At first glance, the latter part of verse 20 appears to offer several possible meanings. The various translations and commentaries favor different meanings and perpetuate them.

The Jerusalem Bible translates, "the interpretation of scriptural prophecy is never a matter for the individual," and this has been used to teach the Catholic doctrine that ordinary individuals cannot just pick up the Bible and understand what it says – only the Church can interpret it for them. The Reformers fought against this false doctrine, and defended the right of individuals to read the Bible.

Then, the KJV says, "no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation." This could also be construed as above, but Protestants would tend to think that this is a repudiation of a subjective and relativistic understanding of Scripture. Indeed, much damage has come from the American way of thinking, that every person is entitled to his opinion, and that every person has a right to contribute to a discussion, even in the church. The Bible denies both – every person must affirm what God's word says, and anyone who ignores God's word must himself be ignored (1 Corinthians 14:38).

In many churches, Bible studies are performed by allowing the participants to give their private interpretations of Scripture. They would begin by saying, "I think this means…" or "To me this means…." Nobody is ever wrong and no view is denounced as heretical, but the moderator would construe all the views presented so that they are all correct and all in agreement with one another.⁷ But then they might as well write their own Scripture, since in effect that is what they are already doing. In any case, the Reformers defended the right of individuals to read the Bible, but not to violate the text and assign subjective meanings to it.

So this second option is true enough in itself. Each passage of Scripture has an intended and fixed meaning, so that a subjective and relativistic approach to reading the Bible is to be denounced as an assault upon the word of God. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that this is what verse 20 conveys.

 

Notes

⁷ See Vincent Cheung, The Parables of Jesus for additional comments.

(to be continued)

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