David Campbell wrote:
>
> > If we don't start with some anchoring in what the human writers
> >intended then we open up texts to all sorts of guesses about what the text
> >"really" means and start reading into it our own meanings - which we will of
> >course think are what God really meant.
>
> Although I agree that the original understanding of the author is extremely
> important to understanding the text, there seem to be exceptions. A few
> texts explicitly assert that those present at the time did not understand,
> such as John 11:50 or 12:16. In the former, even the speaker was unaware
> of the full import of his words. By the time he wrote, John had figured
> out the importance of these. However, OT prophecy of NT or eschatological
> events certainly could have been beyond the understanding of the author.
In part this is because the full meaning of some OT texts is _given_ to
them by Christ. E.g., when Jesus cites the story of the burning bush as proof
of the resurrection he isn't uncovering some hidden meaning but putting new meaning into
the story.
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 11 2000 - 16:06:47 EST