[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:
[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
You can buy critical Greek New Testaments and read it in its original language if you want. The Bible is not a political document except for the Israelite period where politics and religion were the same thing.
The issue with Bible translation from Greek and Hebrew is one of being true to the original Greek/Hebrew while still maintaining sentence readability in the language the Greek/Hebrew is being translated into. Greek is quite a bit different than English in more ways than just sentence structure. Often, literary aspects of the original text get lost in translation (word plays, alliteration, etc). It’s the job of the minister to bring these out in the sermon.[/quote]
Regardless of being made to in some sense study Greek in seminary, it seems to me that few ministers are competent in it. They may even make it up.
I had a pastor who in one sermon made a major point of the distinction between (transliterating here) dunamis and exousia. Choosing various verses, he had seven cases that he alleged were one or the other.
On checking when I got home, he was wrong 4 out of 7 times. (No, I cannot read Greek but I can look things up.)[/quote]
One could only wish that the issues stopped at translating the ancient language. That’s generally the easy part though.
As for ministers being competent in Greek, I’m somehow not surprised. I often hear ministers (or pastors, preachers, whatever you want to call them) spout out words or phrases in Greek and wonder whether their knowledge starts and stops at those words or if they possess substantive knowledge of ancient Greek and ancient manuscripts.
A good example of an often quoted bit of Greek is John 1:1, where preachers love to mention that the Greek word for ‘word’ is ‘logos’ and then mention that ‘logos’ means ‘word’, as if that much wasn’t apparent from the translation. Unfortunately they don’t mention either the much more common uses of logos, like its normal meaning more akin to ‘reason’, nor do they mention what connections the word generally has with the neoplatonic “trinity” of reason, beauty (or the one) and the world soul (sound familiar?) which would have been well known at the time the gospel of John was written. Of course, the mere mention of that historical association will probably be scoffed at by most modern day Christians, who feel more comforted thinking that the author of John wrote that line with the intention of ‘logos’ referring to a book (the Bible) which wouldn’t be put together for another 400 years.
Oh well. [/quote]
Haha, do you even know when John wrote his stuff and when the Bible of today was put together? Because you must be using Babylonian math to come up with 400 years.[/quote]
Actually, I don’t know when John wrote his stuff or why that matters. The author of John, whoever he is, wrote around 100ad. The Bible in its present form was voted on around 400ad? I think. I don’t recall exact dates, but that seems about right. So 300 years. I’m not quite sure how all the conversions workout, but a reference to the Babylons base 60 system seems a bit hyperbolic to me. I know you’re a defensive guy who steams at the smallest insinuations against your faith, but you can do better than this. Besides, I didn’t say anything negative about the Bible, I said negative things about bad interpretations of the Bible. Trust me, I think the mainline interpretations of the Bible are basically correct.