Daily Bible Nugget #642, John 7:52

The Nugget:

John 7:52  They answered and said unto him, Art thou also of Galilee? Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.

My Comment:

I suspect that very few who read John 7:52 posted above will see the point. I think John as he wrote this verse had a smile on his face. If it were me, I could hardly contain my laughter at the subtle humor John employed here. This has everything to do with knowing the Rules of Interpretation. Jesus knew them. John knew them. The scribes and Pharisees did not! And neither did Satan when he quoted the Bible to Jesus as reported in Matthew 4:6.

It has been some time since I last wrote here about the Rules of Interpretation which must be followed carefully to arrive at the correct meaning of any written document, including the Bible.

I just noticed that my numbering of the rules as found in the October 2010 Archives to the right of this page do not correspond to my numbering as given in my resource, The Ultimate Cross Reference Treasury. This post is about Rule 6 in the Archives which is Rule 5 in the UCRT.

Interpret a particular passage in harmony with all other passages which may have a bearing upon the subject. All relevant evidence must be taken into account to arrive at the correct interpretation.

I notice that in the October 2010 Archives I have given a longer statement for this rule:

Interpret a particular passage in harmony with ALL other passages which may have a bearing upon the subject. This is exceedingly important. You cannot cherry-pick your evidence. All relevant evidence must be taken into account to come up with the correct interpretation.

Groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Roman Catholics, Calvinists, Seventh Day Adventists, the Church of Christ, and many others flagrantly violate this rule and come up with very mistaken interpretations of the Bible.

To successfully find ALL the relevant passages about a subject, you MUST do Real Bible Study and make full and careful use of such tools as an exhaustive concordance to the Bible (Strong’s Concordance is a good choice) and a source of full and complete cross references to every verse in the Bible (such as The Treasury of Scripture KnowledgeThe New Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, or Nelson’s Cross Reference Guide to the Bible).

 If you haven’t made full use of these resources (or their equivalent, including the now available digital resources like the e-Sword Bible Software and The Ultimate Cross Reference Treasury) don’t kid yourself into supposing you have properly considered ALL the passages pertaining to the subject, issue, or doctrine you are considering.

Now, if you have read carefully what I just wrote above, you may feel that you are among the many whose toes I just stepped on!

That is why, now once again, this Real Bible Study site has a comment box below that now actually works. Facebook arbitrarily (in my view) turned it off some while back but I have now met their requirements for this site so they graciously and quite promptly turned the visibility of comments back on. So feel free to chime in.

 

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