Have a look at this video excerpt from the Gospel Coalition:

It is a friendly but important disagreement. On the one hand, you have the great preacher John Piper insisting that the text of Scripture itself is sufficient in and of itself to convey God’s truth. As a result, he says, he would prefer a preacher to become expert in the text itself and not in the historical background to the text.

Don Carson, the scholar and theologian, begs to differ. As Carson sees it, the historical background to the Bible is indispensable for its right interpretation. In fact, without knowledge of the historical context, says Carson, it is likely that a preacher will misinterpret the text entirely, however pious his motives and prayerful his study.

I have a lot of sympathy with Piper in this exchange. The quest for the historical background to the Old and New Testaments has not always provided a good deal of enlightenment. What happens so often is that a scholarly work proclaims itself to be THE new lens by which the Bible must be interpreted; and everyone jumps on board the bandwagon. Yet it only takes a generation for the wheels to fall off the bandwagon, and every quietly forgets that old theory.

Furthermore, it is often the case that historians seem to forget how limited and incomplete the data they are dealing with is. They cannot possibly make the kind of totalising claims about life in the first century that we seem to hear so often.

Which leads us to an important theological conviction about Scripture: that it speaks to us across time and space because it is God’s vehicle for communicating with human beings in every age. It addresses 21st century men and women because, however different they are from 1st century people, they share in common a spiritual dilemma. And the same gospel comes to us now as it did then.

As God’s word, Scripture cannot and does not rest on an authority outside of itself. Scripture must interpret scripture, as the Reformers said. So Piper is making an important theological point here.

But, as Carson rightly points out, he is drawing a false dichotomy. We don’t have to choose one or other: we need both deep knowledge of Scripture itself AND a knowledge of history to interpret Scripture well. We can heed the dangers of allowing Scripture to disappear completely into this or that reading of historical background to the degree that it becomes utterly inaccessible to the ordinary person. But we must also recognise that Scripture is a product of human perspiration as well as divine inspiration. Scripture comes from a time and a place; and so it makes perfect sense that knowing about that time and place will illuminate our reading of Scripture.

And this is equally an important theological principle: that Scripture is a historical book means that it must be embedded in history. It is not a collection of abstract teachings or principles. It relates to real events in the real world; and it emerges from those events. It tells us a great deal about the kind of message it conveys that this is so.

And so, for preachers and for ordinary Bible readers, I think Carson’s is the wiser counsel here. Spend the bulk of your time in study of the text of Scripture. But an hour or two investigating the historical context of, say, 1st century Ephesus, or 1st century Palestine will enrich your reading of the text and save you from error - because this recognises the kind of book Scripture actually is.