Looking through a Wide-Angle Lens

On the previous resource page, you got a list of different contexts to take into account when you are reading a text. This page answers two questions:

How do you take those contexts into account? Or, what are you looking for as you widen the angle of your lens? and
What difference for interpretation does your reading of the context make? Or, after you have widened your focus to context, how do you get your focus back to text again?

Relating a Text to Its Context

Remember those contexts we're looking at?

Immediate literary context.
Broader literary context.
Author's extant work.
Similar New Testament texts.
Canonical context.

In this skill, you employ the other exegetical skills you have learned to analyze the context of your text. Here are some of the skills you know so far, and the way they relate to each of the contexts you are reading.

Look at This Context:	Using These Skills:	Asking Questions Like These:
Immediate Literary Context	Tracing Action and Argument Paying Attention to Time & Place	Where have we just been? Where are we about to go?
	Completing a Word Study	Are there themes or words in the text that are repeated in the immediate context? If so, do they mean the same thing in each place?
Broader Literary Context	Getting to Know Characters	Do we hear from characters in the text again in the book? If so, do they change or stay the same?
	Tracing Action and Argument	Does the action surrounding the text help make sense of it? How does the passage I'm studying fit with overall purpose or the general themes of a letter or other New Testament book I'm reading?
Author's Extant Work	Completing a Word Study	How does Paul (or John, or Luke or Peter) use elsewhere words that are key to this particular text?
Similar New Testament Texts	Comparing Similar Texts	Is there a similar story elsewhere in the NT? How does my text compare to that? What is alike and what is different? If my text has a standard form (parable, saying, conflict narrative, letter greeting, letter closing, etc.), how does it compare to texts of the same form in the NT?
Canonical Context		Are there images, themes, characters or words here that remind me of OT themes or broader NT themes?

Relating Findings on Context Back to a Text

Circling Back to the Text

Imagine the move you are making like this. You start with the text, read closely, gather details, and so on. Then you widen your angle of vision and look at various contexts. Then you bring what you learned from the context back to your understanding of the text.

Examples

The easiest way to talk about relating your findings from context-study back to your interpretation of a particular text is to offer a few examples.

In John 3, we meet a Pharisee named Nicodemus. He makes two other appearances in the gospel of John. Together the three texts paint a picture of a complicated, possibly secret-then-open disciple of Jesus. By looking at John 3 in broader literary context, we have a fuller picture of Nicodemus and bring that back to our understanding of the man in his first encounter with Jesus.
In Luke's story of the Transfiguration (chapter 9), the disciples are weighed down with sleep while Jesus is talking with Moses and Elijah. Comparing similar texts in a synopsis, we discover that no one else says this about the disciples, so it must be an important detail for Luke for him to have added it to his sources. This leads to the question, "Is sleeping a detail in other stories in Luke?" Completing a word study on sleep and sleeping, we find that the disciples are sleeping at Gethsemane too (Luke 22). They have trouble staying awake both at a vision of glory and at that time when Jesus is offering his most agonized prayer in this gospel.
In Matthew 2, the baby Jesus is under threat from a tyrant, who kills boy babies. First he escapes to Egypt, then he comes out of Egypt when things are safe elsewhere. Reading in canonical context leads us to Exodus 1-2, where we read of Moses' birth and the need to hide him from a tyrant who was killing boy babies. The baby Moses grows up to lead God's people out of Egypt. Circling back to Matthew 2, we recognize Jesus as a new liberator of God's people, perhaps a prophet like Moses (cf. Deuteronomy 18:15, 18), to lead God's people again and speak for God as Moses had.

What's Next: Two-Minute Tutorial on the Old Testament in the New

Relating your text to its canonical context requires being able to pick up on allusions and echoes of the Old Testament in the New. The next page offers a quick look at several ways the Old Testament shows up in the New Testament and various ways the Old Testament is functioning there.

Next: Two-Minute Tutorial on the Old Testament in the New

Seeing the Big Picture Resource Pages