Arguing that many Evangelicals mishandle linguistic evidence in their exegesis, James Barr analyzes in detail several common patterns that can put sound Bible interpretation out of reach. Barr’s analysis drew a good deal of criticism and was explosive in Evangelical circles. However, decades later, Barr’s conclusions still demand serious consideration. This book poses questions that are essential for all serious Bible students to wrestle with.
Behind the academic and innocently descriptive title of this book is one of the most explosive works of biblical scholarship of the 20th century. Certainly many of those who read it when it was first published were never the same again. It signaled the coming end of what hitherto had been a flourishing literature on a 'biblical theology' that was primarily dependent upon the meaning of individual words. In the 1980's again, Professor Barr wrote a new preface, having come to believe that one of the greatest dangers to sound exegesis comes from the consistent and regular use of methods that mishandle and distort the linguistic evidence of Greek and Hebrew.
Barr argues that the traditional assumptions of the earely and mid-20th century about how Greek and Hebrew culture influences the writers way of thinking and the linguistic structure of the languages is misguided. Popular ideas about how Greek vocabulary and Hebrew vocabulary show evidence of how Greeks and Hebrews thought are demonstrated to be fundamentally false.
