original intent of the biblical text. As noted earlier in this chapter, this is the “plain meaning” one is after. Otherwise biblical texts can be made to mean whatever they might mean to any given reader. But such hermeneutics becomes total subjectivity, and who then is to say that one person’s interpretation is right and another’s is wrong? Anything goes. In contrast to such subjectivity, we insist that the original meaning of the text—as much as it is in our power to discern it—is the objective