This is a lightly edited transcript of what I actually said when I taught this session at Spring Creek Bible Church on May 7, 2017, as Part 2 of the Introduction to New Testament Exegesis class (the first of the two “Techniques and Tools” sessions). It differs from what I planned to say; for the prepared text, see the manuscript.
Today we’re looking at techniques and tools for doing New Testament exegesis—part two in our six-part class. Last week we laid the foundation: key terms like exegesis, eisegesis, hermeneutics, meaning, intent, and context; the principles and goals of studying the Bible; and the theological presuppositions we bring to God’s Word. Today we shift to the mechanics—the steps, tools, and resources for digging into a passage.
A Word About Method
I’m presenting a set of steps you can use to engage a passage, and it’s important to say up front that this is a human-made method, not perfect—there are many good approaches with a lot of overlap, and I’m not offering this as superior to anyone else’s. My two aims were to make it approachable (useful even without Greek training, while stretching you) and to bring the rigorous, the theological, and the practical together. A few things to keep in mind: you don’t have to do every step—some passages benefit more from certain steps than others—and you don’t have to take them in order; the process can flex and be organic. Think of it like a recipe: when you’re learning to cook, a recipe listing ingredients and steps helps a lot, but as your skill grows you deviate, substitute, and improvise. A man like D. A. Carson doesn’t have a sheet like this in front of him as he works through a text—but he’s probably doing most of these things, in whatever order the text calls for. It’s also like a map or GPS: you don’t need turn-by-turn directions to drive a route you know by heart, but they’re invaluable in a new place. As your skill develops, your need for a tool like this diminishes.
One clarification: we’re focusing on a particular kind of study—passage study, where we take a verse or group of verses and try to understand what the author meant and how it fits into the book and its levels of context. There are many other good ways to study the Bible—tracing a theme or doctrine, studying a whole book or a biblical character or a single word—and we’ll touch on book study and word study a little, but our focus is understanding a passage in its context.
Three Big Categories
Many people frame biblical interpretation in three broad categories, and they’re helpful to keep in mind. First, textual criticism: establishing what the text actually said. Second, interpretation: determining what the text meant in its original historical context, to its original audience. And third, application: determining what it means for us today. In short—What does the text say? What did it mean? And what does it mean for us now?
On the first: textual criticism can be unsettling when you first learn how our Bibles came to us, raising two questions—How can the Bible be accurate if there are many manuscripts that don’t all agree? And isn’t this really for scholars who know Greek? Two things. First, our doctrine of the Bible’s inspiration, inerrancy, authority, and sufficiency points in particular to the original manuscripts—what Paul, Peter, and the others actually wrote, which were divinely inspired. We don’t possess those originals; what we have are copies—close to six thousand copies of portions of the Greek New Testament, with more being discovered all the time (Daniel Wallace of Dallas Seminary heads an organization cataloging them, and the number keeps climbing). These copies don’t all agree, which is where textual criticism comes in—but the vast majority of the differences are minor. It’s a bit like our choice between “a” and “an” to smooth pronunciation; Greek has a “movable nu” added or dropped at the end of words for the same reason, and a huge number of variants amount to no more than that. Most differences are spelling variations with no impact on meaning. Second, yes, deep textual criticism requires Greek—but you can still get real value from this category without it, thanks to good tools, including the footnotes likely already in your Bible.
The bulk of your time goes to the second category, interpretation—understanding what the author intended to communicate to the original audience, through context, genre, structure, diagramming, word studies, and comparing versions. Then comes application: what a text written two thousand years ago and many miles away means for my life. Some texts apply almost directly—“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind” means much the same for us, though we may apply it in new ways (we have tools to love God with our minds that the first century lacked). Modern technology, medicine, and science raise questions Paul never anticipated, requiring hard work to apply his words. And some first-century matters—holy kisses, meat offered to idols, foot washing, head coverings—are harder to apply directly in our culture; rather than ignore them, we work to find the meaning behind them and bring that into our setting.
Prepare Your Heart and Mind
Many methods jump straight into textual criticism, but that’s not the best way to engage your heart with the Lord—and it’s a mistake to plunge into the intellectual work and forget why we’re doing this. We want to love the Lord and others, to grow, and to serve God. So before the academic steps, remember the theological presuppositions we discussed—our sinfulness, our finiteness, our need for grace and the Spirit’s illumination—and prepare your heart and mind, asking God’s supernatural help to understand, believe, feel, and rightly respond to the text. I’d encourage you to write out a brief prayer for illumination before you begin (see Matthew 11:25–26; Luke 24:45; John 3:27; Ephesians 1:17–19). Recall John 5:39–40, where the Jewish leaders searched the Scriptures diligently, thinking they had eternal life in them—yet these were the very Scriptures that spoke of Jesus, and they missed him. If we approach God’s Word in our own strength, we risk missing Jesus and missing the change of heart the Word is meant to bring.
Establish the Text
Even without Greek, this step is worth doing: you’re familiarizing yourself with differences among the manuscripts, which show up in the English translations. First, get a good study Bible—one with helpful footnotes—and see what it says about differences in the underlying Greek. I’d commend the NIV Zondervan Study Bible (edited by D. A. Carson, with Andy Naselli among the contributors; Naselli, who ministered here, also has a recent book on New Testament exegesis), the ESV Study Bible, the MacArthur Study Bible, the Reformation Study Bible, the Apologetics Study Bible, and our own Faithlife Study Bible. Two other especially helpful resources: the NET Bible, with extensive, approachable notes on translation and text-critical issues (produced out of Dallas Seminary), and the Lexham Textual Notes on the Bible, which we produce to make textual differences accessible to English readers. Take John 1:18 as an example: after “the only God, who is at the Father’s side,” many Bibles carry a footnote noting that some manuscripts read “the only Son.” So work through a few Bibles and study Bibles, look at their notes, and see where they flag a textual issue. (On the phrase “the most reliable manuscripts”: most scholars today hold that the earliest manuscripts are closest to the original—the fewest years elapsed—while the majority of our manuscripts are later and agree closely with one another, which is the basis for the King James; so “most reliable” usually corresponds to the oldest.)
Compare the Translations
Next, compare Bible translations. We have a wealth of excellent English translations with different philosophies, strengths, and weaknesses—but there’s no perfect translation; the original is perfect, the translations are not, and translation is inherently imprecise. Even English-to-English communication drifts as it’s passed along, and it’s harder across languages: there isn’t always an exact equivalent word, and idioms don’t transfer (we went through idioms as a family recently and the kids were baffled—“kill two birds with one stone” doesn’t mean killing birds; in Hebrew, to say someone was a hundred years old you’d say a “son of a hundred years,” which is nonsense rendered woodenly into English). So translators diverge: some stay as close as possible to the original words (accurate but sometimes less clear), others aim to capture the meaning (clearer but freer). Both have their trade-offs, which is why I’d consult one Bible nearer the word-for-word end and one nearer the meaning-for-meaning end.
One much-discussed area is gender language. When Paul addressed a church as “brothers,” our modern ears may hear only the men, but the Greek often used that term generically for a whole body of people. So some translations render it “brothers and sisters”—adding words not in the original at the word level but present at the meaning level—while more conservative translations like the ESV keep “brothers” and try to teach readers that it includes men and women. That’s a legitimate debate about reflecting how the Greek worked; tampering with the gender language used of God is a completely different category. (Not every translation is a good one—some are driven by theological or political agendas. The TNIV began veering in ways that raised alarms, though the 2011 NIV revision is a helpful, balanced translation.) It helps to picture a spectrum: interlinears (Greek with English words beneath, in Greek word order—barely readable but mirroring the original); literal translations (Young’s Literal, the Lexham English Bible); formal equivalence, word-for-word but smooth (NASB, KJV, and roughly the ESV); a mediating position balancing word-for-word and thought-for-thought (the NIV); functional or dynamic equivalence, thought-for-thought (the NLT); and, at the far end, paraphrases like the Living Bible and the Message, which have their place but aren’t really translations. Open several, note the differences, and—using a text-comparison tool if you have one—spot where they diverge. Back at John 1:18: the King James reads “the only begotten Son,” while many others read “God,” which matters greatly, because if the original was “God,” this is another text (like John 1:1) affirming that the Son is himself God.
Explore the Context
Now we move into interpretation, and a great place to start is context—what was going on when the text was written. Ask questions of your passage, and especially of the book it’s in. Take Philemon: Who wrote it? Paul. To whom? Primarily Philemon (but also Apphia, Archippus, and the church that meets in his home). When? Here we look for clues—Paul mentions he’s in prison, so we cross-reference his life to narrow the date, and Onesimus’s appearance in Colossians ties the two letters together (which is why they’re often studied and commented on together). Put on your detective hat and draw what you can from the text itself before jumping to tools—you gain more by investigating first and then checking yourself. When you do turn to tools, Bible introductions, a good Bible dictionary’s article on each book, and the opening pages of commentaries are all helpful. This matters because the circumstances behind a letter—persecution, uncertainty about the Lord’s coming, some specific problem—illuminate what the author was trying to do. And it helps to know not just the biblical history but the broader secular history of the period (the destruction of the temple, events in Rome), since these people lived amid real events that shed light on the text.
Identify the Genre
Genre tells us what type of literature we’re reading, and not all literature is interpreted the same way. The New Testament has a few kinds. The Epistles are letters (Philemon is essentially a personal note—you could almost have emailed it—from Paul to Philemon about Onesimus). Acts is history. The Gospels are a kind of biography of Jesus—though not a typical one, since they focus heavily on his final week; they’re really extended passion narratives with an introduction. And Revelation is apocalyptic prophecy, with its own rules—approach it like Paul’s letter to Philemon and you’ll end up confused. Within a passage, watch for literary devices too—metaphor, simile, hyperbole, parable. When Jesus calls Herod a fox, Herod isn’t literally an animal; he’s a man with some fox-like traits, and recognizing the metaphor keeps you on track. A simile is just a metaphor that uses “like” or “as” to signal the comparison.
Trace the Literary Context
This is a different kind of context—the literary or textual context, sometimes called the co-text. Here you look at the passage’s sentence and paragraph boundaries and how it fits into the surrounding units of thought. Most modern Bibles show paragraphing: John 1:18, for instance, sits within the paragraph of verses 15–18, which is part of the larger unit of verses 1–18 introducing the Word made flesh (the section headings, by the way, are uninspired—just someone’s helpful grouping). That paragraph is part of John’s Gospel, which is part of John’s writings, which is part of the New Testament. So situate your text within these nested units—What’s the point of this paragraph? Of these eighteen verses? Of John’s Gospel?—being sensitive to the structure and hierarchy of Scripture.
Diagram the Text
Finally, diagramming. There are a couple of approaches. The Reed-Kellogg method—what most of us learned (and forgot) in school—lays out subject, verb, and object, with modifiers hanging beneath, so you can see how the pieces relate; it’s well suited to a single sentence. A propositional display, by contrast, writes out lines of text and uses indentation to show which points are main and which are subordinate—better for a paragraph of several sentences. If diagramming isn’t your thing, at least identify the main verb and subject. Look first for the “kernel”—the subject-verb-object unit—and distinguish the main verb from verbs in dependent clauses. (“John hit the ball” is an independent clause and stands on its own; “when his sister threw it to him” is dependent and can’t.) In John 1:18, the first main clause is “No one has seen God”—subject “no one,” verb “has seen,” object “God”—then the conjunction “but” introduces a second clause whose subject and verb are “the Son…has made him known,” with the relative clause “who is himself God” modifying “Son.” Circling the subjects and verbs, however you do it, helps you make sense of what’s going on.
We’re about out of time—we’ll continue in the coming weeks. For next week, don’t work through the whole handout; just pick one or two steps you feel equipped to try on John 3:16, write down some thoughts, and we’ll work through the passage together as a group. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your Word, and for the challenge and opportunity of digging into it and understanding it. Equip us and give us the diligence to apply our minds to loving you through studying your Word. In Jesus’ name, amen.