Don Carson Answers Questions About Hermeneutics and Introduces Exegetical Fallacies

Don Carson: We’re going to do four things today. First, I would like to begin by answering some of the questions that have been handed in where, in my view, there is no slot in what I propose to say during the next three days where I could answer them as part of the flow of things. If your question you have handed in does not get answered now, it’s because I intend to address it as part of the general scheme of things when the appropriate topic comes up.

There are three or four questions I would like to address now. Then I would like to say something about word studies, something about logic, and something about the interpretation of different literary genres. That’s what we’ll try to cover today. Tomorrow we’ll look to the new hermeneutic, questions of subjectivity, and also the role of the Holy Spirit in enabling us to interpret Scripture. On the last day, much of the time will be devoted to distinguishing between absolute and relative statements in Scripture.

“Greet one another with a holy kiss.” How many of you obeyed that command when you walked in this afternoon? If not, why not? If you shouldn’t, why shouldn’t you? “You must be born again to enter the kingdom.” That’s true. “You must also sell all you have and give to the poor to enter the kingdom.” Why do you obey one and not the other? It’s important somewhere along the line to try to tackle at a principial level hard questions about how one distinguishes between absolute and relative categories in Scripture.

Let me begin then with some of the questions I have no place to answer in the scheme of the outline but where it might be worth taking just a few minutes right now. The first then as I’ve ordered them has to do with what I said yesterday on John 3:5.

Question: As in the previous verse John specifically refers to a mother’s womb, could not ‘born of water’ in verse 5 refer to our first natural birth where the mother’s water burst, and we are literally born of water?

Answer: That is another of the very common interpretations. Look again at the passage. Although there are many who take that view, I find it difficult for two or three reasons. The first reason is that, in the ancient world, there is no source to my knowledge (either on the Greco-Roman side or on the Jewish side) where natural birth is referred to as being born of water. The amniotic fluid is not anywhere discussed or described as water from which people are born.

Now that’s not conclusive, but it is something to be borne in mind. It’s not a common utterance, at least. Then although it is true that in verse 4 there is reference to natural birth, it is on Nicodemus’ lips, and it is important to get that in a certain context. “ ‘How can a man be born when he is old?’ Nicodemus asks. ‘Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!’“

Now many think Nicodemus is just a bit thick. Here Jesus speaks of (verse 3) being begotten from above or begotten again. Nicodemus, a bit slow on the uptake, simply thinks Jesus is referring to somehow entering his mother’s womb and being born. The whole thing is so ridiculous, it can’t possibly be. But he is interpreting everything at an extremely literalistic level.

Well, that’s possible. That’s possible, but don’t forget he is described in verse 10 as, “Didaskalos Israel” (that is the teacher of Israel, the Regius Professor of Divinity, the Grand Mufti). You don’t normally get to that kind of slot if your IQ is about 73. He is a bright man, clearly. Bright people can spot a metaphor when it’s dropped in front of them. They might not understand it, but they can spot it.

It’s possible that Nicodemus has a bad day and he is just being extremely thick, but I suspect his answer is a little more profound than that. Most people who think about moral and ethical questions at all would like sometime or other in their life to begin over again. Are there not things in your life that you have done or said where, in the sober moments of quiet reflection, you wish you could go back and do that bit over again?

Times when you’ve said something, it’s been so cruel. You wake up in the middle of the night. If that’s the first thought that comes to your mind, you sort of break out in a cold sweat. The poet John Clare said, “Oh if life had a second edition, how I would correct the proofs.” Alfred Tennyson said, “Oh that a man may arise in me that the man I am may no longer be.”

I think, you see, Nicodemus is saying something more. He hears Jesus is promising some new beginnings as the prophets had. “God will restore to you the years the locusts have eaten.” Nicodemus just doesn’t have categories for that. “You can promise a new kingdom, Jesus. You can promise the onset of a restored Davidic empire, but to tell me I can begin all over again, that I can undo what is done, that I can start all over from the beginning, a man cannot enter into his mother’s womb and be born again, can he?”

I think that’s the nature of what he is talking about, in other words. I don’t think it’s a dumb question. I think it’s a profound response, and I’m not sure he is merely interested at a merely physical level of birth. He is using that merely as a way of driving his point home. Beyond that, I would want to point out that in verse 6 where natural birth is compared specifically with spiritual birth, in my view for the first time you have the two juxtaposed. There is a particular point.

In verses 6 through 8, Jesus gives two examples of what spiritual birth looks like. The first is basically the principle “like begets like.” Pigs beget pigs. Cows beget cows. People beget people. To be begotten of God, you need God’s action. That’s really what he is saying there in verse 6. “Flesh gives birth to flesh …” There’s not a question of water. Do you see? “Flesh gives birth to flesh; Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’“

In other words, it must be God’s work as promised by the old covenant Scriptures. You should not be surprised and as Nicodemus will be rebuked for not understanding them (verse 10). Then in the second illustration, he says, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

Of course everybody knows that in Greek, there’s a pun on Spirit and wind, but it goes beyond that. The point is when the wind whistles across here, you see the trees bowing back and forth, and you see the little dust storms. You watch the hair blowing. You see its effects, but you don’t stop there and think, “Aha. There must be a high in the Atlantic. I wonder where the low is exactly. Are we on the downside or the upside? Is this a cyclone or an anti-cyclone? Which side?”

We just don’t think in those terms, and they didn’t even know as much about meteorology then as we know now. The point is you see the effects of the wind. You cannot deny them, but that doesn’t mean you can explain all about the origin of things. So also is it with respect to the new birth. Where people are born again, you see the effect, and you can’t deny it. You might not be able to explain it all, but the effect is undeniable. That’s the point.

In both cases, therefore, of these practical examples, Jesus is interested in particular outcomes, of perceptions of things, rather than on talking, it seems to me, at great length about the nature of natural birth. Above all, I find difficulty with the interpretation because verse 5, as I pointed out yesterday, is parallel to verse 3. You take out the common bits, and “begotten from above” or “born again” are parallel to “begotten of water and Spirit.”

That clause, it seems to me, has to be seen as coming right out of the Old Testament or the rebukes against Nicodemus just do not stand out. The rebukes against him are that he did not understand the Scriptures he had in front of him. Although there are many who take that view, with all respect, I think I have to disagree.

There are two or three questions here on preaching, which take us a little outside the parameters of this discussion but are so important that I would like to take two or three minutes to make brief comment. The first is this, from a preacher:

Question: Is it desirable or possible to preach systematic theology? Or what is the relationship between textual preaching and systematic theology?

Answer: That’s an extremely important question and one I feel passionately about. In other words, you’ve pressed my button, and that’s dangerous. I could rabbit on about this one for the next hour and a half and rather lose the point of this exercise. Let me at least say this. The danger of expository preaching, which I hold to deeply.… There’s a danger nevertheless, and it is this. It is possible so to focus on the text at hand, on the immediate text at hand, that you lose a certain kind of horizon, a certain kind of perspective.

You decide to do 10 sermons on the first 5 chapters of Jeremiah, and you never mention Jesus or the gospel or the cross. You’re just being faithful to the text. Then you do a whole series on the Psalms, and Jesus doesn’t come up either, oh except a few places where there seems to be a messianic prophecy or something … the New Testament seems to quote the Old. We’re going to deal with that a bit tomorrow too. Apart from that, you just want to keep your finger on the text, so you don’t mention any of those things.

In other words, the danger with expository preaching is that it can focus so narrowly you don’t see how the ties are made to the large structures of biblical truth. That’s the danger of expository preaching. Sometimes it’s the people who are best trained in seminaries and theological colleges to do their work in Greek and Hebrew and so on who will take you heavily from clause to clause through each genitive absolute and each casus pendens and so on.

You’re supposed to be very impressed! The little old lady who just lost her husband doesn’t really care about the third genitive from the right, but somehow this is expository preaching. Do you see? I think that’s a great mistake. You must explain the thrust and drive of the passage, but in many, many sermons, it is essential then to tie that in one fashion or another to the larger structures of Christian theology.

Now there are a lot of ways of doing that. Sometimes it can be done in the course of the sermon. Sometimes it can be done in the conclusion. You will sometimes hear Roy Clements doing it in an extended introduction. Did you hear what he did this morning? He wandered all over the map for the first 20 minutes setting a framework for contemporary thought on how people drift in the second generation into a certain kind of distant and cold relationship with the living God.

He could have given a lot of examples from the Old Testament. He alluded to some. He could have given examples from the early church. He did allude to some. He set this within a whole framework of what Christian engagement with God looks like and then set up a whole structure which the text of Malachi then addressed. That’s another way of doing it.

It’s possible, for example, to give a survey, a potted survey in 10 or 15 minutes, of the nature of doubt and faith in Scripture and then address one particular subset of that question by preaching on Thomas from John 20. It’s only one kind of doubt. It’s only one kind of response, but it is a kind. It is a response, and it is being addressed directly by Scripture, and that Scripture is thus contributing to a larger structure, which you’ve briefly outlined.

In other words, it’s possible to have the advantages of expository preaching, which are mighty (it keeps the finger on the text, on the Word of God), and the advantages of good, topical preaching by this kind of broad view that has slipped in somewhere. What you must not do is appear to derive the entire structure from this text if it doesn’t really derive from it. That’s the slippery bit when you try to connect the two.

Provided you’re making clear where you get things (what you’re actually getting from the text and what is from a broader knowledge of biblical truth), it seems to me it’s very important to help people to nail down the basic structures and pegs of fundamental, elementary, biblical Christianity.

One way or another that needs to be done not necessarily in every sermon, but it needs to be done as part of the course for our expository preaching. I would love to say a lot more about that. If it were another sort of seminar, I would, but I shan’t here. Related to that is another question about expository preaching.

Question: Clearly expository preaching seeks to grapple with the text using the principles being described here and so forth. I believe it as an approach. However, am I right in understanding Jesus himself was more topical in his approach? Could you comment on how we should see and preach today?

Answer: That’s a question that’s often raised when I try to do seminars on preaching. “What right do you have to say that expository preaching takes precedence when Jesus didn’t use it?” The question is a fair one. However, I would point out that the evidence to say that Jesus did not use expository preaching is a bit slim. What we actually have reported for us by and large is a lot of sayings, responses with people, dialogues. Luke orders a lot of the material topically.

Then there are some large blocks of sermon material. For example, the Sermon on the Mount. If you take the Sermon on the Mount and read it right through out loud, it takes you about 10 minutes. But it is actually delivered in the hill country. It’s a Bible conference. It’s more like an overview once it’s done where you have the notes reduced to 10 minutes.

Many of the individual paragraphs begin with a text from Scripture and then, “You have heard that it was said …” Text. “Now I say unto you …” Sermon. I suspect that in some of those things, those points took half an hour to expound. We’ve just got the summary. We do not have transcriptions of whole messages of Jesus, or of Paul, for that matter. We have brief condensations, accurate but condensations.

It’s a little difficult to be sure just exactly what kinds of styles and methods Jesus always did use. Moreover, he stands in a peculiarly revelatory relationship to that material. He is not exactly in the same position we are. He is not concerned only to expound antecedent Scripture (Scripture that’s already there). He is also concerned to be the Word of God. “In the past God spoke to the fathers by the prophets, but in these last days, he has spoken unto us in his Son.”

Thus he is himself the Logos of revelation. That puts his whole stance with respect to Scripture a little bit differently from ours. If instead we turn to Paul, let’s say, as reported in the book of Acts, there the dynamics are again a wee bit different. I would like to expound that one at length. It would just take me too much time. It would take me too far away.

I do think expository preaching is extremely important in that it helps people to come to terms with the written Word of God. It helps people to think God’s thoughts after him and makes it most difficult for the preacher to rabbit on with pet fads and preferred themes and easy answers and reductionistic theology.

It’s much more likely to deal with the hard things, systematically teaching people to think God’s thoughts after him. That’s a pragmatic judgment. I acknowledge it. I am not saying unless you preach expositorily you cannot be saved. In other words, my priority for expository preaching does not stand at the same level as my priority for fundamental doctrines of the faith.

But as a judgment on the nature of what is needed in the church, provided expository preaching is rightly defined, biblically defined, controlled by a lot of other factors, which it would take me too long to articulate here, I do think that by and large, it is the best approach in most contexts. But I’d be the first to insist that when I have gone to some places to evangelize, I have sometimes used a whole variety of approaches, depending on what group I was addressing. Okay, just a few more.

Question: Can’t we know what the parable of the virgins means from the text without a knowledge of the practices of first-century marriages?

Answer: The short answer is yes. That is to say in that particular parable’s case, there is a punch line reserved right at the very end if you recall (Matthew, chapter 25, verse 14) which seems to lay it all out. But if you don’t know the background, my suspicion is you’re more likely to derive all kinds of lessons you shouldn’t.

For example, the lady sleeping by the side of the road. They should have been vigilant. I have heard wonderful conclusions drawn from that parable that have no bearing whatsoever to do with the text. But I would acknowledge that there are instances where even without any understanding of the particular cultural structure, one can still derive the main point.

If that is a trouble to you in the example I gave you use one or two of the other examples where the point was not so clearly on the surface. That’s related to another question that was brought up that I’m going to deal with tomorrow that I should raise for you.

Question: What happens to the perspicuity of Scripture?

Answer: Christians have always believed Scripture is basically clear. If we suddenly make the interpretation of Scripture hostage to knowing cultural background and Greek and Hebrew and all of that, aren’t we destroying the perspicuity of Scripture? I’ll come back to that one tomorrow. This last one I’m completely ill-equipped to answer, but I will at least raise it, and you can think about it.

Question: How do you encourage young people to read Scripture using your principles today?

Answer: I speak more as a parent here. I’m no expert in educational theory. I would say the most important thing is example, in the church and in the home. If young people hear excellent teaching all the time, they will intuitively pick up a feel for how to read Scripture. If they hear it badly done all the time, then the brightest of them will be very cynical about the enterprise, and the rest of them will simply repeat the same bad practices. The most important thing you can do is set a good example.

You who are parents, do your children ever watch you at the end of the day just picking up a Bible and reading it? Is the only time you read the Bible in your devotions? Do they ever just see you sitting in the armchair at the end of the day reading the Bible because you like it? What do you do in family devotions? Does anybody have family devotions anymore? Is that a lost practice?

Again, I’m no expert. All I can tell you is the kinds of things we’ve struggled through over the years. When my daughter, who we labeled (She is not here. She is onsite, but she is not here. You mustn’t tell her I said this) “motor mouth,” was very young, she was one of these kids who was verbal very, very quickly. By the time she was about 20 months, she had memorized about 75 nursery rhymes.

It suddenly dawned on me, if the little tad could memorize nursery rhymes, she could jolly well memorize Scripture. When she was about 22 months at our family devotions, she sat there in her highchair next to the table. I read 1 Corinthians 13 and the first paragraph of 1 Corinthians 1. Then the second night, 1 Corinthians 13 and the second paragraph of 1 Corinthians 1. The next night, 1 Corinthians 13 and the third paragraph of 1 Corinthians 1.

I was working my way through 1 Corinthians, but every night she was getting 1 Corinthians 13, the Love Chapter. After about four or five weeks, I just left out the last word of each phrase. “Though I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only …” She just plopped in all the words just like that.

After two or three more weeks, she was sitting next to me. She reached over and grabbed my Bible. Her name is Tiffany. She called herself “Tiffy.” She said, “Tiffy do it!” Plop. She recited 1 Corinthians 13. Now Joy and I were rolling on the floor when Tiff got to the little bit about, “When I was a child, I understood as a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”

By the time she was 3–1/2, she had memorized about 25 chapters of Scripture. They’re such impressive little minds. You can fill them with anything. Why not fill them with something worthwhile? Then, of course, number two came along, and the dynamics changed. Then they move into a stage where they don’t want to do so much of that, and we did far more narrative. We’ve read through all the narrative parts of the Bible with the children again and again and again.

We spend more time on narrative now trying to get them to see the plot, the flow, to know who the characters are, the main players. We read bits of Scripture, and then I ask them to repeat from last night or whatever. Try to make a game of it. Only rarely have we gotten into discourse material. My daughter is 10 now. Only rarely. Then I try to treat it as an adventure. “Oh, when you’re old enough …” which immediately means she wants to do it, you see.

About six months ago, we did Proverbs. Now most of that went right over their heads, but every night, I chose in advance a proverb or two and then got one of the two of them to explain it to me in their terms. By the end of that sequence, they were beginning to spot these simple proverbs, what they meant, and how it applied to them.

You have to make it fun. You have to show how to do it. You have to work it out in their lives. In Sunday school and in our Bible clubs and in church, the most important thing you can do is to model things. That’s what I would say. If you don’t do it yourself, you won’t pass it on to the next generation. That’s the introduction.

We come now to words … words, words, words. Some of what I want to deal with this afternoon, I have put into print. So if you’ve seen it, forgive me if I repeat what you’ve already read. Some of it is new in terms of whether or not I put it into print, especially toward the end of the afternoon. Let me begin with words, then say a few things about logic and great doctrines, and then finally say something about genre.

1. Words

Beware of the root fallacy. That is, the assumption that the true meaning of words is bound up with its root. Some people who don’t know another language think there’s almost something mysterious to a word. I was brought up in French Canada. When I was just a child, my father received a letter from an English-speaking lady in Western Ontario … a Christian, a devout believer who only knew English. It was Canadian English, but English.

She said, “I have such a burden for French Canadians that they might come to know the Lord that if you will simply tell me what books you want translated, I will look up every single word, word-by-word, in a dictionary and translate the books for you.” Talk about a labor of love, but the dear lady understood not only no French but nothing about language. You can’t do that!

The structures of languages are different, and a word might have a certain semantic range (a range of meaning in one language), and the receptor word (that is, the word into which the donor word is put in translation) might have a different semantic range so that it works well in one context and doesn’t work well in another context. All kinds of words are not translatable by a simple word. You have to use something else.

Linguists will tell you that anything you can say in one language, you can say in another language. That’s true, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you can say it exactly the same way or in the same amount of space or with just one word. For example, one of the loveliest words in English doesn’t occur in French or German or Spanish or Italian or Portuguese or Arabic or Hebrew or Greek. It’s the word home. Home. That’s a wonderful word in English.

You can say, “I am going home” in French, but what you’re really saying is, “I’m going to our place,” or, “I’m going to my place.” There is a word in German that sometimes can render home (heimat), but it doesn’t mean home. It has another whole set of associations. Meanwhile, in French, you say, Je vais ‡ ma place. “I’m going to my place.” That’s not quite home, is it? You speak of the foyer. Foyer for home? Hearth? Well, closer. What do you do with that? Do you see?

People who think then that words have some mystique to them sometimes think, “Well, we’ll solve this problem just by getting to the root meaning. If you get to the root meaning, then you have this deep significance to the text.” Sometimes, let it be said with shame, preachers are the worst offenders in this regard. They’ve had just enough Greek to do damage but not enough to bail themselves out.

Thus, for example, agapao (the verb “I love”) and the cognate noun agape. It is often assumed this refers to a certain kind of love. Now people will speak of agape love as if something particularly profound has been said. Well, in 2 Samuel 13 when Amnon incestuously loves his half-sister, Tamar, when he rapes her, in the Greek version of the Old Testament, twice it says he loved her, once using the verb phileo and once using agapao.

When we are told, “Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present evil world,” it’s the verb agapao. Nothing noble or self-denying there that I can see. The complete semantic ranges of phileo (one common New Testament Greek word for love) and of agapao don’t overlap entirely. For example, phileo can mean to kiss. Agapao can’t. Agapao is used more commonly.

On the other hand, the Father loves the Son (John, chapter 3, verse 35). The Father loves the Son (John, chapter 5). In one case, phileo. In the other, agapao. We are certainly not to conclude that in one instance, the Father loves the Son emotionally and in the other one he loves him sort of by a commitment of self-denying will or something. Do you see? I will say more about that one a little later on.

Huperetes. In 1 Corinthians 3:5, Paul asks, “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Only servants.” The particular word is huperetai. In the last century, Bishop Trench noted the root of this particular word is eresso, which means to row, as in, “Row, row, row your boat.” He thought that huperetes was a rower, a slave, a servant who was on a chain gang rowing a boat.

By the time you get into popular word studies in this century, people note that it’s huperetes. Hupo means under, so it must be an under-rower. If there are two banks of oars, this is the poor chap who is underneath. By the time you get to Barclay, the poor chap is rowing a trireme (three ranks), and he is at the bottom.

Paul is using the term now metaphorically to refer to the lowest of slaves so that Paul is saying, “What then is Paul? What then is Apollos? Just the lowest of servants, the people at the bottom of the muck.” The fact of the matter is when you do a search of huperetes on the whole Greek corpus using a computer, which you can now do, the word very rarely has anything to do with rowing. It is a very common word in the first century for servant.

In most contexts, it can’t be distinguished from diakonos, from which we get the word deacon, servant, helper. It could be waiter in a restaurant or any number of other similar expressions. You cannot be sure you have gotten to the “real” meaning of a word by breaking it up into its component parts any more than pineapple refers to pines coming from apple trees or apples coming from pine trees or butterfly means.… Well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Etymology (that is, pursuing roots) can provide some insight when the word is extremely rare and there aren’t enough occurrences for us to establish controlling contexts. That’s more important in studying Hebrew than Greek. That can be useful. Sometimes where, in fact, the etymology does line up with the actual use, it can provide a colorful picture. That’s also the case. But you cannot assume the meaning of a word is established by its root.

2. Avoid reverse etymology

This is sometimes done by taking a word which has changed over the centuries to mean something way down the road in English and reading that English meaning back into the Greek New Testament. That too is sometimes done. An example that Moises Silva first dug up as far as I know is the one from 2 Corinthians 8 and 9. “The Lord loves a cheerful giver.” Cheerful in Greek is hilaron, from which, of course, we get hilaris. Hilaron, from which we also get hilarious.

The Lord loves a hilarious giver? This prompts one to ask if one should play a laugh track during the offering. It’s clearly not the case. Or, “The gospel is the power of God to everyone who believes.” Dunamis, from which we get the word dynamite. Not a few popular sermons have insisted the gospel is the dynamite of God. Well, I suppose, but it’s not what Paul had in mind. Dynamite hadn’t been invented yet. He thinks of power in terms of putting things together through the resurrection, not in terms of blowing things up through the IRA.

3. Be aware of how words change their meaning with time.

The Bible was written over a long period of time, and words changed their meaning. Take the word martus, from which we get the word martyr. Martus. In pre-biblical Greco-Roman sources, it regularly refers to someone who gives evidence, a witness in a court, occasionally outside of a court.

Then it comes to be someone who gives solemn witness outside a judicial setting, to bear witness, to give a solemn affirmation that is already found in the Scriptures. That is, to give a solemn witness regarding one’s faith, for example. Then it means (just about the turning of the end of the New Testament into the patristic period) one who witnesses to personal faith, even under the threat of death.

Then it means, clearly in the patristic period, one who witnesses to personal faith by the acceptance of death. Now to be a witness is to be a martyr, if you see what I mean. Then it comes to be one who dies for a cause, regardless of what the cause is (long past the New Testament). Today it primarily means somebody who feels sorry for himself. “Oh, don’t be a martyr.” Do you see? Words change their meaning. It is important to nail down what is being meant in any particular place.

4. Avoid verbal parallelomania.

Parallelomania is a term coined by Samuel Sandmel of the University of Chicago a number of years ago. It is a kind of mania which seeks parallels to everything. Parallelomania. If you can just find a parallel that provides a meaning you want, then you can make the passage do almost anything you want. Do you see?

You might do a search on the Ibycus computer system and discover that a word occurs 12,000 times in the Greek corpus that’s come down to us. But if you can just find one instance where, in some metaphorical context, it means what you want, boy you’ve proved your case. Now the appeal to parallels can be useful. After all, the words used by the biblical writers of the New Testament period were the words spoken in the common cultures of the day.

If we can have a broader look at how words were used in that culture, so much the better. It gives us a better control on the study of words. That’s all fair game. We are really asking ourselves then, “How would these words have been used by first-century speakers? How would they have been understood by first-century readers?” That’s an important question to ask and try to answer.

On the other hand, it’s also possible to abuse this sort of thing in all kinds of ways. Let me give you an example away from words for a bit, because it shows you the kind of danger I have in mind. A number of years ago, there was a chap by the name of Bob Kaiser who wrote an article on the way two great scholars had studied the prologue of John’s gospel (John 1:1 to 18). What he did was he read everything they had written on John 1:1 to 18. It so happened they had read quite a lot.

In their discussion of John 1:1 to 18, they had discussed all kinds of parallels in the ancient literature, in rabbinic literature, in the so-called hermetica, in Greco-Roman sources, and so on. He had studied it all. If he found a little phrase, “the light” or “witness,” or if he found, “in him was life” or any expression he could find at all that might have any parallel anywhere in all that great corpus of literature, then it was listed.

He discovered one of these scholars had referred to 318 pieces of extrabiblical literature. The other, as it turns out, without collusion had referred to 320 pieces of extrabiblical literature. Do you know what the overlap was? Seven percent.