Exegetical Fallacies

But the heart of the issue is that semantics, meaning, is more than the meaning of words.

More than two decades ago, Frank Stagg wrote an article about “The Abused Aorist.”[3] The problem as he saw it was that competent scholars were deducing from the presence of an aorist verb that the action in question was “once for all” or “completed.” The problem arises in part because the aorist is often described as the punctiliar tense. Careful grammarians, of course, operating within the traditional categories, understood and explained that this does not mean the aorist could be used only for point actions. The aorist, after all, is well-named: it is aorist, without a place, undefined. It simply refers to the action itself without specifying whether the action is unique, repeated, ingressive, instantaneous, past, or accomplished.

La filología es el ojo de la aguja a través del cual debe pasar todo camello teológico para entrar en el cielo de la teología”2.

Si cometemos un error al interpretar una de las obras de Shakespeare, o no medimos bien un verso de Spencer, es poco probable que esto acarree consecuencias eternas; pero no podemos aceptar una negligencia semejante en la interpretación de las Escrituras. Estamos hablando de los pensamientos de Dios: estamos obligados a hacer todo lo posible para entenderlos bien y explicarlos con claridad.

A little self-doubt will do no harm and may do a great deal of good: we will be more open to learn and correct our mistakes. But too much will shackle and stifle us with deep insecurities and make us so much aware of methods that we may overlook truth itself.

This does not mean real knowledge is impossible. Rather, it means that real knowledge is close to impossible if we fail to recognize our own assumptions, questions, interests, and biases; but if we recognize them and, in dialogue with the text, seek to make allowances for them, we will be better able to avoid confusing our own world-views with those of the biblical writers.

False assumptions about technical meaning In this fallacy, an interpreter falsely assumes that a word always or nearly always has a certain technical meaning—a meaning usually derived either from a subset of the evidence or from the interpreter’s personal systematic theology.

But one should be suspicious of all statements about the nature of “the Hebrew mind” or “the Greek mind” if those statements are based on observations about the semantic limitations of words of the language in question.

we should be a trifle suspicious when any piece of exegesis tries to establish the meaning of a word by appealing first of all to its usage in classical Greek rather than to its usage in Hellenistic Greek.

my point is that we cannot responsibly assume that etymology is related to meaning. We can only test the point by discovering the meaning of a word inductively.

I am simply saying that the meaning of a word cannot be reliably determined by etymology, or that a root, once discovered, always projects a certain semantic load onto any word that incorporates that root.

I state that exegesis is concerned with actually interpreting the text, whereas hermeneutics is concerned with the nature of the interpretative process.

The fundamental danger with all critical study of the Bible lies in what hermeneutical experts call distanciation. Distanciation is a necessary component of critical work; but it is difficult and sometimes costly.

but one that demands that we learn to move toward unanimity in the crucial business of thinking God’s thoughts after him. This, surely, is part of the discipline of loving God with our minds.

the remaining debates among those who hold a high view of Scripture will be exegetical and hermeneutical, nothing else.

The essence of all critical thought, in the best sense of that abused expression, is the justification of opinions. A critical interpretation of Scripture is one that has adequate justification—lexical, grammatical, cultural, theological, historical, geographical, or other justification.

We are dealing with God’s thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly.

Many local Bible teachers and preachers have never been forced to confront alternative interpretations at full strength; and because they would lose a certain psychological security if they permitted their own questions, aroused by their own reading of Scripture, to come into full play, they are unlikely to throw over received traditions. But

It is all too easy to read the traditional interpretations we have received from others into the text of Scripture. Then we may unwittingly transfer the authority of Scripture to our traditional interpretations and invest them with a false, even an idolatrous, degree of certainty. Because

But tragic is the situation when the preacher or teacher is perpetually unaware of the blatant nonsense he utters, and of the consequent damage he inflicts on the church of God. Nor