Are You Misinterpreting the Bible? The One Thing You Must Know
Excerpted from The Untold Story of the New Testament Church.
Have you ever read your Bible without understanding what you were reading?
Have you ever read any of Paul’s letters and wondered, What did Paul mean when he penned this verse? Who was this letter written to specifically? What were the people to whom he was writing like? How did they live? Where was Paul when he wrote the letter, and what was he feeling? What events prompted him to pen the epistle in the first place?
Have you ever read the book of Acts and the rest of the New Testament and thought to yourself,
When exactly did these events take place? At what point in this riveting drama did Paul, Peter, James, John, and Jude pen their letters? And how do all the books in the New Testament fit together? What special historical events were also occurring during the days of Peter, Paul, and John? And what influence did those events have on the early church?
These were the questions that provoked my book, The Untold Story of the New Testament. What’s contained in these pages, therefore, is a chronological, socio-historical synopsis of the entire New Testament, the value of which is priceless.
First, understanding the story of the New Testament church will give you a whole new understanding of each New Testament letter—an understanding that is rich, illuminating, and exciting. No longer will you see the epistles as sterile, complicated reads. Instead, they’ll turn into flesh and blood voices that are part of a heart-racing saga. To use F.F. Bruce’s analogy about mirror-reading from the previous chapter, you’ll begin to understand both sides of the phone conversation.
Second, understanding the story will help you see “the big picture” that undergirds the events that followed the birth of the church and its subsequent growth. This “big picture” has at its center an unbroken pattern of God’s work. The theme of God’s kingdom moving “from eternity to here” is the unifying thread that runs throughout the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Reading my book, therefore, will not only help you better understand your New Testament, it will also give you a fresh, clear-eyed look at the immensity of God’s eternal purpose.
Third, understanding the story will supply you with the proper historical context that will equip you to accurately apply Scripture to your life. Many Christians routinely take verses out of context and misapply them to their daily living.[2] But seeing the Scripture in its proper historical context will safeguard you from making this frequent mistake. As one scholar aptly put it, “In order to speak with confidence of ‘the beginning of the New Testament story,’ we must first examine the biblical passages in their historical context.”[3] Fourth, understanding the story will radically alter how you study the Bible as well as how you interact during group Bible studies. Have you ever had this experience? You’re sitting in a circle in someone’s home, listening to everyone’s subjective reading of a biblical text. Someone says, “I think Paul meant [xyz] in that verse. That’s what I get out of it.” Another responds, “What the deuce!? That text has nothing to do with that. What’s wrong with you? Did you take hermeneutics with satan or something?”[4] Your chest tightens, and you conclude that you’re sitting in the presence of a full-blown SYI5 session. Perhaps you’ve been there before, maybe one too many times. If so, my book should help with that problem—a lot.
The Untold Story of the New Testament Church
Frank Viola
Combating the Proof-Texting Method
One of the immediate benefits of understanding the story of the New Testament church is that it will deliver you from the “cut-and-paste” approach to Bible study that dominates evangelical thinking today. The “cut-and-paste” approach is the all-too-common practice of coming to the New Testament with scissors and glue,[6] clipping and pasting together disjointed sentences (verses) from books that were written decades apart to different audiences. This “cut-and-paste” approach has spawned all sorts of spiritual hazards.
One hazard is the misguided practice of “proof-texting,” a technique employed to win theological arguments and build floatable doctrines.[7] Proof-texting is the lamentable innovation of privileging certain biblical texts that support a certain theology while ignoring context and other texts that present a contrary view. Today, many Christians behave as if the mere citation of some random, de-contextualized verse ends all discussion on virtually every subject.[8]
You take one text, find some remote metaphorical connection with another text, and voilà, an ironclad doctrine is born! But this is an insipid approach to understanding the Bible. While it is great for reading one’s own biases into the text,[9] it’s horrible for understanding the original intent of the biblical authors. It has been rightly said that a person can prove anything by taking Bible verses out of context and lashing them together. Permit me to use an outrageous example. What follows is how a person can biblically “prove” that it is God’s will that people commit suicide. All one has to do is lift two verses out of their historical setting and paste them together:
He [Judas] threw down the pieces of silver in the sanctuary and departed. Then he went away and hanged himself. (Matthew 27:5)
Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:37b)
While this is a preposterous example, it demonstrates how the “cut-and-paste” approach works. Because the New Testament didn’t fall out of heaven with red letters and maps in the back, but rather arose out of real historical situations, proof-texting is not only a dead-end street; it’s dangerous. When you read Paul, Peter, John, etc., you’re reading someone else’s mail. Consequently, when Paul writes to the assembly in Corinth about lawsuits, what he says shouldn’t automatically be applied to every potential situation involving civil cases. Context must be taken into consideration.
Without context, we’ll routinely misunderstand and misapply Scripture, making certain issues binding that are no longer in force and vice versa. As a result, Christians have managed to build doctrines and invent practices that have fragmented the body of Christ into thousands of denominations, movements, and organizations, many of which have been at war with one another for generations. David deSilva sums up the necessity of a contextual understanding in order to accurately interpret Scripture saying,
If we are to hear the texts correctly, we must apply ourselves to understand the culture out of which and to which they spoke. We need to recognize the cultural cues the authors have woven into their strategies and instructions. This enterprise prevents potential misreading of the texts…. Without taking some care to recover the culture of the first-century Greco-Roman writers and addresses, we will simply read the texts from the perspective of our cultural norms and codes. Negatively, then, this task is essential as a check against our impositions of our own cultural, theological and social contexts onto the text.[10]
Getting the Sequence Right
Another obstacle to accurately understanding Scripture has to do with the way our current Bibles are arranged. The books that make up our New Testament are grossly out of sequence, making it easy for us to “lose the story” as we read. Chronologically, Romans doesn’t follow Acts, and 1 Corinthians wasn’t written after Romans. The same is true for the rest of the New Testament epistles.
Reading the books of the New Testament out of their chronological sequence is like listening to an audiobook on shuffle where the chapters are heard out of order.11 Understanding the chronological sequence of each New Testament book and the socio-historical setting that undergirds it is a powerful remedy for misunderstanding and misapplication.
One may wonder why the New Testament was arranged in its current manner. The answer is that when the New Testament canon was compiled during the second century, Paul’s epistles were arranged according to length rather than according to the time periods in which they were penned.[12] To add to the problem, chapter divisions were inserted in the year 1227, and verse divisions were added in 1551.[13] These artificial divisions have made the “proof-texting” method of Bible reading almost a default setting. Christopher Smith explains one of the reasons why chapter-verse divisions prevent us from understanding the meaning of a text:
Anyone who has been reading the Bible for even a short time has no doubt noticed many individual examples of how verse divisions can break up sentences and phrases that belong together, or else combine those that should be kept separate.[14]
At the end of the day, we simply cannot ignore historical context when reading the Bible—that is, if we want to understand what we’re reading accurately. In the words of David Barr,
We [must] make the basic assumption that an author was trying to communicate something meaningful to the audience for which he or she wrote. This approach attempts to discover who wrote the text, when it was written, and what issues it was intended to address in its own time. Only when we grasp the historical situation of both author and audience can we hope to understand the message communicated.[15]
I don’t pretend to have created the ultimate guide to the New Testament or promise something that only God Himself can deliver. As one scholar writes of his own work,
This book makes no claim to be the last word on the subject of the New Testament story; others will tell it differently. My aim is to show that there is a story to be told, based on solid data, and to tell it as simply as I can.[16]
That last sentence is precisely what I have sought to accomplish in my book. And I pray it serves you well. Beyond everything else I’ve said in this chapter, I hope that as you watch the spellbinding saga of the New Testament church dance before your eyes, it will revolutionize your Christian life as well as your relationship with the Lord.
Footnotes
2. I speak from firsthand experience, having done this often as a young believer.
3. Paul Barnett, Bethlehem to Patmos, 14.
4. Hermeneutics is the process of biblical interpretation. My scenario is exaggerated, of course, as it’s an attempt at humorizing the way Christians sometimes harshly treat one another over differences of biblical interpretation.
5. SYI = share your ignorance.
6. I’m speaking metaphorically.
7. Nuance is important here. Citing or referencing a group of scriptural texts to support a point or spiritual truth is not proof-texting, as long as those texts are applied within the context of the biblical narrative. Paul and Jesus cited texts often, but they didn’t lift them out of their local contexts and misapply them. Proof-texting only occurs when isolated verses, removed from their historical context, are cited to prove a point. The tendency to proof-text where the “plain sense” of a verse is assumed as the final inconvertible proof of a given doctrinal position is tragic. Consequently, “the Bible says it, I believe it, so that settles it” becomes a pathetic conversation stopper.
8. In this regard, many Christians suffer from what I call AVS (Acute Versification Syndrome). This is a cognitive condition characterized by an inability to comprehend biblical texts holistically. Those who suffer from this “malady” exhibit a tendency to isolate individual verses, divorcing them from their broader narrative and thematic context. Such people understand the New Testament in terms of sentences rather than story. (My friend Len Sweet calls it “versitis.”) My book offers a cure.
9. The technical term for interpreting a text through one’s presuppositions, agendas, or biases is called “eisegesis.” By contrast, “exegesis” is the legitimate interpretation of a text that reads it in light of what the original authors intended to convey.
10. David deSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 18. (A newer edition was published in 2022.) See also Bruce Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 24.
11. For details on this problem, see my article, “Reapproaching the New Testament: The Bible Is Not a Jigsaw Puzzle,” at frankviola.org/jigsaw.pdf.
12. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul the Letter-Writer: His World, His Options, His Skills (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1995), 120-130; F.F. Bruce, The Message of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973), 23. The exception to the order of descending length is Galatians, which is a hair shorter than Ephesians. (Some believe this is due to a scribal gloss.) Also, Hebrews does not appear to be Pauline, so it was not part of the Pauline corpus. In addition, the compiler couldn’t have organized the letters chronologically because none of Paul’s letters had dates on them, and there was no precedent for alphabetical ordering. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul the Letter-Writer, 121.
13. Christopher Smith, The Beauty Behind the Mask, 15; After Chapters & Verses (Colorado Springs, CO: Biblica Publishing, 2010), chaps. 1-2. While I personally have no issue with chapters and verses for the purpose of locating specific sentences in the Bible, the invention has created the problems I discuss in my book.
14. Christopher Smith, The Beauty Behind the Mask, 27. In that book, Smith provides a deep dive into how the man-made chapter-verse divisions in the Bible have kept us from understanding the message that Scripture seeks to convey.
15. David Barr, An Introduction: New Testament Story (New York, NY: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1995), 6.
16. Paul Barnett, Bethlehem to Patmos, 12.
Experience the New Testament Like Never Before
Endorsements from New Testament scholars Craig Keener, Darrell Bock, Joel B. Green, Michael Licona, Mark Strauss, Richard Horsley, David deSilva, Constantine Campbell, Paul Barnett, Clinton Arnold, Eckhard Schnabel, Jeffrey A. D. Weima and many others.
One famous scholar said that reading the New Testament letters is like hearing one end of a phone conversation. The Untold Story of the New Testament Church (Revised and Expanded) reconstructs the other end so you can understand virtually every word.
Seamlessly weaving the narrative of Acts with the Epistles, you'll discover a coherent story enriched by intriguing details of first-century life. This unique and innovative presentation of the New Testament unlocks its epic story in a way that will leave you breathless and equipped to understand the Bible like never before.
Though it's non-fiction, this masterpiece reads like a cinematic experience that will captivate your heart by putting you in the center of the drama. Drawing on the best of contemporary scholarship, Frank Viola includes background information about the people, cities, and places that are mentioned throughout the New Testament, all in an engaging narrative.
As you dive into this riveting volume, you will:
Gain an intimate glimpse into the lives of apostles Peter, James, John, Paul, and their colleagues.
Uncover the events that inspired each New Testament letter, shedding new light on every line from Romans to Revelation.
Meet the key figures who shaped the world, like Priscilla, Apollos, Lydia, Luke, John Mark, Phoebe, Aristarchus, and Epaphras.
Witness the dynamic tumult of first-century churches, individuals, and events as they unfold vividly before you.
Prepare to be ushered into the living, breathing atmosphere of the first century so you can uncover the hidden riches contained in God’s Word.
