Quotation, Commentary and Reformulation in Crossing through a Fragment from the New Testament

Abstract

In this article we take a journey through a fragment of the New
Testament that passes through a quotation, a commentary and a
reformulation. It starts from the fact that these discursive
operations not only convoke the text first but also assign it new
meanings as much by chance of the context and verbal
surroundings as by the explicit will to modernize and explain
what was uttered before. The analysis starts from a biblical
quotation present in a letter that the military bishop sent to the
Argentine minister of health. Then this fragment is linked with
readings present in media related texts, official declarations, and
the answer from a female judge regarding a lawsuit and the
source texts. Later, other readings of the same fragment from
the Gospels are shown. The article comes to the conclusion
that the tension between fidelity to the text and modernization is
not resolved easily, even though the interpretive operations are
institutionally legitimized.