If You Have To Explain It... (paperback)

Every serious argument about scripture eventually hits the same move: “It’s clear if you read it in context.” But the context is never self-contained. It needs a lexicon, a historical reconstruction, a denomination’s house style, and someone fluent enough in the original languages to tell you what the ambiguity actually was before it got translated into something that reads clean. The tools built to recover what a passage originally meant are artifacts of their own time, language, and scribal culture. Textual criticism doesn’t strip away the noise and hand you a clean signal. It applies newer static to older static. When five good-faith scholars, using real methodology, produce five incompatible readings of the same twelve words, that isn’t evidence the text is deep. It’s evidence the text is underdetermined, and always was. Part I takes the passages built to absorb that kind of projection: Genesis 1’s plural “us,” Isaiah 7’s virgin, Psalm 22’s disputed verb, the verses Christianity has argued over for two thousand years because the Hebrew and Greek genuinely don’t resolve. Each one runs through six lenses: academic, early church, rabbinic, modern theological, apologetic, and layperson. They never land in the same place twice. Part II changes the question. Exodus 21’s slave-beating clause. Leviticus 11’s menu. Acts 2’s shared property. These passages aren’t ambiguous. They say exactly what they say, and what they say ranges from uncomfortable to indefensible. So why doesn’t anyone follow them? The answer isn’t hermeneutics. It’s a selective canon, applied by cultural comfort rather than any consistent principle, that turns unclear verses into settled doctrine and clear verses into “context we’ve moved past.” No theology degree required. No side assumed going in. Just the passages, laid out plainly enough that you can watch the machinery work in real time and decide for yourself whether anything under the architecture was ever load-bearing. This revised edition corrects errors throughout and is newly typeset for print.