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  1. eisegesis love

Definitions

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. A subjective method of interpretation by introducing one's own opinions into the original: opposed to exegesis.

Wiktionary

  1. n. An interpretation, especially of Scripture, that reflects the personal ideas or viewpoint of the interpreter; reading something into a text that isn't there. Compare exegesis.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. personal interpretation of a text (especially of the Bible) using your own ideas

Etymologies

  1. From Ancient Greek εἰς (eis, "into") and English exegesis. The English eisegesis is historically unrelated to the Ancient Greek εἰσήγησις ("proposing, advising"). (Wiktionary)

Examples

  • “eisegesis" - reading into the text what is not there - and interpret everything based upon those assumptions.”

    Propeller Most Popular Stories

  • “You’re right about many Christians using the Bible to backup their own beliefs which never came from the Bible at all, but from some weird tradition – this twisting of scripture to make it back up what you already believe originating outside the bible is called eisegesis as opposed to exegesis, which is a process of understanding the original text in it’s own context, devoid of your own pre-conceived notions.”

    Bible Study: Who Wrote the Gospels? | Mind on Fire

  • “From my perspecitve, those layers are all well & good for building a theology if you are in to this type of eisegesis... but the only responsible exegesis must have both feet firmly planted in original meaning.”

    Jesus the Mystic in the Gospel of John

  • “Miscegenation laws were justified in part on a Protestant eisegesis of scriptures that were silent on the issue.”

    The Volokh Conspiracy » Libertarian Squishiness:

  • “What you did was eisegesis – you read your own biases into the text.”

    Bad Boy Bible Study

  • “And so apart from questions about the authors' exegesis (or eisegesis) with respect to Johannine theology and Christology, we also find that the absence of a philosophical and theological explanation of how the authors understand the doctrine of the Trinity leaves a confusion that transcends matters of exegesis and enters the realm of systematic theology (a distinction the authors eschew to the detriment of the book's clarity).”

    Review of Kostenberger and Swain, Father, Son and Spirit: The Trinity and John's Gospel

  • “Careful not to read back — eisegesis / eisegetic — a “libertarian” reading of Locke onto the “founding”!”

    The Volokh Conspiracy » McCain’s Interesting Reading of the Constitution:

  • ““Careful not to read back — eisegesis / eisegetic — a “libertarian” reading of Locke onto the “founding”!””

    The Volokh Conspiracy » McCain’s Interesting Reading of the Constitution:

  • “Dreams are often so ambiguous that interpreting them is a form of eisegesis guided more by wishful thinking than by the unvarnished truth.”

    Back in the saddle

  • “For me, it is an illustration of the contrast between exegesis and eisegesis.”

    Archive 2006-11-01

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  1. interpretation

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  1. eisegetical

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  • Telofy Congrats to Word of the Day, eisegesis. You have been among my favorites since I read “eisegesistic” some three years ago in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun (or more specifically The Sword of the Lictor):

    “Anyway, for a long time—no one knows quite how long, I suppose, and anyway the world was not as near the sun’s failing then and its years were longer—these writings circulated or else lay moldering in cenotaphs where their authors had concealed them for safekeeping. They were fragmentary, contradictory, and eisegesistic. Then when some autarch (though they were not called autarchs then) hoped to recapture the dominion exercised by the first empire, they were gathered up by his servants, white-robed men who ransacked cocklofts and threw down the androsphinxes erected to memorialize the machines and entered the cubicula of moiraic women long dead. Their spoil was gathered into a great heap in the city of Nessus, which was then newly built, to be burned.” Apr 28, 2010

  • pavonine Consider Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire Nov 22, 2007

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‘eisegesis’ has been looked up 3906 times, loved by 13 people, added to 35 lists, commented on 2 times, and has a Scrabble score of 10.