From: Jon Robertson (jmrober@pop6.ibm.net)
Date: Wed Jun 24 1998 - 06:51:53 EDT
Hello everyone!
Good questions.
I suppose a kind of "Occam's Razor" would work. The problem being -
simplest reading for whom? The simplest reading for us in the 20th
century would not have been necesarily the simplest reading for
the original readers and author. A case in point - the suggestion of
seeing every aorist as past-referring and every present as
present-referring is certainly simple for us. However, a perusal of
the actual use of these tenses in hellenistic greek quickly shows
that this "simple" rule involves a distortion of what must have been
the "obvious" meaning for the first century crowd. Actually, one
could say that the involved, time-consuming, difficult task of
interpretation (at all its levels) is "simply" attempting to arrive
at what was the "obvious" meaning for the original writer/speaker and
reader/hearer!
Jon Robertson
jmrober@ibm.net
Seminario del Pacto Evangˇlico del Ecuador
Quito, Ecuador
MY words and thoughts do both express this notion,
That LIFE hath with the sun a double motion,
The first IS straight, and is our diurnall friend,
The other HID, and doth obliquely bend,
One life is wrapt IN flesh, and tends to earth,
The other windes towards HIM, whose happy birth
Taught me to live here so, THAT still one eye
Should aim and shoot at that which IS on high,
Quitting with daily labour all MY pleasure
To gain at harvest an eternall TREASURE.
-George Herbert
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