To see as they saw

Church history tells a long story of people interpreting the Bible—sometimes skillfully, sometimes less so. But what makes for skillful Biblical interpretation?

Faithful interpretation seeks to understand Biblical passages the way later Biblical authors interpreted those passages. We can trace this process back to the first Biblical author (in canonical sequence), Moses himself.

Moses may have been the first to write Scripture, but he interpreted events that happened long before his own life and recorded them in Genesis. In our interpretation, we should mimic the ways in which people like Moses, David, Isaiah, John, and Paul understood the world, life, and earlier Scriptures. We want to learn their perspective so we can adopt it for ourselves.

Foundation for interpretation

Several questions arise as we contemplate interpreting the Bible. One of the first is simply which books should be regarded as Biblical—the New Testament canon isn’t disputed, but what about the Apocryphal books the Roman Catholic Church considers “deutero-canonical”?

The definitive treatment of this question can be found in Roger Beckwith’s book The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church. The title of the book suggests the interpretive process I’m advocating: We not only want to interpret the Old Testament the way the New Testament authors did, we also want to have the same canon the New Testament authors had.

Beckwith marshals the relevant evidence on this question as he offers logical arguments that teach readers how to think carefully and critically. Great books make great readers, and those who read Beckwith’s book will become better readers, thinkers, and writers.

Beckwith deftly guides the reader through the ancient Jewish and Patristic evidence on the Old Testament canon, showing that the synagogue never regarded the Apocryphal and pseudepigraphical books as Scripture and though Apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings are sometimes referenced in the New Testament, these quotations are never introduced with the kinds of formulas that precede Biblical quotations. The New Testament authors quote only the 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament as Scripture.

Readers looking for a digest of Beckwith’s work can consult his article “The Canon of the Old Testament” in the ESV Study Bible.

Old and New Testament theologies

Once we have determined which books to interpret, the big questions involve how to interpret them. The Golden Rule teaches us to do unto others as we would have done unto ourselves. The Golden Rule should also apply to interpretation: We should read other people, even dead people, the way we want to be read. When we speak and write, we want people to understand what we intend to communicate. Thus, when we read the Bible, or any other literature, we should seek to understand what the human authors intended to communicate.

Crucial components of understanding include knowing what words mean and understanding the grammatical relationships between those words when forming phrases and sentences. To know the meaning of words, we have to understand how speakers used them at different points in history. The word gay meant joyful and happy back in the 1950s. It means something different today. All this to say, we have to engage in historical-grammatical interpretation that seeks to understand the intent of the human author.

Two books that helped me tremendously with this aspect of interpretation were Paul House’s Old Testament Theology and George Eldon Ladd’s A Theology of the New Testament. House goes book by book through the Old Testament, and Ladd does the same for the New.

These authors offer an invaluable guided tour of the Bible. When I was a young scholar, I would read a portion of Genesis then read House to get his guidance on what I had just read, often revisiting key statements in that portion of the Biblical text. I learned so much about the Bible from House and Ladd.

I valued the experience of reading these books alongside the Bible so much that they informed my own attempt to help readers in a similar way. In my book God’s Glory in Salvation Through Judgment, I also go book by book through the Old and New Testaments.

A Pauline theology

In addition to House and Ladd, I also found immense help from Thomas Schreiner’s Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ. What House and Ladd did for the Old and New Testaments, Schreiner does for Paul’s letters.

Schreiner insists that we must understand Paul’s letters within the context of his missionary endeavors, and he shows that Paul believed all God’s promises in the Old Testament find fulfillment in Christ. Christ has been given all authority, and His followers should engage in the task of making disciples of people from all nations. This theological insight animated Paul, and it should animate those who would embrace his message today.

As we seek to understand and embrace the interpretive perspective of the Biblical authors, attempting to see as they saw, to think as they did, we must read the Biblical texts from a sympathetic perspective. The books I have discussed here do that, and they can help you do it too.

—James M. Hamilton is a professor of Biblical theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Senior Pastor of Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. In addition to being the author of more than a dozen books, he co-hosts the BibleTalk podcast. His next book, In the Beginning Was the Word, is on John’s Gospel and will be released in July of 2025.