Suppose you’re traveling to work and see a stop sign. What should you
do?

Well, that depends on how you exegete the stop sign:

* Knocking the sign over with her car, a post-modernist deconstructs
the sign, ending forever the tyranny of the north-south traffic over
the east-west traffic.

* Similarly, a Marxist refuses to stop because he sees the stop sign
as an instrument of class conflict, concluding that when the bourgeois
use the north-south road, they obstruct the progress of the workers on
the east-west road.

* A serious and educated Catholic rolls through the intersection
because she believes she cannot understand the stop sign apart from
its interpretive community and tradition. Observing that the
interpretive community doesn’t take it too seriously, she doesn’t feel
obligated to take it too seriously, either.

* A fundamentalist, taking the text very literally, stops at the stop
sign and waits for it to tell him he can go.

* A seminary-educated evangelical preacher looks up “stop” in his
English lexicon and discovers that it can mean: i) something which
prevents motion, such as a plug for a drain, or a block of wood that
prevents a door from closing; or ii) a location where a train or bus
lets off passengers. The main point of his sermon on this text the
following Sunday is: “When you see a stop sign, it is a place where
traffic is naturally clogged, so it is a good place to let off
passengers from your car.”

* A scholar from the Jesus Seminar concludes that the passage “STOP”
undoubtedly was never uttered by Jesus himself, because being the
progressive Jew that he was, he would never have wanted to stifle
people’s progress. Therefore, STOP must be a textual insertion
belonging entirely to Stage III of the gospel tradition, when the
church was first confronted by traffic in its parking lot.

* A New Testament scholar notices that while there is no stop sign on
Mark Street, signs are found on Matthew and Luke Streets. He concludes
that the signs on Luke and Matthew Streets were both copied from a
sign on a street no one has ever seen called “Q Street.” In the
scholar’s commentary on the passage, there is an excellent 300-page
doctoral dissertation on the origin of these stop signs, and on the
differences between stop signs on Matthew and Luke Streets. There is
an unfortunate omission in the dissertation, however. It doesn’t
explain the meaning of the text!

* An Old Testament scholar points out that there are a number of
stylistic differences between the first and second halves of the
“STOP” passage. For example, “ST” contains no enclosed areas and five
line endings, whereas “OP” contains two enclosed areas and only one
line termination. She concludes that the author of the second part is
different from the author of the first part and probably lived
hundreds of years later. Later scholars determine that stylistic
differences between the “O” and the “P” show that the second half was
itself actually written by two separate authors.

* Because of the difficulties in interpretation, another Old Testament
scholar amends the text, changing the “T” to “H.” Because of the
multiplicity of stores in the area, “SHOP” is much easier to
understand in context than “STOP.” The textual corruption probably
occurred because “SHOP” is so similar to “STOP” on the sign several
streets back. It is a natural mistake for a scribe to make. Thus the
sign should be interpreted as announcing the existence of a shopping
area. But then perhaps both meanings are valid, with the full thrust
of the message being “STOP (AND) SHOP.”

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