in the woods. You’re not going to build that house until first of all you clear away the underbrush. Having cut away the underbrush, now you’ll be able to get to work to build that house.

We’re going to give a basic principle as to how to interpret the Bible, but fundamentally in this study, we want to clear away that underbrush. So what are these seven sins of biblical interpretation? The first one, perhaps the oldest, is the allegorical. This particular method of looking at the Bible began certainly by the second century and maintained itself with full strength up to the Reformation, limped on until the end of the 19th century, and only in limited circles does it continue today. But it’s still there and the literature of the past 2000 years is full of it and we must look at it.

What do we mean when we say allegorical interpretation? Well, the stories of Jesus, the stories which he told, the stories about him are set in Palestine in a Semitic world, in a Middle Eastern world that is different from ourselves. By then end of the first century, the church was primarily Greek. Yes, there were Aramaic-speaking Jewish Christians; there were Syriac Christians, Coptic Christians, and soon after that there were Armenian Christians and other eastern Christians. But the great dominance of the church was Greek and Latin. These folk, especially the Greeks, already had a method of interpreting ancient stories. This method was the allegorical.

They took the ancient myths of Greece and said these are not just stories about the gods who run around and have girl friends all over the place. These are myths within which we find great truths. They extracted from those stories truths, not on the basis necessarily of the story, but on the basis of allegory, assigning this to this and that to that. Then there was a philosopher in Alexandria whose name was Philo, contemporary with Jesus and with Paul. He died in about the year 50. And he was Jewish. Yet he was a Greek philosopher, living in a Greek culture and a Greek world. He tried to hold his head up high as a Greek philosopher while at the same time being a Jew. So, he had a loyalty to the Old Testament and a commitment to Greek philosophy. So what did he do?

What did it do? Well, for example, the story of the Good Samaritan primarily from various sermons of St. Augustine, the great Latin father of North Africa, in the fourth century and fifth century, we find not all his sermons the same, but we find that when we sort of put his sermons together, and some of his friends, both before and after, the story of the Good Samaritan comes out as follows.

Jerusalem, which is on a mountain, is heaven. The man is descending into Jericho, which they said was hell. The man falls amongst the robbers. Some of them said the robbers are the barbarians attacking the Roman empire from the north. Then along comes the priest who is the representative of the Jews and does nothing for him. Then comes the Samaritan [Levite ?] who represents whomever you, the interpreter don’t like, some other group. Finally, comes the Good Samaritan who is, ah, one of the monks. Usually the people writing these accounts were monks. So, the Good Samaritan, the monk, sometimes they said the Good Samaritan was Jesus, turns aside to find the wounded man who represents mankind. He’s half alive to God and he’s half dead to sin.

So they pour on oil which is sometimes interpreted to mean, Holy Spirit, even though the Holy Spirit had not been given to the church at the time Jesus told the story. Then they also put on wine, which is interpreted to mean, the holy communion, even though it had not been instituted when Jesus told the story. Then they put him on the back of the riding animal identified as a donkey. And Augustine said this is the flesh of Jesus Christ. This is Jesus Christ in the body. In short, Jesus is the donkey. Now good Augustine was a north African, Latin in culture. He didn’t know how bad an insult this really is because in the Middle East donkey is a very, very insulting word. He was of another culture.

So the donkey, you see, carries the wounded man to the inn. The inn quite often shows up in the Medieval period as the church, in case you missed it. And the innkeeper is the apostle Paul, says Augustine. He promises to pay two pence. This sometimes becomes the Gospel of the Law. Sometimes it becomes the two rules which Jesus gave to love neighbor and love self. Whenever you get anything divided into two, why these two pence can become both two. And then finally, the promise to come back is the second coming of Christ.

Well, the thing that saved Augustine and his friends was the fact that they had the theology of the church. They did their interpreting within that theology and so they didn’t come up with a lot of nonsense theologically, although they did come up with stuff that could never have crossed the mind of Jesus’ audience. They came up with stuff that in their most wild imagination, the listeners to the story of Jesus could not have thought of these things.

Now suppose you grant to me the validity of the method. You say this method is OK. Pick out ideas and assign them to different parts of the story, kind of like Pilgrim’s Progress. Where in Pilgrim’s Progress somebody goes into a room and picks up a broom and the broom is one thing, the sweeping of the room becomes something else, the dust in the air is something else, the windows are something else. The whole thing is a very beautiful and very enriching allegory, again, allegorizing within the theological framework of the faith of the church. And so that great story has meant a lot to many people across the centuries.

But when we treat the stories of Jesus with this method and grant the validity of the method, it is possible for us to start interpreting as follows: OK, I’ll tell you that Jerusalem is the noble, primitive savage in his classless society. The man descends to Jericho, which is capitalism. The man falls amongst the robbers; the robbers are the feudalistic who beat him up and leave him half dead and take everything he has.

Next comes the priest. The priest is the representative of religion because everybody knows that religion is the opiate of the people, does nothing for you. Then next down the road is the Levite. The Levite are the democratic socialists who try to claim that they are true socialists, but they aren’t. They really don’t serve the working class.

Finally, then comes the Good Samaritan. You guessed it; he’s the Marxist. He turns aside to the wounded man. He pours on oil and wine. What’s this? Well, it’s the philosophy of dialectical materialism. The only philosophy that will really heal this man’s wounds. He puts the wounded man on the back of the donkey. The donkey is the working class which alone can carry the wounded man to safety, which is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The innkeeper is the comrade who runs the dictatorship of the proletariat. And the promise to come back is the great classless society yet to be born. Ah, conclusion. Jesus is a proto-Marxist. He had all of Marx’ theories way back there in the first century. We discover all of this through allegory.

Now, if you grant to me the validity of this allegorical method, what will you say to me? If I am free to pick and choose whatever ideas I like, hang on them to whatever story I want, I can come up with anything. You tell me what philosophy you want to find in the Bible, what theology you’d like to be comfortable with, give me a little while, and I’ll fiddle around and I’ll come up by proving to you with this method that the Bible teaches it. In short, we end up with complete confusion.

And this is in fact what happened in the church. The church finally said you can’t build any of your faith on the teachings of Jesus. This is in the Middle Ages. It was in the Latin Church that said this. because of their complete confusion. The stories of Jesus were turned into a secret code. The code book was in the pocket of the bishop. And when you moved from the authority of one bishop to another, you'd better check out his code book before you start teaching or preaching because he’s got a different code book from the last fellow. And so finally the church kind of gave up on Jesus and his teachings, held on to the person of our Lord, turned to Paul for our theology from which we find then in Jesus the perfect God and the perfect man, the one who dies for our sins. But we forget him as a serious thinker with serious ideas for serious minded people.

Mind you, the stories of Jesus do have symbols. Now what’s the difference between symbol and allegory? The symbols are those symbols which the original hearer of the story or the original reader instinctively identified. David decides to marry a girl next door whom he sees taking a bath on the roof. Her name is Bathsheba. She happens to be already married, so he finds out that her husband who happens to be Uriah the Hittite is off in the army. He arranges to have him killed. He takes the girl into his family, into his group of wives, of which he had many.

Nathan the prophet walked in, tells a story about a rich man and a poor man. And the rich man has a guest. He takes the one lamb from the poor man and makes a supper for his guest. Even though the rich man has hundreds of flocks and herds. And says the prophet to King David, what do you think about this. And he answers, the man should die. Nathan says to him, you are the man.

David then is filled with remorse because he realizes the parable is true. It really is what he is all about. And tradition tells us this is the occasion which led to the writing of Psalm 51.

Now why was David so moved by the telling of that story. It’s because there were three symbols. The rich man in the story equals the king. The poor man in the story equals Uriah the Hittite. The lamb, taken from the poor man and brought into the house of the rich man for his own purposes is the girl, Bathsheba. Because David instinctively right up out of his gut felt the identification of those three aspects of the story and three parts of the reality of his own experience, because they came together, he was moved by that story.

We have to look at parables, for example, like political cartoons. The person who look at a political cartoon instinctively identifies its symbols. If he can’t identify them, it’s a very poor cartoon that’s not going to influence anyone. If I show you political cartoons from Jerusalem where I now live, and showed then to you, you wouldn’t figure them out because you are not a part of that political scene and you wouldn’t be able to identify the symbols and thereby figure out what the story is all about.

If you happen to be an American and you see a symbol of a donkey and a symbol of an elephant, you know what these represent. You do not then say, the left ear of the donkey is this and the right ear is that and the tail is something else. There are certain basic symbols which you instinctively identify and you don’t look for any more. That’s what we have to do when we interpret stories in the Bible: ask who the original audience is and find out, like David, what it is that they perceive, living in that world.

So our second method, I have called the blink on-blink off method. This method says that the ancient authors of the Bible wrote something. As soon as they got it written, the meaning blinked-off. They really didn’t understand what they were writing. And the people who read it really couldn’t figure it out. Because they were writing historical symbols which only are to be understood in the 20th century. Aha, Ezekiel writes this great book in the 5th century BC. Poor fellow has no idea what he’s written, but we’ve got it figured out. He’s talking about the Russians and the 6th fleet. This is the blink- off, blink-on method. One century goes by, two, three, four, a thousand, two thousand five hundred years. Suddenly, we’ve got it.

Now, this is a very sad way to look at the scripture. Because there is an enormous presumption at the heart of it. And there is an enormous down-grading of the spirit of God that has led Christian people, and before them, Jewish people, to understand Ezekiel and the other texts of the Old and New Testaments and to perceive their meanings through the centuries. God does not mislead his people through the centuries, through the guidance of the preachers and the teachers who have taught this material.

We have to do our interpretation with them, not in isolation from them. And to assume that the original author doesn’t understand what he’s written and that it cannot be perceived until two thousand five hundred years later, is a very sad way to go about looking at the Bible.

Now it’s true, sometimes we can recapture aspects, insights, perceptions in the scripture that through the centuries have been lost. There are new things to discover that other interpreters have overlooked. But we’re not discovering anything that the original author did not perceive. Nor anything that his original hearers missed. Because if we are, then we are getting something that they didn’t understand and this is rather presumptuous both in terms of the speaker or writer and also the listener or the reader. Be very careful of making these assumptions.

The third I call the cut and paste. A good sharp pair of scissors, cut out the verses you like; line them up in the order you prefer. And you can have those same texts say all kinds of things. I remember reading recently a book about Shakespeare. In the introduction, the author said, Shakespeare did not write quotations. Well, of course not, he wrote plays. Now there are lots of nice quotations out of Shakespeare, but you can only really understand those quotations if you put them into the context of the play. There’s nothing wrong with looking at quotations, as long as you read the play first.

Now, for example, there is in our awareness, in our popular quotation, the phrase, “What’s in a mane?” I happen to have acted in the play, Romeo and Juliet. I know the quotation. It’s from the banquet scene. And Juliet says something like this: “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So would Romeo were he not Romeo called. Deny thy father and refuse thy name. And if thou wilt not, I will no longer be a Capulet.” You know, names mean nothing. I’m a Capulet; you’re a Montague. Forget it; what’s in a name? Ah. But the play says, your name is your identity. Everything is in a name. You Juliet cannot stop being a Capulet. He cannot stop being a Montague. And because everything is in a name and the two names are of two families that are at war, the two young people in the story end up dead on the stage before the play is over. So the play says, everything is in a name. We lift that phrase out of it’s context. It flips. And it comes out with a meaning quite the opposite of what Shakespeare intended.

When we quote verses from the scripture, we must be very careful that we are quoting them in context. There’s nothing wrong with quotations. There’s nothing wrong with putting things together in topics. You want to study the love of God? Why not? Pick various places where this is discussed. And you can look at them in that fashion as long as you know the authors did not compose quotations. They composed Gospels and they composed epistles.

The fourth is the mathematization of scripture or the dehistoricizing of scripture. What does this mean? This means that we start to treat scripture as though it were a series of mathematical formulae. For example, two plus two equals four. Now, I said it in English. I can say . . . . I can say it in Arabic. The meaning of it in Arabic and English is exactly the same. You don’t care if an American is saying it, or a Russian, or an Arab, or an African, or a European. And you don’t care what language they use or whether they stand on the moon or whether there is or is not an audience. This is a little piece of absolute truth that stands by itself with no language or culture around it.

But in the Bible, it is not enough to say the Bible is the Word of God. It is, but that’s not enough. You have to say the Bible is the Word of God spoken through people in history. The “through people” asks the question, “what people?” and you must study their culture. In history means what period, and you must find what’s going on with those people in that period of history. Then you will be able to get the message that is there for us. If you fail to ask those questions, you will only get a very superficial level of what the text means and most of what it means, you will miss.

Now, you can say a phrase like “God is love.” Doesn’t this sort of stand by itself without any need for any context? Ah, are you saying God is best. Of course not. Well, how do you know you don’t mean that? Well, we look at the New Testament and we find there are various words for love. And one of them does not occur in the New Testament and it’s the word ______ which has to do with the erotic. And that’s a word we don’t find. The words we do find (there are a number of them) and one of them is a word that is not used very often in Greek literature. It kind of meant, “inclined toward.”

Great theologians and philosophers across the centuries, when they had really new ideas, picked new words. It seems the early church took this word from Greek which was a word that was known but really not used. And they took it and they gave it a new meaning, the meaning of the love which we discover in the cross of Jesus. And so we discover that God is love. Even that phrase is not a little piece of isolated information, rather it is a reality which the deeper meaning we discover only if we look at the word spoken through people in history.

Our fifth method is the colored glasses theory. Now, this theory says, here is the scripture and here is our traditional interpretation of scripture. If you are in the Protestant tradition, you will know that the Protestant Reformation was fought over the issue that the scripture is authoritative for us and the traditions of the church, however honored, are not authoritative in the same way. I am grateful that many of my Roman Catholic friends are now talking about tradition that is in harmony with scripture. And this new understanding of tradition and its importance is a movement that I rejoice at and with which I am in full harmony.

But you see what happens is, we take the scripture and then we build around it our traditional interpretation of scripture. So all the sermons I’ve heard over the past x number of years, the translations of the Bible which I grew up with and which I now read, what my mother told me about at my mother’s knee, all that my Sunday school teacher has taught me, and the books which I may or may not read, all are the interpretive tradition with which and through which I look at scripture.

So what do I in fact do? I put on a set of colored glasses. Now what are these colored glasses? They are the glasses of my tradition. When I do this, [he here puts on a pair of colored glasses] you know it’s kind of funny that this page all of a sudden looks dark brown. And this book looks dark brown and my Old Testament looks dark brown and the table looks kind of dark brown. And if I could see you, I think you would be kind of dark brown too. But why is everything so dark brown. You see, I can pound the table and say the page in front of me is dark brown and you will not criticize my evidence. Here this piece of paper looks dark brown. But why is it dark brown? It’s dark brown because I put on dark brown glasses.

Now, let me try a little experiment with you. Open with me if you will please, to the 16th chapter of Romans in the 7th verse and there you will find where Paul says “Greet Androncius and Junias, my fellow-kinsmen and my fellow-prisoners. They are men of note among the apostles.” This is a Revised Standard translation. However, the word “men” is not in the Greek text which we have here before us, rather it merely says they are notable among the apostles. If you happen to have a King James Version in your house or in your hand, you will notice that the word Junias doesn’t have any “s” on it. It merely says Junia. In this particular case, that text of the King James is correct. Junia is a lady’s name. Paul is saying “Greet Andronicus [that's a man’s name] and Junia [that’s a lady’s name]. They are my fellow-kinsmen and they are notable among the apostles.” Don’t look now but in the New Testament there was a lady apostle.

Now I may have set up a dialogue in your mind. You can say to yourself, that ain’t the way I heard it. Nobody ever told me about a lady apostle. I thought they were all men. The Twelve were all men, yes. But in the early church, there were some other folks called apostles and here is one of them and she is a lady.

Now the professor is telling you the text of the New Testament says there was a lady apostle. You can say to yourself maybe this professor is wrong. Maybe he is. Let’s assume now he happens to be right. That the earliest copies of the Bible, reflected in the King James at this point, have no “s” on that word, that it’s a lady’s name. And she’s called an apostle. Let’s assume that that’s correct. Then you’ve got to choose. Are you going to choose the way I was taught to read this verse, namely our traditional interpretation of the scriptures, or the scriptures themselves? I urge you friends to always allow the scripture to correct your interpretation of it.

I like to keep my understanding of scripture tentatively final. Now that sounds like a contradiction of terms. What does that mean? It means that I can’t wait until I read one more technical articles or one more commentary before I decide to live out my Christian life today. I have to be obedient today. I have to discover my discipleship today. I have to live out and fulfill my obedience in Christ and my witness today. I can’t wait. There isn’t time. I must act. At the same time, I hope, tomorrow that my frail, imperfect understanding of scripture will be revised, that I will understand more and that I will be able to revise the colored glasses which I inherited from my tradition, which happens to be the Calvinistic tradition, and from the sermons and translations and all that my mother and my Sunday school teachers taught. Don’t allow yourself to put on colored glasses and say I will only see it through the glasses of the way we’ve always heard it. Because that’s to put our interpretation on a higher level than the word of God itself.

Now the sixth rule is a tricky one, or the sixth great sin. And that’s called the changing of the ground rules theory. This is tricky one and I’m very anxious that you understand what I’m trying to say here. Every age has its own way of interpreting and recording history. Since the age of rationalism in the west, we have said, truth equals precision in historical reporting. If it’s not historically precise, we then say there’s an error. So if during the Vietnam War, if the Pentagon tells us that 500 Vietcong were killed when actually there were only 50, they’re lying to us because the report isn’t precise. And in our minds, consciously or unconsciously, truth equals historical precision. That’s our way of writing history. We’ve only written history that way for a few centuries.

The Middle Eastern way of writing history in the first century was not like that at all. They were interested in history; don’ let anyone tell you that they weren’t. But the precise reporting of it was really not very high on their agenda, if not on their agenda at all. They’re not just making up stories, but at the same time they were interested in something much more important. And that is, what did it mean? And so they give to us history theologically interpreted. If you Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John sitting here and you said to them, “Now look fellows, each of you has the saying over the head of Jesus on the cross differently. You can’t all be right. Maybe none of you has recorded it correctly. But would the one of you which has it correct, can’t be more than one, please stand up.” They would turn to each other and say, “Does anybody understand the question?”

There’s no way those poor people could understand the question because you the speaker would be talking out of a definition of truth which they could never imagine because nobody ever came up with it until a thousand years after the time they lived. The way we now write history will be changed and a thousand years from now other people will be writing history differently from the way we now write it. And so our definition history equals precision in reporting is something that is very time-bound in our age. We must not use it as glasses through which we look at the New Testament.

Now, what difference does this make to us? You see, I’m not interested in utter precision of historical reporting. Why? Well, a Roman newspaper reporter standing at the cross who gives me the time of day, the temperature, exactly how many nails were used, we don’t know that. The shape of the cross; and we don’t know that either. And whether Jesus was or was not seated on a small little seat; and we don’t know that either. And whether or not the nails went through the front of his feet or whether they went through his heels at the back; and we don’t know that either. And whether he goes around to the crowd and asks how they feel and tells us what time of day it got dark. I’m not interested in those details. I’m interested in interpretation. And so when Paul says Christ died for our sins, OK, now I’m interested.

And mind you, every event is unlocked through authoritative interpretation. Keep in mind please, for example, very quickly. I used to live in Beirut in the midst of a tragic civil war where there was a great deal of tension and a great deal of division. And one day, I saw a shoot-out. I saw a group of young men in a car rush around, stop beside a coffee shop beside our house. Another crowd, there was a lot of shooting and pushing and shoving and finally the second car drove away. I saw the whole thing. I waited for about an hour and then I found somebody who could give me an authoritative interpretation. And he came and told me exactly what happened. This was our militia, their militia. They came; we had a fight. They got frightened; they went away. And I asked then, OK, are they going to come back? “No. Our militia is more powerful than theirs is.” Ah, now I’ve got the insider’s authoritative interpretation. I am at rest. I go up to my flat and know that there’s not going to be another big rumble tonight. That’s what I want. I don’t want somebody to take a TV camera down there and give me everything. I saw it all with my eyes. But that’s not what I need. I need an insider’s authoritative interpretation.

The text of the scripture gives us what happened. And the authoritative interpretation written up with it. They felt in order to make clear to you its meaning that they had the freedom and the responsibility to make whatever slight changes in the order or in the nature of the material itself to make its meaning clear. Thereby we are enriched by the various interpretations of the accounts of Jesus and we are not embarrassed by their differences. Nor do we have to force them together.

The final of our theories here is the electrical shock theory. Now, folks, again, I do not want to be misunderstood. We all read the Bible devotionally, I hope we all do. I hope you do. When we read, depending on what has happened to us, we are moved by what we read. But at the same time, as we read, there has to be a dialogue in the mind between what I read and what I know that original author intends for his readers. Or that speaker for his listeners. I can sit in Jerusalem where I now teach, and it’s a hot afternoon some summer day. And I say to myself, ah gee it’s really hot. And I open the psalms, and Psalm 42 says thy waves and billows have gone over me. Ah, the Holy Spirit is now speaking to me through the text and telling me to go swimming.

Well, you know you may not be learning anything and it may be hot and you need some exercise. But I really don’t think that the message of God through the great psalmist has anything to do whether you should or should not continue studying or whether you should go swimming. There should be a relationship between what I feel and what I know the original author intends for his readers. If I just let my mind wander off into what I can think about and what I feel, I can come up with the most incredible nonsense you can ever imagine.

Now try this, for example, with the Gettysburg address. We all know it. “Four score,” ah the football game. They’ve reached the score of four. “And seven years ago,” the game is very, very long. It’s been lasting for seven years. “Our fathers brought forth.” Very interesting, the mothers didn’t give birth; the fathers did. Wonder what this is all about? I can go on, but you see where you read Gettysburg address, your mind goes click, Abraham Lincoln, click, American history, click, Civil War, click, the Battle of Gettysburg. And in that context you read and great meanings are there for us if we put our minds into that frame. We must do the same for the scriptures.

So what is the foundational principal on which we stand? It is: try to discover what the original author intends for his readers, or the original speaker for his listeners. Jesus talks to the Pharisees. I am supposed to stand at the back of his original audience listening. And I find that if I take that very seriously, that he is talking to the Pharisees, yes, and he is also talking to the human predicament. He’s talking to sinners. He’s talking to me. If I fail to take seriously that word of God spoken through people in history, I will find myself very quickly and very dangerously going astray.

A journey of a thousand miles takes one step. I’m not asking where you are on the ladder. I’m asking did you get there by climbing or falling. The real issue is, will you try? People who have a chance to study more will do this better. But every person can say, ah, Jesus, I know something about him. The Pharisees: I know something about them. First century Palestine: I know something about that. You put your mind into that gear and you will be able to not be led astray. Ah, Moses: in the wilderness, saying these things. Put yourself into that frame and you will understand. Ah, Ezekiel: off in southern Iraq. They are a group that are refugees from their homeland. He’s writing to encourage the people. let’s see what he says.

And with that gear in your mind, like the Gettysburg address, you will find yourself greatly enriched by what we call historical interpretation. 

Dr. Kenneth Bailey