couple o' quick questions

Jon Robertson jmrober at pop6.ibm.net
Wed Jun 24 06:51:53 EDT 1998


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 at ibm.net
Seminario del Pacto Evangélico 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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