From Text to Interpretation: How the Bible Came to Mean Some of the Strange Things It Means 

Why?

When there is ambiguity in the text, subtext and context can clarify. Also, if you want to know whether a command or moral lesson in the story is meant to be a moral law that you are being told to live by, context and subtext can make clear whether the lesson is meant for the reader or whether the story is a commentary on such advice. That is the same method of analysis used outside of religion, in law and literary analysis and such.

And how would an intelligent, honest person "understand" the intentions of a person writing in a dead language 5,000 years ago? If there is a god...It, He, She is not very intelligent. Almost everything he wants to accomplish is thwarted by the shortcomings of his creation. And everything he does or creates seems to have opposing effects on all or most of its intended audience.

that's another key point. fundy atheists will say the bible is old, therefore outdated, therefore studying it is a waste of time (we only need to know enough to reject it as superstition). by the same token, we should reject ALL literature of the past, because it in some way no longer reflects the cultural zeitgeist, opinions or values of whatever dominant culture in which one finds one-self. thus, there is no "timelessness" to Shakespear or Chaucer or Melville or any of these writers. even the "best sellers" of today will be obsolete in the near future, perhaps in a generation! Authors don't always account for every possible meaning their work can inspire. if the scriptures are divine, could they contain meanings the original human authors could not have foreseen that are still valid? poetry has that power.

Alberto Pepperoni.. Absolute historical fact..Moses did not exist.

@jay jayjay. what if the author's intent was not literalistic? What if the author intended multiple layers of meaning? at least if you're a Christian, you are forced to accept this proposition, because the NT draws heavily on symbolic interpretations of many key OT passages. then again, many parts of the OT are clearly allegorical, metaphorical, or else the biblical editors and canonists would have been madmen, who knowingly stitched together and laid side by side contradictory stories and accounts (and nobody seemed to notice or mind all this time).

I think any reading of the New Testament and Early Christian history that's detached from religious motivation would have to concede that it was far too chaotic and disjointed for there to be a significant amount of "deeper meaning" to the contradictions between Gospels and constant tug-of-war over doctrine. Were there different non-literal non-historical ways of reading and talking about things in the period? Absolutely (and that goes for pagans as well and cultural translation is often difficult because of it). But it's an incredible jump to say that embracing these differing accounts as all somehow authoritative would make early Church leaders "madmen" unless they had some intricate poetic lens to decipher it all. It seems pagans accepted differing supernatural accounts of purported history without much difficulty, too. And it's worth remembering that we know through figures like Marcion of Sinope that this laxer view of canonical consistency wasn't universal, anyway. Marcion seems to have read his Bible the way that many literalists of the modern era do and came to a similar conclusion as Thomas Jefferson did: that to get the Bible right, he had to edit it himself. And unconstrained by thousands of years of tradition: Marcion's results are notable for how thoroughly liberated he was from having to deal with those inconsistencies. But in general most second and third-century Christians (like modern people today) probably just reproduced and spread what sounded good to them and what they thought was potentially authoritative. How was some second-century house church in Thessalonica supposed to know for sure whether the authors of Luke or John got some particular story right? All they know is that someone told them Luke wrote one and that John wrote the other. The most reasonable thing for a scribe to do is reproduce both and trust the direct revelatory nature of God to guide people to the truth. Because of the early Apocolyptic nature of Christianity, it's very likely that nobody really cared all that much about the details in the generation or so that saw the Gospels written, or about how generations of descendants will have to sort through this mess. *Jesus was coming back any day now!* Just do your best to prepare and prepare everyone else. It was the third and fourth century period when it seems like a lot of the diversity was winnowed away, and likely vastly more contradictory material was destroyed or lost to history. We still can only guess at how discordant the first and second century was for Christianity as a movement.

The 'author' was probably by committee. Whoever owns the pen and has the loudest voice :0)

LOL

He didn’t say or allude to that in the slightest. He was joking, rather, about the potentially improper pronunciations of biblical Hebrew words by modern scholars, and how there’s no one around to correct them for it because it’s a dead language. Translation wasn’t mentioned at all - let alone making it up.

kicked the pair (adam and eve)

aPEARently he did.

Taking "death of the author" literally

Anyone who wishes to appreciate much or even most of the great Western canon-music, literature, art, etc. needs to know the Bible. As a professional ignoramus, I'm sure this is of no consequence to you. :-)

Should everyone do what you want?

In Numbers 21:4-9, Moses is commanded by the Lord to raise up a bronze serpent on a pole so that the Israelites can look on it and be saved. What is your interpretation of this passage?

No!