Authorial intent

But before we get into that, just a brief review of the first two sessions, which I think is very important.

Because the one thing that I'm arguing for, and I think that this is extremely important, is that the controlling principle of meaning in a text is authorial intent.

A lot of people have used the term a literal hermeneutic, and that's fine.

But what we mean by that is not that everything is used literalistically, but it's used in accordance with the original author's intention.

If authorial intent is the key to understanding the meaning of Scripture, how exactly do we tell what an author meant when he wrote something? Let's talk about it.

This is the Bible Sojourner, where we discuss issues related to the Bible, theology, and culture.

I'm your host, Peter Gaiman, professor of Old Testament and biblical languages at Shepherd's Theological Seminary.

Welcome back to another episode of The Bible Sojourner.

I'm your host, Peter Gaiman, and we are on session two of a series we started on hermeneutics last time.

And I wanted to follow up that series by essentially asking if it is true that authorial intent is the key to meaning, how can we access the meaning of the author? How can we be sure what he's talking about? So just by way of review, what we talked about last time was that there are essentially three sources for proposed meaning for a text.

On the one hand, you have the author, which I have proposed to you, that the author is the one who controls the meaning.

The author uses words, he uses grammatical conventions, he uses phrases which communicate something that he intends his audience to realize.

A test removed from what? His context can easily become a what? A pre-test.

Three, authorial intent, which is about discovering the intended message.

Let me give you examples where that is concerned.

John 20, verse 30 and 31.