people today, all understanding, religious understanding included,
is rooted in history, both the present historical situation in which
we seek to understand and the past historical situation of that which
we seek to understand.

Although, in the intention of their authors, the New Testament
writings are documents of faith and religious instruction, they
are also our principal source for whatever can be known about
Jesus and the earliest church. References to Jesus and earliest
Christianity which come from outside the Christian church are
exceedingly rare and usually do no more than confirm what we
already know from Christian sources. Since the New Testament
has both theological and historical uses, it is important to be able
to distinguish between them and to know the methodology which
is appropriate to each use.

Historical interest is not the only, or even the primary, interest
which motivates contemporary readers of the New Testament, and
although the historical perspective has placed great weight on 'the
intention of the author', it is actually the interest of the reader
which determines how he approaches the text. This is not an
endorsement of arbitrary subjectivism but a simple statement of
fact. Only if we become aware of our expectations in approaching
the text, can we formulate appropriate questions to address to the
text and hope to hear answers from the text which are not simply
echoes of what is already inside our own heads. A claim to
objectivity or literalism which is unconscious of the interests which
are actually motivating us, as we 'search the scriptures' ( John 5:
39), leads to the worst possible subjectivism--the worst, because it
is invincible.

The interests of twentieth-century men and women in the New
Testament text are exceedingly varied. Besides the interest of the
historian, there is the restricted, but entirely legitimate, interest
of the philologist, who can learn a great deal from the New
Testament about the state of the Greek language in the first
century of the Common Era. (See below for the explanation of
this expression.) The fact that the New Testament can provide
answers to the questions of a philologist, even though philological
interests seem to have been quite foreign to the New Testament
authors themselves, illustrates a point which is absolutely crucial

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