[quote]JayPierce wrote:
[quote][quote]KingKai25 wrote:
How very convenient.
“He saw God face to face! He struggled with Him all night and won!”
“No one has ever seen God”
“Oh, uh, I mean, he saw an angel that, uh, named him Israel “because you have struggled with God and men and have prevailed”, and he, uh, thought the angel was God… Yeah, that’s the ticket!”
And who thought up this farce and sold it to you? And you have the nerve to call someone else naive?
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That is what the VAST majority of Jews in the first century believed, sir. That is how they explained these issues. Even secular scholars agree on this.[/quote]
Consensus does not determine truth. Do you believe everything that first century Jews believed, or everything that secular scholars believe?
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Agreed - consensus does not determine truth. But I was never trying to say that it does, JP. No, consensus does not determine truth, but consensus does represent the fruit of more minds than our own examining a topic. It enables us to see what options have been considered, rejected, and accepted by others before us.
In other words, analyzing the history of interpretation of a particular text can alert us to possible problems in the text. If, however, as we study the history of a text’s interpretation, we find that, for those readers closest to the original context in which a text was composed, the things we see as “contradictions” in the text were not seen as such by those original readers, then it behooves us to ask why. Why, if the supposed contradiction is a real one, did others before me not see it? The earliest Christians spent more time in Scripture than you ever will, and they dealt with real textual difficulties all the time, so if THEY didn’t see a “problem”, that raises the question of whether the “problem” is a genuine one. It could be that they possessed information derived from their milieu that you and I lack, information that filled in the gaps. It certainly isn’t the case that they were less observant than we are. So if YOU, with your limited knowledge of Scripture (one or two readings through the bible aren’t enough to make you even REMOTELY familiar, bud), see a “problem,” you should be asking yourself if and how your betters before you dealt with that “problem.” If they don’t even SEE it as a problem, then doubt is cast upon its problematic status.
Your understanding of context is, as I surmised, superficial. First of all, your conception of context is unduly limited to the words on the page. Context embraces much more than that - the historical period in which the text was composed; the cultural milieu of author and intended readers; the sociological relationships of the protagonists; the rhetorical goals of the author in composing the text, etc. This is why I have said again and again that if you aren’t well versed in the history, cultures, and societies of the Greco-Roman and Second Temple Jewish milieus, you have no business pretending you can interpret texts. It’s not just about words on the page, JP. Our languages pre-exist us as individuals and are ultimately culturally-bound; if you do not understand the cultural codes of a language, you are not equipped to interpret its texts.
Secondly, the meaning-process does not go on ad infinitum; there are boundaries, like the boundaries of the individual text. The meaning of individual passages in John’s Revelation ultimately goes back to the purpose of Revelation itself, i.e., why John wrote it, what effects he is trying to achieve through it, etc. We may bring other texts into dialogue with Revelation (a process which it invites), but this is ultimately for the purpose of understanding why JOHN configures his symbols (words, images, etc.) in the specific way we find in Revelation. This is why literary theory has shifted to thinking of texts as acts - they are meant to accomplish something. Disinterested historiography of the kind we value today DID NOT EXIST IN THE GRECO-ROMAN OR JEWISH WORLDS OF THE FIRST CENTURY.
Your demonstrative pronoun (“This”) lacks a clear referent, so I am not sure how it follows from your inadequate explanation of context. However, I will firmly object to that second statement - “getting down to the truth of the matter” IMPLIES A SPECIFIC METHOD. Don’t you see that? There is no uninterpreted truth, bud! Your desire to forego examination of method in favor of looking at “just the facts” is your own version of the doody-butt-poop-head argument. We all have lenses; everything is interpretation. You yourself say that it is impossible to read without presupposing anything; but if we don’t analyze our presuppositions, how do we know that the results of our presuppositions are correct? YOU CANNOT. Everything is interpretation, including the words of Jesus as delivered to you by the apostles. THERE WAS NO DISINTERESTED HISTORIOGRAPHY (history-writing) IN THE FIRST CENTURY, JP. The apostles already screened and filtered Jesus’ words; you are presented with their interpretations of what Jesus said. While I believe, as a Christian, that those interpretations are ultimately faithful, they are still interpretations. You have NO access to the unfiltered words of Jesus.
You have just illustrated my point. Context determines meaning. You can imagine scenarios in which my original statements could be taken differently, but neither of the two scenarios you offered match the one I was discussing, as in both of your constructs, YOU HAVE MORE INFORMATION. That misses the entire point of my example. You have limited information in my scenario; the question is what your immediate assumption is going to be.
Pay attention. In Jesus’ case, we know that he is speaking to a group that is comprised of Jews. You assume that his statements directed at a specific crowd are intended to refer to ALL Jews, as if Jesus is envisioning every single Israelite and Jewish person in his audience. There is no indication in that text that he IS referring to all Jews in general. None. Not a single generalizing statement, like, “You Jews have never seen him,” or something else that would indicate that Jesus is thinking corporately rather than specifically. So you and I would seem to be at an impasse - you think he refers to all Jews in general, whereas I think, without any indication of Jesus’ statements being general in nature, that he is referring to the group of Jews before him.
Are we stuck? Well, we have an option - Greek syntax. The word “you” is, linguistically speaking, a deictic, a word which identifies someone/something and/or denotes its position in space from the perspective of a particular speaker. “You” serves to signal that the author is speaking to a specific person or group of persons. Now, when reading a narrative where there is a clear speaker and audience, the probability is that, if a deictic marker is used, it has a specific and immediate referent. The only exception in Greek would be if the speaker specifically used a deictic (su in Greek) and paired it with a general appositional phrase - thus, “You Jews.” Without that appositional phrase indicating that a wider referent than the immediate one is in view, context favors the more immediate referent. It’s really that simple.
Duh, JP. Duh.
I’d be the first to say, along with Gadamer (a major hermeneutician), that our pre-understandings form the basis for all future understanding. That does not mean, however, that we cannot or should not question our presuppositions. In this case, I was not so foolishly attacking the inescapability of presuppositions; my point was that your presupposition in this case, i.e., that Jesus is referring to all Jews in general rather than Jews in his immediate audience, lacks any textual warrant. There is no evidence in the passage itself that Jesus is referring to all Jews. You have to purposefully ASSUME that, without providing any verbal signal (like saying, “You Jews”), Jesus was intending to speak about all Jews in general.
I don’t have a problem with presuppositions, JP. I have a problem, when you presuppose your conclusion! And that’s exactly what your argument does - without the assumption that this statement of Jesus’ refers to all Jews in general, a conclusion not demanded by the text itself but one you INSIST on assuming , the whole problem of people hearing God’s voice disappears.
Now granted, I know you don’t like the portrayal of God in the Old Testament, so you need John 5:37 to mean what you say it means. That way, you can justify not standing in awe of the God who both saves and punishes his own people. But frankly, that’s too bad. He’s beyond your understanding.
Oh how thoughtlessly you dismiss the point that DESTROYS your entire argument. Do you not see your own hypocrisy here? It exists on two levels - let me help you.
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You claim that John 5:37 is a statement about Jews in general. You ignored the fact that 5:38 is part of that exact same statement in Greek! Therefore, whatever Jesus is saying about Jews in general in the 5:37, he is ALSO SAYING ABOUT JEWS IN GENERAL IN 5:38. That’s a grammatical fact. That’s a problem, JP, because John notes elsewhere, before Jesus makes this statement, that some Jews DID believe. Now based on your unwillingness to harmonize seeming contradictions between Scripture (God being heard in the OT and Jesus saying he hasn’t), I would assume that you would automatically recognize that (1) either Jesus is a liar, or (2) John is a liar, so you cannot trust his gospel. Do you do that? NOPE - instead, you try to harmonize Jesus’ statement with a passage from a completely different book! That’s hypocrisy. Find a consistent method and employ it across the board; if you cannot, that simply demonstrates that your arguments are crap.
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Secondly, you have already rejected most of the New Testament - why not Revelation? You do realize that Revelation was written LONG AFTER PAUL’S BELIEFS HAD BECOME DOMINANT IN THE CHURCH? Your whole theory of Paul’s infiltration and deception of the church cannot evade the fact that Revelation was written by someone at a time when Paul’s thought was taken FOR GRANTED. In fact, we can see the influence of Paul in Revelation itself, such as in its seven-fold letter structure, a development derived from the circulation of Paul’s letters as a corpus of letters to seven churches. Therefore, there is NO reason why Revelation should be accounted more trustworthy than Paul’s letters.
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And right here, you point out exactly what I was referring to as ‘convenient’ above.[/quote]
And right here, you point out exactly what I am referring to when I say that you have no ability to interpret texts. The quoted portion here was part of the preceding quotation; it was actually part of the paragraph beginning with “but let’s go one step further” that you cited above. This quoted portion contains the verse that demonstrated the problem with your view, and you split it from its context. I can only assume that you either recognized how devastating that argument is to your point, or, more likely, you simply cannot interpret and analyze texts longer than a single sentence.
