Tony Keddie: The “Glaring Problem with Second-Amendment Exegesis”

Tony Keddie, “Second-Amendment Exegesis of Luke 22:35-53: How Conservative Evangelical Bible Scholars Protect Christian Gun Culture,” in Misusing Scripture: What Are Evangelicals Doing with the Bible? edited by Mark Elliot, Kenneth Atkinson, and Robert Rezetko (Routledge, 2023), 267-268:

From a critical historiographical perspective, there is one glaring problem with Second-Amendment exegesis: The Bible was written ages before the Second Amendment. As we’ve seen, conservative evangelical interpretations of the Second Amendment already fail to account adequately for understandings of self-defense at the time the Constitution was written, overlooking less canonical sources from that time and privileging the propertied white man as the default position of interpretation (i.e., who an “individual” is). Their interpretations of the “original meanings” of Luke 22:35–53 in light of their interpretations of the Second Amendment similarly segregate the Bible from its world by discounting non-biblical sources and dodging critical questions of power and privilege. As a result, they impose modern conservative notions of individual rights to lethal self-defense onto a text from a world with entirely different laws and ideals.