Interpretive replacements sometimes erase context
There’s a practice I’ve encountered in Biblical interpretation which often leaves me with some unease. Not because I haven’t done it myself, I have. Maybe it’s because the practice feels too close to interpretation by mystic symbology.
The practice is finding a term or phrase in the New Testament that gets applied to Jesus, then interpreting that term as a pseudonym for Jesus in the Old Testament. The example I run into most regularly is the transformation of “Angel of the LORD” to “Jesus pre-incarnate”.
On the surface there’s little danger in this practice. What does it matter if you think angel references in the OT are actually masked-Jesus spottings? Change it to another person, say Enoch, and it doesn’t appreciably change the meaning of the story. And that’s where I suspect the problem lies.
You see, further stories in the Bible do shed light on previous stories. For example, the Cain & Abel story is heavily tied into the Adam & Eve story and expands upon the design patterns present there. But new angles that further stories add does not modify the contextual meaning of the earlier story. Interpretive replacements like pre-incarnate Jesus references short-circuit the interpretive necessity to understand the reference in its actual context with the meaning that’s been applied to it from page one.
When I’m studying the Bible with others I almost always let interpretive slips like this go unchallenged. I’m not sure that, under the surface, this practice is any more dangerous than it appears. But I do feel a bit of sadness when it’s done at the expense of wrestling with what’s in the passage, with the context. Many wonderful discoveries are overlooked in our attempts to simplify and systematize Bible discovery.
Related Ideas
This practice is related to passage white-washing. Passage white-washing(1) is when a reader like myself, upon faced with a passage that sounds similar to another or that is difficult to understand, so uses another passage to explain it that the new passage, or sometimes only the idea conveyed, serves as a stand-in without respect to context. I should write more about this in a separate note…