Bart Ehrman in Misquoting Jesus:
“…the more I studied, the more I saw that reading a text
necessarily involves interpreting a text. I suppose when I start-
ed my studies I had a rather unsophisticated view of reading:
that the point of reading a text is simply to let the text “speak
for itself,” to uncover the meaning inherent in its words. The
reality, I came to see, is that meaning is not inherent and texts
do not speak for themselves. If texts could speak for
themselves, then everyone honestly and openly reading a text
would agree on what the text says. But interpretations of texts
abound, and people in fact do not agree on what the texts
mean. This is obviously true of the texts of scripture: simply
look at the hundreds, or even thousands, of ways people inter-
pret the book of Revelation, or consider all the different Chris-
tian denominations, filled with intelligent and well-meaning
people who base their views of how the church should be
organized and function on the Bible, yet all of them coming to
radically different conclusions (Baptists, Pentecostals, Presby-
terians, Roman Catholics, Appalachian snake-handlers, Greek
Orthodox, and on and on).” (216)
Every act of reading is also an act of interpretation. There is no such thing as what the text says, it is always what you think the text says, which is coloured by your presuppositions and biases. The only honest approach to getting at the intended meaning of a text (if that is even possible, given that we are 2000 years removed from the text and imposing an alien meaning on it is inevitable) is to not divorce it from it’s historical, social, political, economic, cultural, and literary context; always read a text to understand what it meant to it’s intended audience, and not to appropriate it to yourself, for in the process you will have altered the text. Always read a text to be intellectually fulfilled and not emotionally pacified.
Works Cited
Ehrman, Bart D. Misquoting Jesus: The Story of Who Changed the New Testament and Why. HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.
