There is a hermeneutical constellation of belief systems that posits texts speaking for themselves without any interpretation and announces that meanings are clear to the newcomer, or outsider, or even the barely literate, in ways they were never clear to bodies of scholars who gave their lives to the study of the same texts. I’m not sure you want to be in that constellation. That is Constellation Fundamentalism, though to be fair to the actual fundamentalists, they don’t seem to be amenable to animal bloodsports at all.
To be fair to this idea, it can be useful to approach things from a fresh perspective. Scholars have had longer to develop the more … complex misinterpretations.
The trouble springs up when you don’t check the, y’know, facts. Like the original text your copy was translated from, say. Or the culture it was written in. Or logic.
(Or, in the opposite case, declaring that your once-over the text has revealed what believers “really” believe.)
To be fair to this idea, it can be useful to approach things from a fresh perspective. Scholars have had longer to develop the more … complex misinterpretations.
The trouble springs up when you don’t check the, y’know, facts. Like the original text your copy was translated from, say. Or the culture it was written in. Or logic.
(Or, in the opposite case, declaring that your once-over the text has revealed what believers “really” believe.)
So very much this.