Dean Anderson

As you can see from the title of this thread, in our normal speech we often use the rhetorical device of ironically saying the opposite of what we mean.

Things we like are 'wicked' or 'bad' (depending on how old you are).

Sometimes we use idioms that are simply non-sequitors when taken out of context. A common thing amongst today's generation is to call something that they don't like 'Gay'.

How do we know when the Biblical authors are using these types of construction?

After all, to use the 'Gay' example, a difference of merely 50 years could render the meaning of the sentence Bob's house is a gay place with three completely different readings. It could be calling Bob's house a happy place, or a place where homosexuals meet, or a rubbish place...

Since we cannot date many biblical texts to within even a 50 year range, how do we determine what they mean when they talk about things?

I would assume that we could compare them with other texts in order to see where the language is similar, but we would need a lot of texts to be able to glean such idiomatic turns of phrase - and such turns of phrase can completely alter or even reverse the percieved meaning of a passage.

IamMoose

Interesting point .. an oft cited example is the famous 'camel through the eye of a needle,' whose exact meaning has been debated hotly over the centuries. In that case, though, I suppose the point that is being made is the same, even though we don't know for definite whether the camel in question is a dromedary or a coarse type of thread, or indeed, whether the 'needle' is a real needle, or some gates.

(another example is the word 'generation' which some Christians tell me can mean 'race'.. they often use this as an excuse for Christ not having returned during the 'generation' in our sense of the word he was talking to at the time).

I should imagine examples of these things exist throughout the bible, but for fairnesses sake I wonder how much the overall meaning of the NT is compromised by them. I can't think of any circumstances in which its overall message could be diluted or distorted by a misrendering, although individual tenets and parables certainly could.