meaning is derived from the work of people such as E. D. Hirsch and, more recently, Kevin Vanhoozer, and as a historian, I must say that their epistemology and theories of meaning seem much closer to that of the New Testament authors than do those of modern scholars who are more indebted to existentialist and nihilist philosophers than they are to the biblical sources when it comes to the matter of meaning.31 Words have meaning in contexts, and the context is not just literary in the case of the