Wild pigs are the key to unlocking it all (Is the Bible true? Part 5)

Is it possible Legion and Pigs are a statement about Jesus being more powerful than Rome?

In this ridiculously long set of posts to try and answer the short question of whether the Bible is true or not, we’ve come to the concept of context in interpretation.

I’ve proposed the following 3 keys when trying to interpret scripture in our Modern 21st century CONTEXT.

1. Literature type
2. Context (the subject of this article)
3. Storyline (that’s next)

Trying to understand whether something in the Bible is literally true, or figuratively true, or metaphorically true, or whatever sort of true you’re trying to figure out is impossible without understanding the context of any given scripture. For example, in the previous post I talked about donkeys and elephants.

You might guess what the context of that post is but unless you go back and read the last post you’re not going to have any idea what I’m talking about, especially if I decide to use donkeys and elephants to explain context here.

Actually let’s do that.

Donkeys and elephants are mad but people are joining their ranks so they’re glad.

Imagine you find that line in a poem in the year 5024. It was written three thousand years earlier in the USA. Now imagine you don’t actually know anything about the USA, you’ve only heard about it a handful of times in the history books. You don’t know the culture, you don’t know the history, you just don’t know ANYTHING about this former nation.

You do some research, find out that this line is from a political poem. You look up U.S. politics and find out that symbolically donkeys are associated with Democrats and elephants are associated with Republicans. All of a sudden this strange line in a poem starts makes sense. People are joining these two political parties and they’re celebrating that.

But there’s something that still does not make sense. Why are they mad? You do some more contextual research and find out that both parties were so divided against one another that people began leaving them but something happened in the future (now the past) that caused the people to start coming back. There was true cause to celebrate because people once again started joining the ranks of Elephants and Donkeys.

As odd and out there as the above paragraph may seem, we deal with the same sorts of problems, and actually the same exact problem in scripture. Would you care to guess what a wild pig symbolized when Jesus walked the earth? The strength of Rome. Was Jesus making a political statement when he cast demons into a herd of pigs that drove them off a cliff (Matthew 8:28–34)? Was he saying his kingdom power was more powerful than Roman power? Is that why the people got rid of Jesus even though he had performed a miracle? Maybe they were afraid that word of this would get out to the Romans and then they would be punished for it (even though Jesus performed an amazing miracle). Who knows? But you won’t know as much as you could know if you don’t bother to research for context.

Context helps us understand what the original authors of scripture were facing and feeling and thinking as God inspired them to write these things down. All the things that make up context help us to see why a certain story or a certain event and the details of those events were recorded and what implication that has for us today.

Drawing correct meaning out of a passage like this is ok (It’s called exegesis). But when you reverse this, when you take your context and try to interpret a passage through your context (unless it actually applies and there are passages like that) your actually adding meaning to a passage and that’s not okay. That’s called eisegesis.

This happens a lot when people begin talking end times theology. They start saying things like Babylon is the U.S.A. and such other nation in the Bible is Russia and what they’re doing is reading their context into scripture instead of doing the research to understand the context the original author was writing from. To be clear, Babylon is Babylon, not the U.S.A. The U.S.A. and Russia were non-existent to the original readers and writers and tellers of scripture.

Imagine the prophet Jeremiah telling the people they would suffer at the hands of the Babylonians. Now imagine the prophet Ezekiel speaking about a future fall of the USA as some interpret it, except that Ezekiel says it’s Babylon who will fall, and also that Babylon fell millenium ago. People had no idea about the USA then. They knew about Babylon. The understood clearly that Ezekiel was talking about Babylon. You cannot read your context into the Bible or you are mistranslating.

So what is context? The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed. Not your context. But their context.

Yet another question: Am I being contextually true to a given passage in the Bible or am I adding my own biases? Good luck ever being purely non-biased but its certainly something we can all work towards.

Now back to that original question: Is the Bible true? I’m hoping to get to that in a few more posts. But first, the last thing in the process of getting at that question is understanding the storyline of any given passage. When you couple the storyline with context and literature type, you’re well on your way to understanding how any given passage in scripture is true.

Is the Bible true?

• Part 1: Or maybe the better question is, “How is the Bible true?”
• Part 2: Are we retelling these stories with the same motivation the original storytellers did?
• Part 3: A process for getting at that question
• Part 4: Donkeys, Elephants, and Poems
• Part 5: Wild boars are the key to unlocking it all
• Part 6: Onions in PaRaDiSe
• Part 7: The God and Satan Contradiction
• Part 8: Creation to New Creation
• Part 9: Answering the question