QUOTE : We are warned about the pitfalls that open up before us if we fail to recognize the linguistic usage we are faced with. We are advised not to try to discover meanings beyond, or behind, those the original writers intended (had Caird lived to see the full flowering of postmodernism, we can predict what his reaction might have been). He points out that when the biblical writers used a word, we should not assume they meant what we today would mean by it – advice that, if heeded, would enable a good many theologians, both scholarly and popular, to stop wasting time and to concentrate on the real issues. He remarks that those who apply surgery to a biblical text are, as often as not, tacitly admitting their failure to understand it.