Review: Seeing the Big Picture

Here is your executive summary of the Big Picture resource pages. You can use it either as a review after you have read all the pages, or you can start here and go to the previous pages to fill in detail.

Texts and Contexts

Reading a text in context is a movement back and forth between a small part of the Bible and larger parts. Starting with the text you are reading, move out to wider and wider circles of material, looking at contexts like these for your text:

• The immediate and broader literary contexts within the book you are reading.
• The context of the author's extant work.
• The context of similar New Testament texts.
• The context of the Christian canon as a whole.

Looking through a Wide Angle Lens

With these contexts in mind, practice your exegesis skills, asking how each context relates to your text.

In the process of looking at these contexts, you will probably come to see things in your text that you had not noticed before. Examples of ways that the context changes how you see a text are on with Wide Angle Lens resource page.

Old Testament in the New

Since one of the most important contexts for any New Testament text is its canonical context, I've included material in this unit on how to find Old Testament connections to your New Testament text. Here are the topics from the Two-Minute Tutorial in this unit.