Abstract
M.A.
Since the 19th century, scholastic biblical hermeneutics mushroomed in competition with other critical disciplines within the human sciences, and this resulted in the emergence of the historical critical approach. This is an umbrella-term which describes a plurality of methods. These approaches include the textual criticism; literary criticism; form criticism; redaction criticism; source criticism and many others. The historical critical approach dominated biblical interpretation for the last one hundred and fifty years.
The socio-scientific critics used the expression “context” to understand the importance of the life-situation; the economic; social; political; historical; cultural, gender and psychological “context” to bring back the full picture of “human context" of the Bible. Representatives such as Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh read and interpret the New Testament from a modernized industrial perspective with certain presumptions and assumptions from the reader’s own culture and background. New Testament scholars have made attempts to use the aspects of the social world of ancient Israel to investigate the origin, development, and/or function of these societal components of the social systems and structures of biblical Israel. The socio-scientific critics feel that every interpretation, giving meaning to a text, derives from a cultural system. They say that using social-science models from Mediterranean cultures is an honest attempt to come to the same understanding, of that of the first century reader and author by applying the same social systems. According to the socio-scientific critics, the modern reader must understand what then made sense to a
Mediterranean culture. In this case, they also say that the knowledge of the sociological data of the biblical world is very important for the interpreters. Socio-scientific criticism studies, emphasises the strict relationship between the texts of the Bible and the life actually lived by the early Christian communities. We can therefore conclude by saying that the socio-scientific criticism is indeed that phase of the exegetical task which concerns itself with the social and cultural dimensions of the text and of its environmental context.