Makes perfect sense

What your saying about reading the bible in context makes perfect sense for most books.

But it brings up some problems for Christians. If you start picking which parts apply to you and which don't, you can pretty much read anything you want out of the bible.

Worse yet, it greatly weakens the impact and power of the bible because it now depends on highly falible human judgement to mean anything.

In any case it's very hard to read the sermon on the mound as only having been given to the inner circle disciples. The end of the speech makes it clear that it was given to a large crowd.

In most bibles it's not clear from the first few sentences who it's being addresed to. Young's Literal is the only one I saw that addressed it to the masses, the one you quote below is the only one I've seen that aims it at the disciples specifically. The rest just address it to 'them' without being clear who they are.

Of course, that we can even have this argument show another huge flaw in using the bible as a source of Gods word.

Jay

If you start picking which parts apply to you and which don't, you can pretty much read anything you want out of the bible.

There is no way around "picking which parts apply to you"--it's called hermeneutics. Choosing to apply ALL parts to you or NO parts are simply extremes.

There is a big difference between an individual reading anything they want to (less likely) and the possibility of *anyone* reading anything (more likely). Like any system, a hermeneutic may be big-C Consistent and Complete and yet allow only a small subset of all possible expressions. For example, arithmetic *could* have expressions like a+/()2^ but it does not. Likewise, one's Biblical hermeneutic is generally rule-based (if informal): many (but not all) statements are possible, fewer of those are extant, fewer of those are useful, and even fewer of those are normative. So for any one person's hermeneutic, there are strong constraints on what can be "read out of" the bible. For a group of people, the *variance* between hermeneutics grows in proportion, but don't forget that we are then talking about many mutually interacting systems, which tend to find their own internal equilibria (or at least local attractors), and begin to be modeled more appropriately as a cohesive group.

I'll grant you the position that most people's Biblical hermeneutic is less than rigorous. But that does not deny that *everyone* must rely upon their "fallible human judgment" at some point in the process of interpretation.

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