Originally posted by Mountain Man
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1. In studying the history of Christian theology I have very often been struck by how often Christians of a particular time would take a particular, idiosyncratic, interpretation of a biblical verse for granted. They would assume it was "obvious" that verse X meant Y generally without considering other possible interpretations. And they would often do so unaware that no other Christians in history had held that interpretation. As a result, I became very very convinced of the importance of always knowing all the possible interpretations when trying to ascertain the correct one. Anyone who starts out assuming they definitely know the correct interpretation is going methodologically wrong immediately. So it is very important to "start with... every proposed interpretation... on equal footing" as you put it.
2. There are many, many, things that can be taken into consideration when one moves on to evaluating the likelihood of different possible interpretations being correct (i.e. the intent of the original author). Again, I have been consistently struck when studying the history of Christian biblical interpretation, how easy it is for Christian theologians to only take some things into consideration and not others and thus arrive at an interpretation of a verse that they prefer. It's very easy to say "I've thought up an argument for why my interpretation is best", but very very hard to reach a position where you've exhaustively analyzed all possible arguments for all possible interpretations and judged one interpretation to be superior. It requires an immense deal of historical and socio-cultural background knowledge to make accurate judgments about how the culture of the time might have impacted the meaning of the words and the references being made. Rather than "there is no reliable method for determining which is probably the correct one" as you put it, I would phrase it as "Christians almost always underestimate the difficulties and complexities involved in determining the correct interpretation, and tend to heavily rely on both their English translations and the theological teachings of their local church".
3. It is not always possible to determine the correct interpretation (i.e. the intent of the original author). In cases where it really isn't possible to make a definitive judgment as to the correct interpretation, the methodologically correct thing to do is to "throw our hands up in despair" as you put it. I've noticed that conservative Christians are strongly resistant to doing this even where the evidence seems to clearly warrant it.
I have strong opinions about the correct interpretations of many parts of the bible because I spent years researching the topic. In my opinion, the average conservative evangelical Christian is substantially wrong (unbiblical) on nearly all major points of theology and is interpreting nearly all theologically important parts of the NT wrongly (correct interpretations IMO can be found in a combination of modern socio-cultural commentaries, New Perspective on Paul scholarship, and the Eastern Orthodox theological tradition). For the most part the average conservative evangelical Christian would have never once in their lives ever heard of or thought of the interpretations that I think are the correct ones.
I would guess that you and I, MM, probably agree very little on the correct interpretation of virtually any important biblical passage. I would guess that you probably had never heard of or thought of the interpretations I would hold for the most part. But we both believe we have good reasons for thinking our interpretations are correct.
As such, I think critical thinkers and skeptics are right to emphasize the sheer difficulty of reaching the correct interpretations of biblical passages, since to this day informed experts have massive disagreements on the interpretations of all important passages.
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