From an article in Sojourners by Marilyn McEntyre titled “How to Read the Bible”:

When Luther insisted on “sola scriptura” as a corrective to abuses of ecclestical authority, he opened up no only the richest conversation in history for the priesthood of believers, but also a large can of worms.

… Hebrew is one of the most ambiguous languages on earth. And Greek draws distinctions that do not survive translation. And the cultural assumptions of the ancient folk who sat on a hillside and heard the Beatitudes differ from ours profoundly. It takes careful, ongoing scholarship to help us imagine how they heard what they heard.

— Marilyn McEntyre, “How to Read the Bible,”
Sojourners, June 2009, 30.