Hermeneutical principles must guide an attempt to understand the Biblical text written long ago, in languages representing both Western and Eastern vocabularies and expressions, and especially as it is used interpretively to claim authority in the decisions, choices and faith of millions upon millions of lives.
The governing method by the Bible's own standards so we would know is:
Return to the earliest recoverable linguistic layer and require every subsequent interpretive layer to justify itself.
For each example, begin with the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Koine Greek rather than the traditional English expression. Distinguish carefully between:
1. What the original word actually means in its historical linguistic setting.
2. What the grammar and syntax actually establish.
3. What parallelism or immediate context establishes.
4. What the ancient cultural setting contributes.
5. What later meanings or theological concepts became attached to the word or passage.
6. When those later meanings appear historically, where that can be determined.
7. How English translation may preserve the later interpretation.
8. What familiar imagery, artwork, preaching, or theological tradition has added.
9. What we can confidently recover after stripping those accretions away.
10. What remains uncertain.
Do not assume that a traditional interpretation is wrong simply because it is traditional. The objective is to distinguish text from interpretation and then determine whether the interpretation survives examination.
Likewise, do not favor a novel interpretation merely because it is novel. Apply the same evidentiary standard to it.
Give special weight to the Bible's own internal interpretive controls: immediate syntax, Hebrew parallelism, usage by the same author, repeated biblical usage, acrostic structures, root relationships, Septuagint translation choices, quotations by later biblical writers, and historical linguistic evidence.
Very unfortunately, views labeled "Christian" centuries and a proliferation of them today have become unbiblical and with particular assault on core tenants established by Christ and his Apostles most significantly (redemption and ecclesiology et. al.). They can be understood by one or more of these types of intrusions:
Semantic anachronism: importing a later meaning into an earlier word.
Retrojection: importing a later institution, theology, cosmology, social category, or conceptual system backward.
Eisegesis: supplying something the syntax/context does not establish.
Interpretive accretion: layers of preaching, art, translation, harmonization, commentary, and tradition accumulating around the text until readers no longer distinguish them from it.
Interpolation: actual additional wording entering the textual transmission. This belongs to textual criticism and should remain rigorously separate.