Scripture Study: Set Texts and Exegesis
The Scripture domain tests your ability to turn a prescribed passage into an argued interpretation rather than a retelling. Questions supply a text or a theme and ask you to explain it, locate it in its context, and assess its theological significance for the writer and community. Marks come from textual detail joined to method.
Method before message
- Context: author, date, audience, and the passage's place in the book's argument. The prodigal son in Luke 15 answers a criticism about table-fellowship; in Matthew the parable sits inside a kingdom discourse.
- Genre: law, narrative, hymn, parable, miracle story, pronouncement story, prophetic oracle, apocalyptic vision. Genre sets the rules of reading; Genesis 1, read as polemic against rival creation myths, yields claims about God rather than about the age of the earth.
- Source criticism: Markan priority, the Two-Source hypothesis (Mark plus Q), and the Pentateuchal strands (Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomistic, Priestly).
- Form criticism: short oral units - controversy stories, pronouncement stories, healing accounts - shaped by the needs of the pre-literary community.
- Redaction criticism: what each evangelist added, cut or rearranged, and why - Matthew's fulfilment quotations, Luke's concern for the poor and for women, Mark's urgent "immediately".
- Language: the Hebrew or Greek behind a translated word (agape; hesed; pistis as faithfulness as well as belief).
Worked example: Mark 2:1-12
"The point of the passage" earns nothing alone. Supply the chain: the scene is a controversy narrative; the friends' action dramatises faith; the pronouncement "your sins are forgiven" is what the story exists to deliver; the scribes' silent charge of blasphemy is the real conflict, since only God forgives; "which is easier?" exposes that spoken forgiveness cannot be tested, so the healing becomes visible proof of an invisible authority; "Son of Man" links the scene to Daniel 7. Assess: the passage advances Mark's conflict theme and his Christology of hidden, authorised authority. A candidate who notes Luke 5:17-26, with its Pharisees and teachers of the law present and the note that the power of the Lord was with him to heal, shows redactional awareness.
Traps that cost marks
- Paraphrasing the narrative instead of analysing its construction.
- Answering only the first half of a two-part question ("explain … and assess …").
- Dropping a scholar's name without stating the argument.
- Importing modern controversies as if the text asked them.
- Eisegesis: reading your conclusion into the text.