An old saying: “A text without a context is a pretext for a proof-text.”  Certainly this chestnut has a ring of truth to it. The first stage in serious Bible study is to consider the larger context within which a passage is found.  Unless we can grasp the whole before attempting to dissect the parts, interpretation is doomed from the start.  Statements simply have no meaning apart from their context.  If I say, “Give it all you’ve got,” you would rightly query, “What do you mean by ‘it’?” and “How do I do so?”  Without a situation to give the command content, it becomes meaningless.  In Scripture the content provides the situation behind the text.  Ignoring the context is the basic error that encompasses other errors and makes them possible. Failure to note context may be the most frequently occurring error, since the majority of commentaries are organized around a word-by-word approach that usually isolates each word from the other terms surrounding it and as a result fails to put the message of the text together as a coherent whole.

Every believer should be a textual critic!  We are to test everything: “Test everything; hold fast to what is good” (1Thess.5:21; cf. Acts 17:10-12).  The Greek word dokimazo (G1381) corresponds to test, prove, discern, examine, approve, and try.  Examine and try everything!

Bart D. Eherman: I kept reverting back to my basic question: how does it help to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly?  What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired?  We don’t have the originals!  We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.[1]

One writer writes of “another prominent scholar” who states: It cannot be too strongly asserted that the substance of the text of the Bible is certain: Especially is this true with the New Testament.  What is “substance”?  Substance refers to the real content of a statement or speech.

Let’s see if the “substance” of the following passage has been retained.

KJV: “This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood.  And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.  ⁸ And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one” (1Jn.5:6-8).

RSV: This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood.  ⁷ And the Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is the truth.  ⁸ There are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree” (1Jn.5:6-8).

The “substance” of the adulterated KJV passage is clearly supportive of the Trinity.  But parts of the KJV section were added, as I have been told, by a monk in the 13^th century.  However, an NIV Study Bible Footnote states:The addition is not found in any manuscript prior to the 16^th century.  Regardless of the confusion in dates, the KJV substance is false.  The obvious conclusion has to be that the “substance has not been retained” in the corrupted KJV text of 1Jn.5:7. And so far, we’re only looking at an English interpretation of the Greek text.  (Continued...)