Talk:Historical-grammatical method

I'm not the one who added the cleanup tag, but next time someone works on this article, could a paragraph be added contrasting the Historical-grammatical method with the historical-critical method? Thanks. Ropcat 21:17, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

And how about deciding whether it's historical-grammatical or grammaticl-historical? PiCo 22:57, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

The statement that in "postmodern and liberal forms of literary deconstructionism" appears to equate postmodern methods and liberal methods of textual analysis and/or criticism. Deconstruction is better classified solely as a postmodern way of analyzing text. But beyond that, I don't think it is really fair to say that deconstruction means that "each person's own interpretation is valid at the expense of the original author's intent." That's not exactly an accurate understanding of deconstruction, and definitely not NPOV. I'm not sure how to fix it, though, short of removing the entire sentence. So that's what I'm doing.

Aardvark92 17:45, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Christian POV
This article seems to have a clear Christian POV, and more specifically a conservative Christian point of view.

The article really needs a proper discussion of criticism of the GH method. It should deal with both religious criticisms, eg the Christians who prefer highly allegorical readings should have their view presented, and secular, eg historical-critical scholars frequently find the readings produced by the grammatical-historical method unconvincing and more a product of preconceived notions than serious engagement with the text. I cleaned up some sections that showed a particularly blatant bias but I am not the right person to go over the whole article and correct. I neither have the expertise, nor am I anything approaching unbiased myself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by MathHisSci (talk • contribs) 17:41, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Invitation from Wikiversity
Hi, this is Opensourcejunkie from Wikiversity. I'm part of a (very) small group of individuals building content in the School of Theology's Department of Biblical Studies, and I'm here to put out an invitation to you, my fellow wikipedians :-). Our Center of Biblical Hermeneutics is virtually nonexistant (we have a "welcome and expand", if that counts ;), and we need knowledgeable editors to build it up.  If that sounds like something you'd like to help out with, either let me know, or just start doing it!  Thanks for any time you can contribute to the cause,
 * --Opensourcejunkie (talk) 12:46, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

“literary-historical”
In his book A Brief Introduction to the New Testament, Bart D. Ehrman calls one of his methods “literary-historical method”. Is this a synonym of “historical-grammatical method” too? And is it something else than Higher criticism, which is also called “historical-critical method”? -- Irene1949 (talk) 09:20, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
 * No, almost surely not. The historical-grammatical method is something used by theologians, not historians like Ehrman. This article describes the historical-grammatical method as "Christian" (surely correct) and Ehrman is not Christian, also making it unlikely that he uses it. MathHisSci (talk) 14:37, 16 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Christian belief may play an important part in the third step, application. But as far as I see, Ehrman's book is about the first two steps: observation and interpretation. I think that observation and interpretation can be carried out in the same way by Christians and by agnostics as long as both work in a scientific way. Would you say that - as long as it's about observertion and interpretation only - there must be a difference between an agnostic and a Christian who uses the historical-grammatical method? -- Irene1949 (talk) 23:17, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

reader response method
The two sentences in this article contradict each other.

First Sentence: In the reader-response method, the focus is on how the book is perceived by the reader, not on the intention of the author.

Second Sentence: For those who regard the text as divinely inspired and seek to determine the intention of the divine author this method will naturally have attraction.

If a person wants to determine the intent of the author, why would a style of interpretation that has no regard for the intent of the author be attractive to him/her? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.42.224.236 (talk) 14:27, 22 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Both sentences make sense if the word "author" in the first sentence means the human author who actually wrote or dictated the text, while in the second sentence the word "author" means God or the Holy Spirit who inspired the human author. That would make sense, but I am not sure whether I got it right. -- Irene1949 (talk) 21:00, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Toward a neutral point of view
The comment above regarding a conservative Christian POV has not fully been addressed in nearly two years. I want to move toward a more neutral point of view, but am unsure how to proceed. In particular, I think the following statements need work:

Top section
who reject the so-called historical-critical method used by mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics.

First, "so-called" should be removed. Second, from what I can tell, the historical-critical method is more an academic exercise and not a hermeneutical method used by mainline or Catholic churches. Third, the footnote attached to this statement does not provide support for it.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

The historical-critical method is not "an academic exercise"; Catholic and mainline Protestant scholars depend heavily on it, and the footnote attached to this statement provides support for it (at least regarding Catholics). This method is taught even in Catholic elementary schools and in parish Bible study groups.

I agree about removing the "so-called". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Irisheyes5 (talk • contribs) 00:28, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Section on Historical Criticism
Scholars who use the historical-critical method treat the Bible as they would any other text, and in embracing a naturalistic methodology, preclude interpretations which allow prophetic foresight on part of the authors.

The first half of this sentence is fine, but the part about a "naturalistic methodology" and disallowing "prophetic foresight" are not NPOV. I am removing the second half of the sentence.

Aardvark92 (talk) 17:49, 25 October 2011 (UTC)