IT’S IN THE BIBLE…MAYBE [Sun, 11-17-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—IT’S IN THE BIBLE…MAYBE [Sun, 11-17-24]

 

I looked for my Arndt & Gingrich Greek-English lexicon this morning. I wanted to look up the use of some New Testament word. Of course I couldn’t find the lexicon. I don’t have any of my Greek and Hebrew language helps anymore. There was a time when I had a whole shelf full. They have gradually disappeared, just as those languages in my brain have gradually disappeared.

I miss those books. I was never a very good scholar of the Bible languages, but I got satisfaction from working at it. It seemed like what a serious preacher should do, exegete the scriptures of the coming sermon in their original languages.

Well, I do I have an inter-linear, Greek & English [KJV] New Testament, that I use once in a while for break-of-day Bible study, when I’m suspicious of the paraphrasers, especially the jargon “translators.” My Ethics professor, Henry Kolbe, used to say, “The surest way to be irrelevant tomorrow is to be too relevant today.” Jargon is too relevant. It changes so rapidly. What is “dope” today becomes “sick” tomorrow and is almost immediately replace by “brat.” [1] But jargon translations usually get a laugh when used for the scripture reading in Sunday worship, so they are popular. And they really are easier to understand.

The question, though, is: are they accurate? Are we understanding what the Bible writer said in the original language, or are we understanding what some jargon repeater thinks? Or, more importantly, what some jargon listener hears?

The Living Bible [1971]is a paraphrase, not a translation, done by Kenneth N. Taylor for good reasons, so that his children could better understand the Bible passages they used in family devotions. It has been criticized for being both too conservative and too Arminian [free will, 2]. The first criticism is probably valid, since in the original printing, the introduction even said it was written to make it more conservative. That was dropped in later printings. I have to recuse myself on the charge of too Arminian, since I am myself a Wesleyan Arminian.

More than any other type of language, jargon is open to the interpretation of the hearer. Especially when a word that already has a common meaning is appropriated to mean something else.  Dope and sick and brat are probably going to mean something quite different to me than they mean to anyone else.

Jargon is fun. If I say something silly, and a friend says, “Get out of here,” I know it is not meant literally. At least, I hope not. If my friend answers with “Twenty-three skidoo,” well, you know they’re really old!

Jargon is probably necessary as well as fun. But not for the Bible. Best, I think, to stick with the translations of someone who still has an Arndt & Gingrich.

John Robert McFarland

1] “Brat” is the name of the new album by Charli XCX, released just this recent June 7, so it is the current word for the Gen Z and millennial lifestyle, which according to Ms MCX is “…very honest, very blunt, a little bit volatile.” [I had no idea that such a lifestyle is new.]

2] Arminian means free will, [what you do on earth makes a difference about where you’ll spend eternity] as expressed by Jacobus Arminius, rather than predestinarian, [what you do on earth makes no difference since God already knows whether you’ll go to heaven or hell] as espoused by John Calvin, in the Protestant Reformation.