Hard Texts Atlas Editorial Standard

Purpose

Required method

1. Define the difficulty precisely. Quote or identify the words producing the conflict. Separate moral, historical, textual, theological, and pastoral questions.
2. Establish the textual field. Include every primary passage and the most important parallels. Do not solve a problem by omitting the hardest verse.
3. Locate the text. Explain genre, speaker, covenant setting, ancient practice, and the passage’s role in its book.
4. Expose textual decisions. Identify meaningful manuscript variants, ambiguous Hebrew or Greek terms, translation choices, and places where the evidence cannot decide with certainty.
5. Steelman major readings. Describe each position in terms its informed advocates could recognize. State its explanatory gains and its costs.
6. Conclude with reasons. Exegis must say which reading best explains the evidence. It may combine insights where the text warrants it, but it must not use “mystery” to avoid analysis.
7. Calibrate confidence. Use High, Moderate, or Low, and explain what is being rated. Separate confidence in a central conclusion from confidence in a reconstruction of details.
8. Serve three readers. The short answer should work in a search result; the pastoral answer should address conscience, grief, or abuse; the academic answer should expose the argument and its qualifications.
9. Annotate connections. A reference list is not enough. Every cross-reference must say why it matters.
10. Point beyond Exegis. Recommend serious, relevant works, including a fair representative of a major alternative when the issue remains contested.

Tone and safeguards

• Admit the moral or emotional force of a question before offering resolution.
• Distinguish description, regulation, permission, concession, and command.
• Never turn an exceptional judgment narrative into a standing authorization for violence.
• Do not use ancient context to make evil good; use it to understand what the text claims and how its laws functioned.
• Avoid claiming that every discrepancy has one provable harmonization. State when a manuscript error or unresolved historical question is possible.
• Do not make a disputed denominational conclusion a test of Christian faith.
• Never give pastoral counsel that shields abusers, silences lament, or transfers guilt from perpetrators to victims.
• Revise when better textual, historical, or archaeological evidence emerges.

Confidence scale

Source policy