Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
With any old testament prophet, remember always that what they wrote meant something to them and to their contemporary hearers and was written into a specific point in history and so addressed things from a certain angle and with certain assumptions.
It also meant often quite specific things to the Jews of the 1st century AD - by no means all of them accepted that these things were fulfilled in Jesus. In some ways, it’s helpful to see the late 1st century as the beginning of the split between Rabbinic and Messianic Judaism, with the Messianic stream becoming what we now call Christianity.
A decent exegesis of any Old Testament text will always adequately deal with its historical and cultural background, acknowledge any textual difficulties, and consider how the text was received and used in the generations that first held it as well as by the church, both in its earliest days as well as down to today.
A temptation with any of the principal messianic texts of the OT is to treat it purely as a means of illustrating something Jesus said or did. Important as it is to do that, really getting to grips with the text requires a broader approach. Have fun!
|
All very true and very appropriate. We can't read Messianic into every bit of every prophet, same with allegory and so forth. We must read scripture in context both historically, culturally and in keeping with other texts. Yet that doesn't mean that texts can't have a then and also a not yet reading that is applicable.
Essentially exegesis should seek to bridge the "author's idea in his context" to the "author's idea in our context". Lots of good tips in our lecture notes and some good texts that I've been reading but can't remember. One biggie is that our interpretation can't mean something that the author didn't mean in his context.