Copyright Brooke Lester 2012: I make this guide, and each of its files, available under a Creative Commons "Attribution CC BY 3.0" license. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon my work, even commercially, as long as they credit me for the original creation.
This guide to researching an exegesis project is adapted—and adapted, and adapted again—from that offered by Ronald Allen, Professor of New Testament, at Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis IN (US), in 1996.
These are the steps by which I break down exegetical research for my Masters students in biblical studies. By "exegesis," I mean "determining the likely meaning of a text in its original social-historical context."
Included also is an explicit element of "hermeneutics," in its limited sense of "determining some range of possible meanings that the text might support for particular reading communities today."