Brian2
Veteran Member
none of this addresses my post. However.
There are no “earlier texts” for Jesus.
I’m taking an exegetical approach. Anthropology is part of that approach. The issue of divine provenance is immaterial to exegesis. It only applies to to how we feel about what the texts say; it does not inform what the texts say.
Maybe I am not doing exegesis then. Certainly not the exegesis that you are talking about.
Divine provenance is important in what the full picture of the text means, and later scriptures in that regard do speak to the meaning of certain texts.
Exegesis.
From the site above I got this quote which tells of the differing exegetical methods. I see the historical setting and subsequent meaning as informative but not definitive for the meaning of the text.
Christianity[edit]
Main article: Biblical hermeneutics
Views[edit]
The main Christian exegetical methods are historical-grammatical, historical criticism, revealed, and rational.
The historical-grammatical method is a Christian hermeneutical method that strives to discover the Biblical author's original intended meaning in the text.[3] It is the primary method of interpretation for many conservative Protestant exegetes who reject the historical-critical method to various degrees (from the complete rejection of historical criticism of some fundamentalist Protestants to the moderated acceptance of it in the Catholic Church since Pope Pius XII),[4] in contrast to the overwhelming reliance on historical-critical interpretation, often to the exclusion of all other hermeneutics, in liberal Christianity.
Historical criticism also known as the historical-critical method or higher criticism, is a branch of literary criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts in order to understand "the world behind the text".[5][6] This is done to discover the text's primitive or original meaning in its original historical context and its literal sense.[7]
Revealed exegesis considers that the Holy Spirit inspired the authors of the scriptural texts,[citation needed] and so the words of those texts convey a divine revelation. In this view of exegesis, the principle of sensus plenior applies — that because of its divine authorship, the Bible has a "fuller meaning" than its human authors intended or could have foreseen.
Rational exegesis bases its operation on the idea that the authors have their own inspiration (in this sense, synonymous with artistic inspiration), so their works are completely and utterly a product of the social environment and human intelligence of their authors.[citation needed]