Sabrina.....Even if you believe that God influenced the selection of the books in the NT, that doesn't mean that the books don't speak from different points of view. It doesn't take much research to realize that different viewpoints are expressed in the NT. Each writer, or rather, each text has its own distinct voice and thought. The theology in the OT is also very different from that of the NT, which anyone who's read the Bible should know. The belief that there is a single, unified theology or perspective in the Bible essentially privileges certain concepts above others and erases concepts expressed in the individual texts in favor of the globalizing view. In other words, each text should be taken on its own terms. So when Daniel designates Michael as a Messiah-figure and Revelation distinguishes Michael from the Messiah child, this is only to be expected because the author of Revelation adopted concepts in Daniel but used them in new ways. To force the separate conceptions into an artificial compromise for the sake of a unified theology is not the best way to interpret a given text.
The books of the NT run from Matthew to Revelation. What God has put together we must respect.
The doctrine of God as the divine compiler of the 66-book Bible is unbiblical; the Bible also does not define exactly what constitutes "scripture". The NT was actually put together by men two hundred years after the individual books were written. Along the way it included books not found in your current Bible, and rejected certain other books (such as 2 Peter and Revelation). Only through discussion and compromise was a universal NT canon finally adopted at church councils. The Nestorian canon of churches in Syria still to this day excludes 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation from the NT. It is easy to look at the canon after the fact and feel that it was "meant to be," but only through an appreciation of the complex process of canonization (see for instance: http://www.bible-researcher.com/canon5.html) would one realize how arbitrary the process was.
But I do believe that the first step to understanding the Bible is to allow the words written to speak for themselves without some outside influence. If the text says a "well is full of water" then imo we should allow, within context, that the writer meant a well dug in the ground and the water is H2O. Why try to decipher if his use of "well" and "water" is consistent with how it's used in texts outside of the Bible?Your analogy is not a good one. If the subject we're talking about concerned "wells" and "water," there'd be no argument -- for we all know what wells and water are from our own experience. But we have no such familiarity with "archangels," or what the word "archangel" is supposed to mean. This word occurs a grand total of TWO times in the NT. It is not a word that originated in the NT but was used for at least a century in intertestamental books (the word is not found in the OT). It already had a well-established meaning. What is more, as myself and others have already pointed out, in one of the only cases of "archangel" in the Bible (in Jude), the word is used through a direct allusion to just such a "text outside the Bible"!! So of course we'd want to look to texts outside the Bible if the very text in the Bible is using a text outside the Bible!! "Archangel" was widely used to refer to the highest class of angels. That's what the word meant. There is no evidence that two writers of the NT suddenly decided to change the meaning of the word to refer to a single angel that was above everyone else. There's nothing in the individual texts I mentioned (again going back to the need to take texts on their own terms) that warrants such a view.
I must assume that the translators know what they are doing when they translate singular and plural nouns and their verbs. If most Bible translations say Archangel, the singular, it should be taken as such. If they say "chief priests", the plural, that too should be understood as written.
I think you missed my point completely. I was showing why you cannot extract the arkh- "chief" from arkhangelos and infer from it that the word uniquely referred to one "Chief Angel," as you put it. The word for "chief priest" is built just the same way and yet it denoted not a unique individual but a class of "chief priests". The subject is not whether a plural should be translated as a plural or a singular as a singular. And it is not significant that the plural form of arkhangelos is not attested in the NT -- as the word occurs only TWICE in the Bible, as I've already mentioned. The plural form is readily attested once we consult a larger body of texts. There was a thread recently about the phrase "third heaven" in 2 Corinthians 12. This is the only case of that expression in the NT and without opening ones' eyes to the literature outside the confines of Bible canon, one can let one's imagination roam free in interpreting what this expression might mean. But when we examine the Jewish literature of the period, which locates Paradise in third heaven and explains what the various levels of heaven are, the reference suddenly makes perfect sense. This is another "obscure" word used in the NT which has light cast by "texts outside the Bible".