Texts and Contexts

Texts

Your text is the part of the New Testament you are focusing your study on. Maybe you are studying a parable: that's your text. Or maybe you are reading a chapter from one of Paul's letters. In 1 Corinthians, for example, chapter 13 is related to what is around it, but also capable of standing alone. Some people choose very small bits of text to build a sermon or study around. Maybe their text is only one or two verses. Other times, as when a preacher is using a text from the Revised Common Lectionary, the reading will usually be around ten verses long.

Contexts

The context is anything around your text. Think about the text in the middle of several concentric circles, each of which provides a context for your text. To read a New Testament text in literary context, you need to pay attention to things like these:

• The immediate literary context. What is going on immediately before and after your text, and what implications does it have for understanding your text?
• The broader literary context, such as the whole book of the New Testament you are reading.
• The context of the author's extant work. Sometimes Acts will help you interpret Luke, for example, or one of Paul's letters will shed light on a passage in another of his letters.
• The context of similar New Testament texts. If you are reading in the gospels, other versions of the same story may help you understand your particular version of the story better. If you are looking at a greeting in an epistle, reading similar greetings will show you how the one you are focusing on is distinctive.
• The context of the Christian canon as a whole. The New Testament is probably best understood as a reading (or interpretation) of the Old Testament in light of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and his followers' conviction that Jesus was the Messiah promised in the Old Testament. Any New Testament text will make more sense if you see it in the context of a canon that includes both the Old and New Testaments.

Here is the general idea of situating a text in its literary context.   With the parable of the prodigal son as an example, the circles look like this:

Historical Context Questions

In addition to look at various literary contexts, you may also want to pay attention to the historical context of your text. For instance, with the parable of the prodigal son, would it help you to know about inheritance conventions of Jesus' time? Or when you are reading a Pauline letter, might you want to know how its form compares to that of other letters of the period?

These are worthwhile questions to ask. However, I have not included here training in identifying features of a text's historical context because we generally have to depend on outside sources (Bible dictionaries, collections of background documents to the study of the New Testament, etc.) to answer those questions and Into the New Testament is limited to teaching close reading of New Testament texts with as little outside resource work as possible required. This is a limitation of Into the New Testament, but we had to stop somewhere!

What's Next: Looking through a Wide-Angle Lens

As you look at a text in context, what will you find, and what difference does it make? On the next resource page, I list some things to look for as you expand your focus and talk about what your findings might mean for the meaning of your particular text.

Next: Looking through a Wide-Angle Lens