…the NT is a short book, as far as scholarly disciplines go, and NT scholars ought to know its context better [Hengel]…It is simply naive to take a document written to a particular ancient setting, written in Greek, using figures of speech and cultural allusions that were shared assumptions by the ancient author and the author’s intended audience, and assume that we can read it without taking any of that into account. I’m not saying that we can’t get many correct ideas from a translation without additional background, but you will also miss a lot.
Craig Keener, interview on Romans with Nijay Gupta. (Read the whole interview here.)
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