Back projection

One of the most common interpretive errors in reading the Bible is retrospective projection: the attribution of meanings, questions, and cognitive categories to an ancient text that emerged only many centuries later. Within the Evidence-Based Biblical Studies approach, retrospective projection is not treated as a moral or ideological error, but as a methodological one, consisting in the conflation of levels of data and interpretation. A classic area in which this phenomenon becomes visible is the question of the shape of the Earth.

Biblical texts do not pose questions about the planet’s geometry. Not because their authors possessed some “hidden truth,” nor because they were mistaken, but because such a question lay outside their cognitive horizon. The Bible operates with phenomenological language: it describes the world as it is experienced—earth beneath one’s feet, sky overhead, the horizon, the rising and setting of the sun. These are functional and relational descriptions, not model-based ones. The problem arises only when a modern reader begins to ask whether the Bible teaches that the Earth is flat or spherical—and then attempts to find “evidence” for one of these positions in the text.

From an EBBS perspective, such a move is a warning signal. It indicates that the question precedes the data, rather than the other way around. Expressions such as “the circle of the earth,” “the ends of the world,” or “the foundations of the earth” are then extracted from their literary and genre contexts and burdened with cosmological meaning they did not carry in their original usage. This is precisely what retrospective projection entails: the text becomes a screen onto which contemporary debates are projected, rather than a source from which an ancient way of speaking about reality is reconstructed.

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Importantly, EBBS does not defend the claim that the Bible “knew more” than the science of its time, nor that it anticipated modern cosmology. It does, however, point to something else that is often overlooked: the Bible does not contain claims that are directly contradicted by scientific findings, precisely because it does not attempt to speak at the same level of description. It does not formulate physical models, define geometrical parameters, or employ the language of empirical theories. It is this restraint—rather than any hidden scientific knowledge—that many find most striking today.

In this sense, questions about a “biblical shape of the Earth” often reveal more about our contemporary epistemic tensions than about the text itself. Methodological integrity therefore consists not in proving that the Bible agrees with science, nor that it opposes it, but in maintaining the proper order of inquiry: first asking what the text actually says on the basis of the available data, and only then considering what significance this may have for us today. EBBS does not close the discussion, but frames it in such a way that meaning is not a product of expectations, but a proportionate response to the available evidence.

EBBS does not deny the right of believers to seek meanings in the Bible that correspond to what they understand, feel, or experience. It merely emphasizes that such meaning—even if existentially important—cannot automatically function as an interpretive argument at the level of textual data.

EBBS does not deny the right of believers to seek meanings in the Bible that correspond to what they understand, feel, or experience. It merely emphasizes that such meaning—even if existentially important—cannot automatically function as an interpretive argument at the level of textual data.