“You may indeed have had the experience of reading a story under a headline, and wondering whether there wasn’t some mistake — what the headline shouted and what the story appears to say point in different directions. And you can sometimes imagine how infuriating and humiliating it must be for the original journalist to have her nuance and research traduced by the quick-grab title. The point I’m trying to make is a simple one: we don’t read the story in the order in which it was written. We read the most recent piece of editing first, and that is what first guides our interpretation of the process which led up to it. Well, this is no less true of the Scriptures than it is of newspapers. We read the texts through the eyes of the most recent editors. And that means that the more we know about who edited the texts and when, the better a sense we will have of the different fragments that make up the whole.”