Wallace N. Stearns

“ What scholarship has agreed upon as the meaning of a word, that must be its meaning for us. Words come and words go, and change with the passing of time. We must seek, then, the sense of the word as used at the time of the work or writer studied. We must, further, determine the classification of the document concerned, whether technical, scientific, or literature for art's sake. ”

“ But the passage from Hebrews calls up still another law, interpret historically. The historical background is often the best if not the sole method for getting at the meaning of a passage. The covert references in any considerable piece of literature, whether the Divine Comedy, the tracts of Milton, the letters of Burke, Hudibras, or the Dunciad, all stand revealed in the light of history. The student of Paul must first know of the world of Paul, the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean— Jerusalem to Rome, for that matter. [12] Further, Christianity sprang from the lap of Judaism. ”

“ The Gnostics sought to combine philosophy with — or to seek a philosophic basis for — Christianity. World-creation was by a series of emanations of and from the divine original ground, source, or basis. ”