INTRO: I am undertaking a large project and it is to go through the Book of Hebrews. It is a major undertaking. One needs to have an overview of the book one's mind before beginning. With an overview and outline, I usually diagram the material I will be working with grammatically and that is a very big task. And then one has to seek to understand why the book is written, to whom it was written, what the circumstances of the people were when it was written, and that requires some understanding of the date when it was written. All this needs to be done before beginning.
Let me say this at the outset of this series that I hold to the Majority Text of the NT. Almost, if not all modern translations use what is called the eclectic text. The main reason I do not use those texts is that if the oldest MSS are best, that means for the majority of the Church age we did not have the best texts. I find that unacceptable. So I hold to the view that the Lord divinely protected the best texts, and second, the Lord divinely saw to it that the books that should be in the Bible are in it. That is very brief, but covers the major issues of the NT text.
Now, one of the most difficult points in interpreting the letters of the NT that the writer is writing for a reason or various reasons, and the writer and the readers know what is being addressed. But the interpreter, interpreting some 2,000 years later, not having some or most of that information must try to reconstruct the historical situation. |
