a brief commentary on bible scholarship (particularly New Testament scholarship) and its retrojectionist/projectonist tendencies which have negatively impacted exegesis of the text

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In addressing a discussion of how bible scholarship (in particular New Testament) has understood text, it is necessary to open by identifying issues that have made the field more complicated than it needed to be:  the first issue is the separation of “classical” (i.e. Greco-Roman) history, and “religious” (Christian or Jewish) history.  The second is the issue of the progression of history from the ancient world to the contemporary one, and how that progression contributed to the divide in the two disciplines.

Scholars of “classical” (Greco-Roman) history do not address the matter of “religious” history because “religious” history deals with issues of doctrine and dogma which are secondary to social/political developments of the period.  Scholars of “religious” history do not address matters of  “classical” history because “classical” history is secular, and therefore deals with problems of pagans who were, by definition, uncivilized and not worthy of meriting attention.

The trajectory of the development of history means that in order to claim “true” inheritance of tradition, both Christian and Jewish histories have had to distance themselves from their early origins, because those origins were inconsistent with the religious structures and doctrines that evolved as the result of and response to socio-political events.  

By the Renaissance, those doctrines, both Christian and Jewish, were sufficiently encultured in the socio-political framework that when Greco-Roman history and philosophy were rediscovered and reclaimed, an explanation had to be constructed whereby the separation between the ancient past and the present could be bridged in such as way as to reassure “civilized” people that their predecessors were also “civilized” and not pagan barbarians, while not destabilizing the socio-political contructs that evolved, which would result in the delegitimization of the contemporary world. 

To this end, Renaissance scholars determined that Greco-Romans did not “really” believe in a plurality of gods, that philosophy was dominant structure of the Greco-Roman world, and that the excesses of the Roman Empire were an aberration that was rectified by the benevolent appearance of the Church (this, obviously, was the Christian, not the Jewish, construction of the trajectory of history from the ancient world to the Renaissance).  Post Reformation, that model was revised to retroject a Protestant framework onto the early Christian Church, so that the early Church was “really” Protestant, was subsumed by the “yoke of Rome” and then realizing the error inherent in that, blissfully rejected that yoke and reasserted its “true” form to recover its rightful place as the heir of both Jewish text and early Christianity.

Because the dominant model, the model that was accepted by the “civilized” world, was the model that was acceptable to the Church, that model has held sway into present scholarship of the ancient “religious” world:  at best, contemporary scholars retroject modern presumptions of ancient beliefs (like the presumption that the ancients did not “really” believe in a plurality of gods), or project their greatest “barbarian” dramas onto that world, in the belief that the ancient world was corrupt and that only Church provided the ancients with redemption from their putative sins (from which, of course, good early Christians were exempt).

Needless to say, both models have their flaws.  This is not an examination of those flaws.  It is an examination of certain texts, and a cross-referencing of those texts against other relevant texts to determine what the texts in question might actually be referring to.  Because it is certain that a lot of the actual import of the texts has been corrupted due to the retrojection/projectionist tendencies of scholars who have evaluated them.