Despite a renewed emphasis today upon biblical studies in our seminaries and parishes, critical exegesis of the Bible remains an enterprise little understood and still less appreciated by most Christians. The Holy Gospel, most feel, should be heard and venerated in the Church as the divine Word. Some ask, by what pretension do we presume the right to criticize God’s self-revelation. Also, some believe they know exactly what God is revealing through His word by just listening to it. In fact, one of the main tenants of the Protestant Reformation is that each person can interpret the true meaning of the Holy Scriptures.

Our Church, it must be added, does not share with fundamentalists a notion of biblical literalism and inerrancy. Even those who are theologically less sophisticated appreciate the divine-human character of Scripture; they are fully aware that God discloses His Person and will through human experience interpreted by human language. The problem, however, is that in most instances people tend to say they know exactly what God means in Holy Scriptures even though they are using translations on which to base their interpretations. We often find that languages like Hebrew, Greek and Latin – the first languages that conveyed the Scriptures to us – have nuances that cannot be accurately expressed in English. To assert that one has the true meaning of a biblical passage based on an English text, is truly foolish. You can assert what the passage may mean to you but you cannot truly say that the meaning you derive is the meaning that the author intended when he wrote it.

The aim of exegesis is to understand and to interpret the meaning of written documents, particularly the Bible, by applying to the text pertinent insights of the historical, philological, archaeological and also philosophical sciences. Exegesis itself is a scientific discipline insofar as it uses historical-critical methods to answer questions pertaining to the origin of the text (who wrote it, when and where), its purpose (why it was written, its aim (to whom and to what situation it was written), and its function within the life of the particular community that accepted it. At the level of “lower criticism,” exegetical research attempts to establish the original text of a biblical document as the author or “school” of authors composed it, and to lay the groundwork for “higher criticism” that seeks to determine the meaning or message of a given passage