Do we need to analyze the Bible?

When you speak, you don’t pause to weigh your verb tenses. You don’t ask whether this clause should take a subjunctive or whether that noun needs the genitive rather than the dative. You just talk. And when you write casually, an email, a text, a letter to a friend, the same is largely true. You say what you mean the way it occurs to you, and if you’re clumsy about it, someone else usually has to point that out before you notice.

It is reasonable to assume the New Testament authors wrote the same way. Paul was not sitting at his desk consulting a grammar as he dictated. John was not weighing each participle against a style guide. They wrote the way people write, in the moment, saying what they meant to say, without treating their own letters as an exercise in careful composition. The proof is in the text itself. John’s Greek is simple, almost childlike in its vocabulary and sentence structure. The Greek of Hebrews is dense, literary, carefully balanced, the kind of prose a trained rhetorician produces. Neither author was more or less careful than the other. They were simply different men, writing the way they each naturally wrote.

If that’s true, a reasonable question follows. Why should we treat their grammar as though every construction carries deliberate weight? If the authors themselves weren’t fussing over the fine points as they wrote, what right do we have to fuss over them now?

There are two answers, the first of which carries significant theological weight.

We hold that Scripture is inspired. This means that the Spirit of God superintended the whole process, from the author’s pen to the final text.¹ The human author wrote the way he would naturally write. And what came out was, in every particular, precisely what God intended to be written, down to the word.² This is why Jesus said that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.³ Each word is intended by God and assured by the work of His Spirit as the human author wrote. Where a human author is constrained by time and the demands of the moment to get something written, God is not. Where a human author lacks knowledge of all things and can’t always be certain that what they are writing is perfectly accurate, God knows all things. Where a human may have competing motivations that can undermine a message, God’s character is immutable, and His purposes never change. His involvement in the process of writing scripture guarantees that what the human author wrote corresponded with what God Himself wanted written, not by means of dictation, but by working through the human author to bring about His divine purposes. The Spirit’s intention does not depend on the author’s craft.

The second answer is more practical. Even if you don’t hold to the inspiration or inerrancy of scripture, we are two thousand years and countless arguments removed from authors. Since then, theologians, pastors, and commentators have disagreed, sometimes sharply, over what a specific verse means, and those disagreements typically turn on the wording of a text: the force of a genitive, the aspect of a verb, the antecedent of a pronoun, the structure of a clause, and so on. If we, as the church, are to handle the word of truth accurately, then we need the ability to think through these arguments and discussions on their own terms. We need to investigate the claims made to assess their value and strength. We need to compare and consider the arguments together as they are not always mutually exclusive. It is irresponsible and lazy to resolve disagreements like these by choosing the commentator whose name you recognize, or whose writing you find most persuasive on the page. The only way through a genuine exegetical dispute is to go back to the construction itself and ask what it can mean, what it cannot mean, and why. This means we need to be able to analyze the text, consider the grammar, and understand what has been written. This is possible only with explicit knowledge of how the grammar works.

While the Greco-Roman world of the first century lived and moved in Greek, as time has passed, fewer and fewer people in the church have known Greek. First, the world transitioned to Latin, and more recently into a variety of other languages, the most important of which today is probably English. As languages have evolved or arisen, translations have been made to facilitate Bible reading for those who don’t know the original languages. This means that arguments about what a text means often start with a translation rather than the original text. That means we assume that the Greek or Hebrew says exactly the same thing as the translation. A poor understanding of the Greek or Hebrew will then allow us to read those assumptions back into the original language, and the result is that the authority of the Greek or Hebrew is used to defend unsound arguments and conclusions. Untangling this requires both an organic understanding of the language, i.e., the ability to read it without reference to translated texts, and the ability to understand and explain how the construction can and cannot be used to reach certain conclusions. Today, this knowledge is in decline, and it is the responsibility of the church to reclaim these skills. Nobody else will do it for us.

The inspiration and inerrancy of scripture assume a precision that you and I might not use in our own communication. The church’s understanding of its theology rests on deep analysis, thoughtful reflection, and careful argumentation and debate that have unfolded for centuries. Only those who hold the scriptures to be what they truly are, the word of God,⁴ care enough to read and study what God says about Himself, His redemptive plan, and how we are to live in His world so as to please Him.

Footnotes

1. See 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:20-21 for the classic biblical statement of this doctrine. ↩

2. This is the historic Protestant doctrine of verbal, plenary inspiration: inspiration extends to the very words of the text, not merely the general ideas, and to the whole of Scripture, not selected portions. ↩

3. Matthew 4:4, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3. ↩

4. 1 Thessalonians 2:13. ↩