Nkjv Study Bible Thomas Nelson

A Primer On the Historical-Grammatical Bible Interpretation Method

How to become proficient in Bible Interpretation

(EVEN IF YOU DON’T KNOW HEBREW OR GREEK)

This is an article regarding the history of Bible Interpretation. It will be principally for the intermediate person who may or may not have the obligation of instructing a class or instructing others in the Scriptures but who has a desire to be proficient in Bible Interpretation for himself/herself. It is written on the premise that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, ordinarily known as the Bible, are the very words of God. I believe that in the original manuscripts, the words of God were recorded incisively as God would have them written, and the humane writers were kept from all error.

To the young preacher Timothy the Apostle Paul said these words:

“But carry on thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; 15 And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are competent to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: 17 That the man of God may be perfect, exhaustively financed unto all good works.” KJV 2 Timothy 3:14

In the phrase “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God…” the word “inspiration” in a literal sense means “God breathed.” God actually exhaled all Scripture. That is the biblical assert and I receive that at face value. I say that so there will be no mis-understanding as we learn how to interpret the Bible.

Bible Interpretation has been a mystery for most laymen for a a heap of years. This is so even altho there are a good deal of good books available on the subject. I think there are various reasons for this situation. Through the years a professional church mentality has tended to leave the understanding of the Bible up to those who are seen as professional teachers. The seminaries and Bible schools cater to those whose life calling is instructing and preaching the Bible (and so they should). There likewise seems to be the mentality amongst numerous “professionals” that they are the only ones who will have to be trained in Scripture interpretation. I beg to differ. It is apparent to me that a biblically astute laity is necessitated if there are to be godly homes and spiritual churches. Godly men and women grow spiritually as they learn to feed on the Scriptures. It is my prayer that a lot of who have been mystified by much of what the Bible says will read the words in this little article, and be invigorated to study the Bible anew, and will be equipped to do it with a great degree of satisfaction.

An primary portion of Bible interpretation is understanding a little in regards to the history of the discipline.

The basi professional pros of Bible Interpretation were Jewish scribes. They arose in the days of Ezra and were determined to give the truth of the Scriptures they had. They gave the sense of the written Scriptures so that the mutual persons could perceive their meaning.1 A document called The Midrash housed the interpretations of the rabbis, the teachers to Israel. The scribes put the introductory Misrash together in the 4th century B.C.2 The term ‘midrash’ comes from a Hebrew root which means ‘to explain, deduce, ferret out.’3

Some of the early scribes and rabbis thought that the Scriptures had a deeper meaning that was not apparent on the surface. It was a deeper and mystical meaning. One writer quotes Rabbi Akiba, who was a leader of a school for rabbis at Jaffa, Palestine as saying , “. . . each repetition, figure, parallelism, synonyme [sic], word, letter, particle, pleonasm, na, the very shape of a letter, had a recondite meaning, just as each fiber of fly’s wing or an ant’s foot has it is peculiar significance.”4

This doctrine carried over into the early Christian church. According to Roy Zuck, Origen, an early church father, believed that “Noah’s ark pictured the church and Noah represented Christ. Rebekah’s drawing water at the well for Abraham’s servant means we will have to each day come to the Scriptures to meet Christ. In Jesus triumphal entry the donkey represented the Old Testament, it is colt depicted the New Testament and the two apostles pictured the moral and mystical senses of the Scriptures.”5 This kind of interpretation closely ignored the literal meaning the writers of Scripture had in mind. Because of this disregard for the literal meaning of the Scriptures in Alexandrian Church Fathers, assorted leaders in Antioch of Syria put their special importance and significance on the historical, literal interpretation. “They stressed the study of the Bible’s basi languages (Hebrew and Greek) and they wrote commentaries on the Scriptures.” ” For them, literal interpretation included figurative language.”6

The trend to allegorize and give fanciful significances to the Scripture continued in the Western church however. Interpreters left the historical, literal and contextual significances of the Scriptures and developed all kinds of unwarranted interpretations. McQuay says: “Collections of allegorical interpretations showed, for example that the word sea could mean a gathering of water, Scripture, the present age, the humane heart, the active life, pagan or baptism.7 For a thousand years the allegorical method of interpretation of the Bible kept sway. I do not think it is a coincidence that this is the amount of time of time dubbed the dark ages by the historians.

The Protestant Reformation beginning in the 16th century saw the move back to the literal interpretation of Scripture. The Reformation established two main principles that led in this return. The initial one was called “the analogy of Scripture” and merely said that all Scripture will have to be interpreted by other Scripture. It refused the right of the Catholic Church, the pope or any other humane institution to lock in any queer Scripture interpretation. The second principle was the principle of literal sense. The Bible was to be interpreted in a literal sense where possible. This annihilated the whole system of allegorical interpretation that had held sway for the duration of the dark ages. Men started out to exegete the Scriptures on a new plane and the primary languages were applied to find the initial author’s literal meaning.8 This method of interpretation came to be known as the Grammatical-Historical method of interpretation.

A group of critics that were very damaging appeared in the 19th century. These men were controlled by naturalistic pre-suppositions that refused anything that could not be empirically proven. The super-natural was merely dis-believed. This has led to much confusedness concerning true biblical interpretation. My answer is that we need to go back to the simple principles of the analogy of faith and a literal interpretation. If God is super-natural then we ought to not limit Him to acting in only natural, humanly explainable ways.

Neo-orthodoxy arose in the latter 19th century to combat the liberalism spawned by the higher critics brought up above. It was a way of attempting to interpret the Scriptures as God’s word while keeping on to the naturalistic pre-suppositions of the liberal higher critics. It failed miserably.

In the early 20th century a motion arose that was known as “Fundamentalism.” It was characterized by men who believed the Bible, super-natural events and all, and who said that the Scriptures ought to be interpreted in a literal sense and in their historical context. Conservatism, the step-child of fundamentalism holds, for the most part, to the position of a literal interpretation of the Scriptures but does not hug the legalistic tendencies of a lot of of the early fundamentalist leaders. The Pentecostal and Charismatic movements seem to hold to a literal and historical interpretation of Scripture but with the danger of going beyond Scripture and mixing up the instructing of sure men with the instructing of Scripture. We will deal with this phenomenon more at length later.

That is a very abbreviated overview of the history of Bible interpretation. If the student is fascinated whole books have been written on each aspect of that history and it would be well worth the work to investigate each amount of time in depth. In our next article we will go on to an comprehensible statement of the Grammatical- Historical approach to Bible interpretation.

1 1Norman Geisler and William Nix. A General Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1975), 52.

2 2James I. Packer. Merrill C. Tenny, and William White, Jr. Eds., The Bible Almanac (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1980), 502

3 3Concept Midrash Internet Source (USA Jewish Theological Seminary of America 1997), 1.

4Roy B. Zuck. Basic Bible Interpretation (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1991), 28.

5Zuck, 36.

6Zuck. 37.

7Earl P. McQuay. Keys To Understanding the Bible, (Nashville: Broadman, 1993)18.

8J. Barton Payne. The Theology of the Older Testament, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1962), 26.

Nkjv Study Bible Thomas Nelson

The NKJV Study Bible, Second Edition, the most comprehensive study Bible available, is now better than ever!

The acclaimed The NKJV Study Bible is the most finish study system for pastors, teachers or Bible students who desire exact study in God’s Word. It is now better than ever, including more features to make it the best all-purpose study Bible available. Using the trusted New King James Version, The NKJV Study Bible, Second Edition has “the mind of a scholar and the heart of a pastor.” Nelson’s skilled team of scholars has invented THE study system to reach for when accurate, beneficial study in God’s Word is the goal.

Features include:

• New! Expanded cross-references with textual notes
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77 of 77 persons found the following review helpful.
Outstanding study Bible
By David C. Leaumont
I own some dissimilar study Bibles, from the NIV Study Bible, the Scoffield, New Scoffield, Thompson Chain Reference (NIV and KJV), Dake Bible, NIV Topical Study Bible and various Parallel Bibles. While I use them all, my bestloved for study and for Scripture reading is either the Nelson Study Bible or the NIVSB. The language is easy to grasp and the study notes are somewhat comprehensive. The commentary hails from a conservative evangelical theology.

Book binding quality:
The binding is strong and is durable. I’ve carried this Bible around a lot, and it has held up with no sign of failure. Because of the spacious notes and indices, this Bible is rather a bit thicker than most.

Scripture Page layout:
The Scriptures are laid out in the natural paragraph form, rather than the bullet form based on verse numbering, which is less mutual in the KJ versions of Scripture. The Scriptures are laid out in two columns with letters guiding the reader to parallel passages and asterisks showing divergences in other texts (See below). The bottom of each page holds commentary listed by matching verse and the references to other parallel Scripture passages is amongst the two commentary columns rather than among the Scriptures themselves, like most other Bibles. The words of Christ are in red, and contextual subdivisions have headings that correspond to the outline at the beginning of each book.

Introduction to Books:
Each book of the Bible has a discussion of the author, audience and purpose, date and place of writing, characteristics, roots and a short outline of the book. A timeline of secular historical items that happened at the time of the writing is also provided.

Commentary:
The notes deal with archaeological, historical, lexical and cultural distinct elements that pertain to conservative hermeneutical exegesis. In disputables, they many times do make definitive conclusions, but also at times give dissimilar views giving selective information on what the editors believe is the most probable rectify conclusion. The prophetic passages are the only place where this lacks. It is totally unlikely to put all data on a topic into a study Bible, but the Nelson does an amazing occupation of packing a lot of selective information in for a substantial level of understanding.

Indices:
There are assorted helpful and easy to use indices at the back of the Bible. A Subject Index acts as a topical study help. There are assorted map and measurement aids and at long last a somewhat comprehensive concord is included.

Special Features of the Nelson:
The Nelson’s NKJV Study Bible has various features that are missing out in a great deal of study Bibles.
–There are 8 “Full View Bible Summaries,” including the system of belief of the Trinity and the Old Testament at a Glance.
–There are 103 InDepth Articles that talk about items of interest. For instance, in James there is an article on Faith and Works and in Acts there is an article on Roman Citizenship.
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–In passage asterisks point to divergences amongst the Nestle-Aland 27/ UBS4 text, the Majority Text and the Textus Receptus, with the latter being the text employed for the NKJV. This helps give deviations amongst the manuscripts and is a superb tool for comparing them.

Upon receiving this Bible, I changed my main study Bible from the NIVSB to the Nelson NKJV Study Bible, because of it is still-easy-to-read verbiage and it is copious amounts of study aids.

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
As close to perfective as it gets in this life…
By Webster Ranger
Bible study is necessary to me, and I have studied my way through dozens of translations. After resolving on NKJV as my translation of choice, I started looking for a study Bible that satisfied my predilections and needs. Unlike the introductory reviewer above, I prefer that the study notes and materials refrain from dictating private interpretations to the reader. I prefer the paragraph format and study aids that don’t intrude into the text area.

It is a strength to me that the cross-references are placed out of my reading area, providing a space that is without major obstacles to attention while I am reading. If I want to check cross-references or refer to notes, I recognise where to look–the standard place for notes to a scholarly text, down below. The text floats uncluttered above what are amazingly utile study aids.

I have the Large Print edition, which is even heftier, but a study Bible is not designed to be a book for hauling around each place you go. I’d unquestionably want to carry a dissimilar book for street witnessing, for example.

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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
NKJV Study Bible: Kindle Version
By coffeegirl
I am returning the Kindle version as it is too difficult to navigate through. I may get to the Books of the Bible and to Chapters but not Verse without having to page up/down too a great deal of times. They need to make it much having little impact to navigate because it is a Study Bible and consequently has much more data to sift through. My Kindle is new to me so perchance there are tricks I am not conscious of but it is just too much disturb and I will keep using my bound version until I may find a good Kindle version.

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