reading scripture

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what is the best way to read and understand the bible. I’ve ruled out literalism, especially with the prophetic aspects ( daniel, revelations ) Sola scriptura and Prima Scriptura seem to be untenable, illogical, and devoid of biblical, or any other, support. What’s left. I want to learn what the bible really says. Please no gnostic devices, or comparing scripture with scripture. And please don’t say ‘pray real hard to the holy spirit’ or anything like that. private interpretation, even through ‘the holy spirit’ is impossibly problematic.
 
Couple of suggestions: Making Senses Out Of Scripture by Mark Shea, which tells of the four different senses in which scripture can be understood, and…

Inside the Bible by Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J. , in which Father Baker gives a synopsis of each of the 73 books of the bible, including its place in the bible, the date and author (if known), the theme of the book, a summary, the theology of that book, an outline and a prominent verse as a reflection.

Yes, more reading, but you will be guided by the teaching and manner of the Church whose members produced the bible.
 
I highly recommend reading Scripture with a real good Bible commentary that is very traditional. The Haydock Bible is very good as well as the Navarre Bible and the Ignatius Study Bible. I get the most from commentaries from the Church Fathers and other medieval commentators, but that is not always easy reading. With the commentaries that I just mentioned you will find a balance of interpretation from the literal to the spiritual.
 
At the EWTN website, in the document library, there is a (needlessly) lengthy document called The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.

I tried to read it and got cross eyed trying to understand where that document was taking me.

What it is, it spends a lot of time looking at different approaches to studying scripture and lists the benefits and shortcomings of each of the methods.

It was put out by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which is the advisory to the Pope and to the Church on the interpretation of scripture.

There is a carefully transparent section towards the back saying that people can submit questions to them about the Bible and they will work on it. Surely, this is not meant to make them open to questions from around the globe. Perhaps they are addressing mainly the bishops and maybe the university and seminary communities.

They wrap it up by saying that the best way to read and study the Bible is by having a commentary nearby. That’s it. But, they said that without recommendations or references to which commentaries to consult.

They point out that the various exegetical methods, like historical critical analysis, literary analysis, feminist exegesis, etc.ALL fall short of describing the Church’s method of reading the scripture. So,get a commentary.

Oh, I didn’t fully grasp that document until well more than ten years after I first picked it up.And, as usual, you only hear the occasional person in these forums even mention this critical document.

For the last two or three years, I have been reading the commentaries put out by the Jewish Publication Society. They’re a bit expensive, but they are very scholarly. They work at the level of the text, to clarify what the most probable meaning of the text is. There is a layer of commentary that is (for all I know) typical of the conservative Jewish branch of Judaism

The commentaries on the Torah (Gen,Ex,Lev,Num, Deut) are the core of their commentaries. Each of those volumes was typically over 10 years in preparation. They run around 400 to 500 pages each. I can tell you that they are not exhaustive of the issues that reside in the text.

If you go down this path, you will be exposed to mountain of Hebrew words. Interestingly,there is no index to these five large volumes. The index could easily run 800 pages, if an exhaustive index was prepared.

I have other of their scriptural commentaries. I was surprised to learn that the Jews think that book of Ester is a very funny book.History just did not work the way it is described in Ester. The heavy handed treatment of subjects in the book is done for comic effect.

Beyond this, in other threads people have listed their preferences for study bibles and commentaries, like the Navarre Commentry. I am not familiar with the latter. It may be worth the hefty price, but I have not run across anybody quoting from it, directly or indirectly, on this website.

I also have a cheap ($20 at the time I picked it up) one-volume version of the centuries old Matthew Henry Commentary on the Bible. This has some very interesting and scholarly meditations and insights from the Christian perspective, as far as I’ve seen and gotten into it.

Maybe the often mentioned Jeff Cavins Adventure Series Survey of the Bible is something you may want to get and have on your shelf.

I mentioned above, I don’t think there’s any single, “best” commentary. And, as for the four senses of scripture mentioned in a previous post, I don’t know of any study bible or commentary that offers an exhaustive treatment of those prespectives on Scripture. That’s my idea – maybe you want to write that book yourself.

Dr. Mary Healy is a scripture scholar. I read something she said that there are great commentaries on the Bible – in Latin – at the Vatican. Those resources haven’t been tapped for the average Catholic in the pew, according to her.

If you delve into the Jewish commentaries, from JPS, you will encounter some obvious and some not-so-obvious arguments against Christianity in their commentary. For example, in regards to the incident with Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, they point out that not only THAT human sacrifice would never be pleasing to God, they extrapolate that NO human sacrifice (hint: Jesus) would ever be acceptable to God. That is an obvious polemical “leap” that they cannot justify persuasively to a committed Christian.

They also rally around Moses as the ONE greatest prophet of all time, who makes any other (hint: Jesus) such prophet or lawgiver unnecessary, according to them. Again, more polemics. Judaism admits that it has said many things to provoke Christians, particularly about scripture interpretation.

My suggestion, get a quality commentary and work on it. TAke all the time you need.
 
Don’t discount literalism. The Bible is made up of words and they mean things. But the Bible is deeper than just the modern meaning of the words on the page and literalism is just one tool.

And please don’t discount the workings of the Holy Spirit. The Church fathers read scripture differently from our analyitical style of reading. They let the Holy Spirit guide them in ways that many of us don’t.

So here are a few suggestions…
  1. Discover the authors intention. God is the primary author of scripture but the humans who wrote down the story and the words were writing to a certain audience and were trying to convey a specific message. We must be concious of the political, social and economic conditions under which the authors and their intended audience operated. We must also be concious of what type of literature it is - poetic, didactic, allegorical, historical narrative, etc. We must also be concious of the modes of speech used at the time, jargon and laungauge. Some good books about the terrain, weather, farming techniques, manner of dress, etc., such as “Mannger snd Customs in the Bible” by Victor H. Matthews is valuable.
  2. Pay attention to the unity of scripture. Take for example baptism. Noah and the flood prefigures baptism. Ezekiel prophesies about baptism. Jesus speaks to Nicodemus about the need for baptism. Paul is baptizes as is the Ethieopian eunich. 1 Peter mentions baptsim in the context of Noah, the flood and the ark. There is a unity there, a thread which should have a consistent meaning. If you find one goes off on what appears to be a tangent, you have to ask yourself if you are understanding it correctly and be humble enough to ask for help or seek out authoritative sources of Church teaching.
And remember that the Bible was given to us in a certain order for a reason. The Book of Revelation is at the end for a reason understanding it assumes that you have read everything that comes before it. Read it always in light of the order of the books and unity of the whole.
  1. Read scripture within the living Tradition of the Church. Consider the way of life of the Apostles, disciples and Church fathers. Scripture is not just a lecture, it is a way of life, a guide on how to choose God, live according to his commandments and ultimately get into Heaven. You have to read scripture within the context of how the Church functions, what it does, what it teaches, its rules and its sacraments.
  2. Read the Bible in light of the four senses of scripture:
  • Literal Sense: Don’t discount this. Pay attention to the words. Does the author say “Disciple” or “Apostle”? Does he say “Saved” or “Redeemed”. What do the words say?
  • Allegorical Sense: How do the persons, places and events point to Christ. All scripture points to Christ.
  • Moral Sense: How does what you are reading point to our moral life as individuals and as members of the Church
  • Anagogical Sense: How does what you are reading point to heaven, to the end of the creation and to Christ’s ultimate fulfillment of his promise to return?
Keep these ideas in mind and start reading. My recommendation is not to push it in terms of trying to understand every passage. One can spend hours struggling over one particular passage and if that starts to happen, just move on. If you cannot understand a particular passage after a few tries, then maybe God does not want you to undersand it right then. He will reveal it to you when he is ready and likely when you least expect it.

-Tim-
 
A consideable portion of the OT is poetic. That presents a couple problems in interpretation.

As we understand poetry, you have a “license” to be poetic, to express things abstractly etc. and connect things in creative ways. But, what purpose does poetry serve in scripture?

What parts of the OT ARE poetry and is poetry used in different ways? This is a tough subject to master, just by your average “read the bible in a year” approach to reading scripture.

The Jewish commentaries point out that Judaism does NOT have an official interpretation of any scripture. What does this mean? Well, in Jewish writings they say that you can find 70 (once thought to be the number of nations on the earth) or more interpretations or viewpoints on any passage. So, they preserve all this and study it as a reflection of, if nothing else, how rich the meaning and message of scripture is. Jewish scholarship often has contradictory interpretations of scripture, which they find perfectly acceptable, to look at scripture from all points of view, to NOT overlook anything that God may be communicating in it.

Of course, they exclude any CHRISTIAN/CATHOLIC interpretation, as you would expect.
Only THOSE are wrong, of course.

Make the reading and study of scripture your lifelong task. In Judaism, the study of the Torah is the VERY primary activity of one’s life. The Jews proudly call themselves “people of the book.” Paragraph 108 of the Catechism declares that Catholics are NOT people of the book (without explaining who these people of the book are; it took me a few years to figure that out — I can’t understand why the bishops put such an obscure declaration in the Catechism – sure Catholics are not Jews. Big deal. What am I missing?)
 
I am by no means an expert in Bible study. But, in my readings, I have come to a hypothesis of what is going on in part of the Old Testament.

We know or hear that Jesus fulfilled the Law, the commands of the Old Testament. What could that possibly mean? I think, first of all, it means just what it says. When the OT says to love God, Jesus loved God more than anybody else.

When the OT says to love your neighbor, Jesus loved people more than anybody else.

So, you read this commandment or that law or such and such a rule, Jesus is the perfect fulfillment of each of those.

So – and this is just me talking – when you read each one of those dry rules and statutes, I think they’re talking about Jesus. If you interpret the OT properly, as Jesus did on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, they are talking about Jesus.

Jesus not only obeyed these laws, he fulfilled them.
 
The answer to the original question is contained in my post #4. The “Interpretation” document that I referred to says there is no one single method to be used for reading and understanding scripture. That is the definitive answer from the PBC.

There’s nothing wrong with starting to read the Bible from the beginning. The usual fear is that you will get bogged down in Exodus or Leviticus, because of mind-numbing boredom. I didn’t find it that way using the Jewish commentaries. So, some popular advice is to start with reading a gospel.

Sure, whatever.

But, you must do “something” with the Old Testament, and so it’s a good place to start, actually. If there is a good Christian Catholic commentary on the OT, then I’d like to know what it is. Otherwise, I still recommend the JPS commentaries.

What’s interesting about Deuteronomy is that it re-writes some of the commands in Leviticus. Lev is a book written for the temple priests (descendents of Aaron), and so there is an emphasis on them as opposed to the Levites, who were very peripheral in function at the Temple. There is a BIG, almost radical departure in Deuteronomy, in that the Aaronic priesthood virtually disappears and the Levites are running the Temple. Not only does that big difference come about, but there’s no internal explanation for the change.

The external reason for the change is the belief that times had changed, and the rules for running the wilderness Temple had to be rewritten for the new reality of an established,permanent Temple in Jerusalem.

It’s certainly interesting, if not significant that the laws of the “holiness code” in Leviticus seem to have been dropped in Deuteronomy. It’s hard to figure out why. Why would the explicit condemnation of incest and homosexuality in Lev be dropped in Deut?

It’s a very interesting Bible, to say the very least.

Another landmark document from the Pontifical Biblical Commission is the paper entitled The Jewish People and their Scripture, again available in the document library of the www.ewtn.com website.

In the introduction, Benedict XVI makes the point that it IS worthwhile to study Jewish commentaries on scripture, by the way, so as not to overlook the centuries of Jewish thought on the scriptures.
 
Crumpy said:
I am by no means an expert in Bible study. But, in my readings, I have come to a hypothesis of what is going on in part of the Old Testament.

We know or hear that Jesus fulfilled the Law, the commands of the Old Testament. What could that possibly mean? I think, first of all, it means just what it says. When the OT says to love God, Jesus loved God more than anybody else.

When the OT says to love your neighbor, Jesus loved people more than anybody else.

So, you read this commandment or that law or such and such a rule, Jesus is the perfect fulfillment of each of those.

So – and this is just me talking – when you read each one of those dry rules and statutes, I think they’re talking about Jesus. If you interpret the OT properly, as Jesus did on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, they are talking about Jesus.

Jesus not only obeyed these laws, he fulfilled them.
Click to expand...
Yes you are absolutely correct Crumpy, Jesus is the fulfillment of the OT. Hence the only acceptable interpretation thereof before God the Father. (Note He now sits at the Right Hand of the Father) Any other is bogus. In this it’s about the integrity of Christ, for of the Lord did these revelations come, in the OT and it is only the Lord that can fulfill them. Only you can be you and only the Lord God can be the Lord God.

In the OT the Lord God showed, who and what He is. In the Son of man He completed it in the Son of man. Therefore He is the Lord.
 
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