Violent Jesus
In this age of violence, I notice many trying to justify or excuse violence by using a single event in scripture to support their narrative of a violent non-pacifist Jesus. I shake my head because it’s the same problem I see day in and day out when it comes to scriptures. People do not use exegesis, they rely on eisegesis. This is a major, major no-no when it comes to scripture. A brief explanation of the 2 terms may be in order for those who don’t know what this means: exegesis is the process of drawing out the meaning from a text in accordance with the context and discoverable meaning of its author, eisegesis occurs when a reader imposes his or her interpretation into and onto the text. In a nut shell, exegesis is studying scripture to find out what IT says, eisegesis is studying scripture to make it tell what YOU say. So instead of “reading” the text, you are “reading into” the text. All this does it provide confirmation bias, which is: the tende...
