Where Everybody's Crazy

Argh, so much to do and so little time. I have of course another sermon this weekend to write, and this time - the third Sunday - in Japanese. This takes twice to three times as long as doing a sermon in English. But fear not, I still do do the same kind of preparation for those sermons; here's part of my preparation for this week's:

Luke lists these twelve disciples. The first six evidently formed a pre-existing community, or at least set of overlapping communities, while none of the latter six seem to have any connection to the others.

There are some possible connections: Mark says that Matthew the Levite was the son of Alphaeus and Luke says that James was also son of Alphaeus. So they might have been brothers, but there's no tradition for that. It's possible that Mark got confused. (Well, not if he was inspired by the Spirit but we can blame it on a mistaken harmonization by a scribe, which has the same effect.) But on the whole the second set of disciples are fairly independent.

Indeed some of the connections between them are ironic: Matthew the Levite and Simon the Zealot would not ordinarily have been the best of friends, and that style of relationship was also prefigured in the relationship between Jesus and Judas from Keriot. Remembering that Jesus deliberately chose this set of people, I'm taking it to mean that he wishes his kingdom to be composed of those who ordinarily would not necessarily get along, but what a testimony it becomes when they do get along in his name. These days it's kind of rare, but it really is a testimony when it does happen.

So Jesus uses both "friendship evangelism" - utilising existing relationship networks - and "cold" evangelism, calling people like Matthew off the street. Let us not say that one way is better than the other.

I'm also looking at the way people change as a result of meeting Jesus. John was an aggressive and feisty fisherman and yet he dedicated the last few years of his life as bishop of Ephesus to telling Christians that they should love each other. Matthew was greedy and he became generous. Peter was a racist (or at least an elitist) when he met Jesus, and - here's the interesting bit - stayed a racist long after Pentecost until God finally dealt with that bit of his personality. And he still had a fight with Paul about it. Perhaps, just perhaps, the apostles were human after all.

Thomas - well, people get the wrong idea about Thomas. Yes, he was not inclined to believe people who said that someone had raised from the dead. I think that's a fairly sensible position to take, given that people don't often come back from the dead. Thomas always wanted a bit more proof. But Jesus knew that Thomas needed that proof, and he gave it to him, and when Thomas got it, he called Jesus his God, giving the rest of us a handy proof-text against Jehovah's Witnesses. And while everyone else was messing around heading west around the Mediterranean, he thought, well, someone's got to take this good news east, and off he went and founded churches in Iran and India.

I don't know yet how the sermon's going to finish and tie all this together, which is why I equally don't know how this blog post is going to finish and tie all this together. But at least with a blog post I can say: Well, that's as far as I've got with my thinking. Can't really do that with a sermon. Still, the blog post has a pretty picture and the sermon won't, so that makes us even.

OK, enough technological tomfoolery, it's back to work for me.

I'm preaching on Sunday (of course), and every time I write a sermon, I find myself going down a line of thought and thinking "Uh, not sure I like where this is heading," and I decide to change tack and hope nobody asks me about it afterwards. And in our English service, guaranteed at least one of two people will ask me the question I'm dreading. Given that I know one of them reads this blog, (Hi V!) let's see if I can pre-empt the awkward question...

I'm preaching about Amos and also giving a general introduction to the role of the OT prophets. One of my main points will be that prophets generally operate within the people of God. Their job is to remind people under the covenant what the covenant requires of them; it is not to tell people who are not under the covenant what the covenant requires of them. In other words, I think it is prophetic to call the Church to repetance; I think it is pathetic to try to call the nation to repentance.

Now there are two prophets (Amos and Jonah) who look very much like they are prophecying to other nations, but my contention is that this is chiefly rhetoric to display how far off track Israel has got. Jonah is easy - the faithless prophet who is amazed at how quickly a foreign country listens to God compared to Israel. Amos, chapters 1 and 2, is a bit more tricky.

Amos talks about a bunch of countries and what they've been doing wrong, and then, seemingly with no distinction, turns to Israel and Judah and has a go at them too. I think this "seemingly with no distinction" is the key part here. He's saying "You're just like all the other nations":

“You Israelites are just like the Ethiopians in my sight,” says the LORD. “Certainly I brought Israel up from the land of Egypt, but I also brought the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir.”

One distinction is that when God talks about the other nations, he mentions what they've done wrong, and then what will happen to them. Many translations use the word "sins" for what the nations have done wrong, but this is a mistake. The word "sin" in the Old Testament (‏חָטָא‎) is a technical term for a breach of the covenant between God and his covenant people. But the word Amos uses for the other nations is ‏פֶּשַׁע‎, a transgression or crime. From the context of these verses, I think "war crime" is a reasonable translation. God is not talking about punishing sin; He is talking about restoring justice. Evangelicalism tends to blur that distinction, but I think it's an important distinction. So for instance, here's my translation of Amos 1:9:

This is what the LORD says: "Because of the three war crimes of Tyre - actually four! - I will not take them back. They deported a whole community of exiles to Edom, and they reneged on their international treaties."

This is about big geopolitical injustices. It is not God offended that His people have breached their relationship with Him; it's God offended that other nations and political actors could possibly be so damned inhumane to each other. Perhaps it still offends Him today.

So here's the line of thought that I didn't want to go down: If this is not referring to "sins" of the nations, and if, as I claim, "sin" is a term referring to breaches in the covenant relationship between God and His people, can people who are not under a covenant relationship with God sin? Am I saying that those who are not Jews or Christians cannot sin?

Well, it's a huge heresy but let's have a think about it anyway.

The first important thing to remember is that I don't actually need to know how God deals with people who aren't me. Puzzling deeply over how He treats those outside the covenant does not excuse me from how I am to live now that I am inside of it. That's sort of what the Amos 8 quote was about above: Israel has this relationship with God, but Ethiopia has another. Jesus has sheep of other sheepfolds that we don't know about. If he wants someone to remain alive until he returns, then what is that to me? Do I think there is salvation for those who are not Christians or Jews? Absolutely yes, because of what Jesus has done! Can I say who is "in" and who is "out"? Absolutely not, and it's not my job to judge. It's my job to (a) get my bit right, which includes (b) serving others, and (c) inviting them into a secure covenant relationship.

(The second important thing to remember, of course, is that it's probably unwise to build a theology on fine distinctions between Hebrew words in one chapter of one book of the Old Testament. Particularly with Hebrew being such a, uh, fluid language. Still, people commit worse exegetical crimes, so let's press on...)

I keep talking about covenant relationships, and I think that's pretty key here. From the start, God used local cultural expressions to demonstrate that He wanted a bilateral relationship with His people: "They will be my people and I will be their God". The Old Testament covenant relationship and Jesus' invitation-and-response were cultural forms of agreement and contract between two parties. In Revelation, there's the symbol of a marriage, which again symbolizes a two-way contract. (I think it's still a two-way contract in that culture, right?)

God does not act unilaterally in choosing His people. (This is not a cue to talk about predestination versus free will; I knew you were going to do that. He gives His people the impression that they're entering into a bilateral relationship, and I'm not going to accuse Him of deceit.) So it was never a "He is God and you shall submit to Him", as some Abrahamic offshoots and overbearing evangelists may try to claim.

(OK, so possible NT counterexample: Paul. That'll break your brain. Paul didn't "convert", God forced his hand. Oh great, another road I didn't want to go down.)

Anyhow, the predominant relationship type is certainly two-way, invitation and acceptance. The Bible is predominantly a book about, by, and for people who have accepted that relationship, and it delimits sin, certainly in the OT, as breakdown of that relationship. Because of this focus, it says almost nothing about those who have not accepted that relationship. Are you getting me?

Paul, writing to Greeks and Jews in Ephesus, makes a similar distinction to Amos: "dead in your transgressions (παραπτωμασιν) and sins (ἁμαρτιαις)". While in a sense, it doesn't matter, they were both "dead", I think that it is fair to say that those who are not in a covenant relationship with God cannot sin.

The eagle-eyed will spot a circular argument here: I have defined "sin" in terms of a particular relationship, so of course it only applies to those within that relationship. If there's anything to attack here in my argument, it's the definition of sin. But if you have a better one, please be prepared to show working! Etymologically in Greek and in Hebrew, the word for "sin" refers to missing the target, and so I think that one person can only say to another that they have missed the target if the target is mutually agreed. (Particularly if the one doing the saying turns out to be a mutually-agreed kinda guy.)

But I think this does help to explain something. Jesus tells us not to judge others. Yet the epistles are full of people correcting, rebuking and so on. I think the same distinction is at play. Those under the covenant, and who wish to remain under the covenant, are liable, and even grateful, for reminders of how they should live under that covenant. Those who are not under the covenant, we can't speak for.

So my takeaway from all this is that I can't call out those who have not agreed to our rules for not following our rules. Sounds pretty simple, but the louder edge of the Christian faith don't seem to have grasped it yet. The corollary, of course, is that I do have a right to call out those who claim to have accepted our rules but then don't follow them.

Of course, first we'd all have to agree on what "our rules" are, and I don't see that happening this side of the Parousia...

Update: Yeah, OK, I hear you. I hereby recant the major idea of this, which is that sin only applies to those who have a relationship with God; thanks to Alan, Daniel and others for pointing me at bits of Paul I haven't spotted. (That said, funny that when Paul said that Jews and Gentiles were alike under sin, he didn't say whose sin. It's almost like he's saying that the Jews' sin, breaking the covenant, made them just like the Gentiles who didn't have the covenant relationship. But no, I'm not going there, I really do recant this.) I still hold on to the idea that the prophets only spoke internally, and that God's relationships are fundamentally bilateral.

Also it's worth noting that these are the thoughts that didn't make it into my sermon, precisely because I wasn't sure about them. The blog's for experimentation, not for finished products.

Amusingly, I preached the sermon again today, and my pastor heard it for the first time. He said "That's your testimony, isn't it?" About right.

Otherwise titled "Still A Biblicist?"

The more of the Bible that I read, and the more I respect the Bible, the less that the individual words of the Bible are significant and the more I have a sense of the whole. I guess I'd better explain that.

The book of Job is amazing book, as I've mentioned before. The main story is of a character who, after receiving a complete nightmare of a time from God, asks a load of difficult questions of God, and, instead of getting a sensible answer, gets put in his place. Meanwhile, three people tell him he must have sinned, but he hasn't. (I eagerly await those comments which say that, because my precis of the book is wrong, then my thoughts about textual criticism must be wrong also.)

Anyway, the whole climax of the book comes when Job has had a heck of a time at God's hand, and he decides that he's going to ask God a few questions. The turning point of the book is Job 13:15, which is held up as an example of amazing faith by many evangelicals:

Though he may slay me, yet I will hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.

This is an amazing verse! I remember on my WEC orientation, the UK director pointing to this as the high point of faith in the Bible - a man who will trust in God even though God appears to be against him.

Or at least, that's what the NIV says. The authorised Jewish version, the JPS, (and the ASV and the RSV, and...) says something that can be seen as the exact opposite:

He may well slay me; I may have no hope; Yet I will argue my case before Him.

What has happened here? How can the translations be so divergent? At this point, the crux of the entire book, we have either a faithful Job who will trust implicitly in a God who seems to have it in for him, or we have a cynical and despondent Job who will argue with God even though it's completely pointless. Commentators will try to tell you that "the context requires" one option or the other, but actually, in context, both possible readings make sense. So which is it?

Well, the problem here is one of qere versus kethib. Basically, in the Hebrew Bible texts, we have certain passages which have two readings. One reading is what is written, but the Masoretes, who prepared the Hebrew Bible, wanted to preserve all the texts that they had received, even the mistakes. They worked out what the mistakes were probably meant to be, but they wanted to preserve the integrity of the text that they had received. So they wrote little notes in the margin saying "We have written (Hebrew 'kethib') the text as this, but when you read it, read it like this (Hebrew 'qere')."

Usually, there's a very slight difference between the Qere and the Kethib but a very slight difference in Hebrew can completely change the meaning. (And I hope the Biblicists are listening at this point.) So the Kethib of our verse in Job is "lo'" but the Qere is "lo". Like I said, a slight difference. The Qere then reads "I will trust him". ("lo" means "to him") But the Kethib reads "I will not trust". ("lo'" means "not")

What do we do with this? Is Job saying that he will trust in God, or that he will not trust? It depends on which translation you read. That can't be satisfying, can it? Well, at these junctures, Bible scholars look for an alternative translation, such as the Septuagint.

The Septuagint is an authoritative Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, prepared by seventy Jewish scholars before Christ's birth. From a Christian point of view, it gets a few things "more right" than the Hebrew text - for instance, in Isaiah, where the Hebrew says that a young woman will become pregnant and bear a son, which is not exactly a fantastic miracle, the Septuagint says that a virgin will become pregnant and bear a son. Which is a little more surprising. So some Christian confessions, particularly the Orthodox ("It's Greek so it must be good") rely heavily on the Septuagint rendering of the Hebrew Bible.

Unfortunately, for this verse, the Septuagint is, let's face it, a complete crock.

ἐάν με χειρώσηται ὁ δυνάστης ἐπεὶ καὶ ἦρκται ἦ μὴν λαλήσω καὶ ἐλέγξω ἐναντίον αὐτοῦ

I'm really not sure how best to translate this, because it's incredibly confused Greek, but let's have a stab.

Because even if the ruler overpowered me, and surely he ruled over me, indeed I will I speak and plead before him.

Is this indicative of a depressed but hopeful Job, or a despondent and cynical Job? I can't tell, because it doesn't make very much sense.

This is precisely the point where theology overpowers exegesis. If you think that theologically Job ought to trust in God despite his situation, you choose the Qere reading. If you think that Job is completely fed up and is howling pointlessly at God, you choose the Kethib. Half of the commentaries you read will spend this verse slagging off the other half.

Well, I don't care. Whichever reading you choose is between you and God, and completely changes the dynamic of the story, and - hopefully - the nature of your faith in God in difficult times. I hope it does change the nature of your faith, because otherwise you're reading the book of Job and getting nothing from it. If reading the Bible doesn't change the way you live, why bother doing it?

But whichever reading you decide suits you best, please don't tell me that "The Bible says..." whatever, unless you believe that you're qualified to make a judgment why the kethib is correct and the qere is wrong or vice versa.

The Bible doesn't say things. People do. (Lots of people get really lost at this point, but it's true.) The Bible does not make definitive theological statements. It can't. It's a book. It's an inanimate object. The Bible doesn't "speak today", and InterVarsity Press be damned. The Bible doesn't "say" anything. It's a book, savvy? People read from it, and sometimes they read into it rather than reading out of it. Sometimes they read the qere, sometimes they read the kethib.

Sometimes they just read whichever bit of it suits their own blessed theology. Real Live Preacher, with whom I rarely agree, but frequently love, absolutely nails this one. The Bible doesn't say anything. People do. So which set of people you follow is an important decision.

The important thing about the book of Job is not whether you read the qere or the kethib, but how your relationship with God changes as a result. If it makes you more humble, more mystical, more caring for your fellow man, and more devoted to God and to finding out more about him, then you chose the right reading. At that point, arguing over what "the Bible says" becomes meaningless.

Once we put down our biblicist weapons - because they are weapons for political control over one another - and start on the narrow path of humility and love, we can learn to embrace the ambiguity of the Bible; it shows us a little more of the ambiguity of life, and it challenges us to deal with that ambiguity in the way that Jesus would.

I'm trying to write a sermon on Luke 5:1-11 - Jesus calling Peter - for next Sunday. See, I was supposed to be having a weekend off in Tokyo next week, but, well, you know how it goes - Saturday afternoon will be spent at a conference in Yokohama, and then on Sunday I'll be preaching at Shonandai church. Shonandai is pastored by the Kawamuras, who were missionaries in Oxford and looked after me like parents while I was there in 2003-2005, before their mission retired them. When they asked me to preach, I could hardly say no. But then I'm preaching the week after at Nagahama anyway, so I'll use the same sermon...

Anyway, I was really surprised by Peter's reaction to Jesus' miracle. Most of the time the disciples, or anyone else, witness a miracle, they ask who Jesus is; when Peter witnesses a miracle, he asks who he is. And he declares that he is a sinful man. Suddenly, this big fisherman starts talking in religious jargon. "Sinful" is not a word that is a normal part of a fisherman's vocabulary. This is a theological word. Jesus starts talking about fish; Peter ends up talking about theology. As I said previously, if you want to talk to the fisherman about religion, you've first got to talk to him about fish. This is still, I think, a lesson for all missionaries.

But now Peter has got religion, what does he say? He says he is a "sinful" man. Sinfulness is an admission of guilt. This is a man with literally a serious guilty conscience. There is no connection between a miraculous catch of fish and Peter's sinfulness. The usual explanation is that Peter is in awe of Jesus' holiness. But I'm not convinced about that. Because you can't see holiness. Peter didn't see holiness. He saw fish. If you want to talk to the fisherman about religion, you've first got to talk to him about fish.

This wasn't the first miracle that Peter witnessed, either. Peter's mother-in-law got healed. (Lk 4; now that raises questions about Peter's wife during the rest of the Gospel, but let's not go there this time.) Why the confession of sin? Why now? I wonder what he's done. I wonder why Peter has a guilty conscience. Fishermen are pretty feisty characters. They work hard, they play hard. They probably drink hard, and generally live hard. My ancestors were fishermen. Sometimes it shows.

But anyway, what this got me thinking is that Jesus knew exactly what was needed to get Peter talking in theological terms. Jesus doesn't talk theology; Peter ends up talking theology. This was obviously Jesus' plan all along. First he prophesies over Peter when Andrew brings him for an interview; (Jn 1) then he heals Peter's mother-in-law; and now he is ordering Peter around on matters of fishing. He knows exactly what is needed to get Peter to recognise his own sin.

And this is really what caught my attention. Because there is a distinction between dealing with "felt needs" and giving "personalised attention", and we often mash the two together. There's a lot of emphasis on "felt needs" in evangelism these days. And I understand it. I'm fairly sympathetic to it. There's a great article in this edition of "Japan Harvest" about the felt needs of the Japanese. I know that Jesus can fulfill these. And I used to enjoy the sermons of Archbishop Kallistos of Diokleia, and one of his catchphrases was "if salvation is to be salvation, it must reach the point of human need". And he's right. If it doesn't satisfy us, it isn't salvation.

But that must be weighed against another quote, from William Sloane Coffin:

I don't see how you can attract folk to Jesus by appealing to their basic selfishness - "Jesus can fix everything that's wrong with you" - and end up offering anything like the self-less, self-denying faith of Jesus.

Jesus did not deal with felt needs. His concern was with getting Peter to acknowledge his sinfulness. Jesus did demonstrate personalised attention. He clearly had Peter in mind and knew how to bring him to a point of confession. But it seems like his sensitivity was not towards Peter's felt needs, but to Peter himself. Peter knew he was a sinful man, but that wasn't a problem. Jesus personalised his attention towards Peter and made it a problem.

The danger of the "felt needs" gospel is that we can alter the gospel to be whatever the individual needs. Jesus doesn't do this. His personalised attention is focussed on getting people to need whatever the gospel is.

I'm busy writing a sermon about "holiness", based on Jesus' dealings in Mark 4-5 with those people and places which were considered unclean. (tombs, demons, a woman with an emission of blood, the dead) I was just about to title the sermon "True Holiness" when I caught myself.

I have a visceral negative reaction to any theology which talks about "True Noun" or "Biblical Noun". It's certainly my postmodern culture speaking. I can't believe that the Bible is narrow enough (or even small enough) for us to pick out and anoint one specific interpretation of theology, nor do I know that, between the tens of thousands of denominational differences, the opinion I (or anyone else - certainly not anyone else!) settles upon is shared by God. I would not have liked to listen to a sermon called "True Holiness", so I shall not impose it upon others.

I have a problem here, though, because I'm not being consistent. Previously I argued that we have the same Spirit as Paul and all the other canonical apostles, and so (presumably, and implied) should be able to speak with the same authority as them. And they certainly did not hold to a tentative interpretation of Scripture:

So we also give thanks to God continually for you, because when you heard the word of God through us, you received it not as words of man, but as it truly is, the word of God.

Worse, they commanded non-apostles not to hold to a tentative interpretation either: (adding more weight to my idea that we have the same Spirit as them.)

If someone speaks, do it as the oracles of God.

So if I wish to be consistent I am left with an uncomfortable choice: either the apostles were overreaching and claiming something that may not have been true, or we are to assert the same claim ourselves. (Incidentally, I have no idea how the people who teach that prophets should pussy-foot around and say "Well, I may be wrong, but I think the Lord is saying..." handle this verse in 1 Peter.)

Thankfully, the other legacy of my postmodern culture is the knowledge that slavish consistency is overrated.

Let's get all my heresies out in one day.

While I was hunting through How to read the Bible for all its worth, I found something which crystallised a number of problems I have with the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture.

Now to say that I have problems with something doesn't mean I don't believe it. Actually I don't know where I stand on it. The best argument I've heard for it is that the Bible says that the Bible is inspired - which is a seriously broken interpretation of 2 Tim 3:16 (as this page makes clear) - which is very similar to the Da Vinci Code saying that everything in the Da Vinci Code is true. Oddly believers in this argument agree with the first part of that sentence but not the second.

The second best argument I've heard is that the Bible is inspired because the Church recognised its inspiration. Good news for the doctrine of inspiration, really bad news for the doctrine of the authority of Scripture, because Scripture is only authoritative because the Church says so.

But the one that really freaks me out is how textbooks on exegesis, like How to read the Bible for all its worth deal with the fact that within the Bible, the authors break all their rules of exegesis. They deal with it by appealing to magic. Always a bad sign, I feel.

At a number of places in the New Testament, reference is made to Old Testament passages that do not appear to refer to what the New Testament says they do. That is, these passages seem to have a clear meaning in the original Old Testament setting and yet are used in connection with a different meaning by a New Testament author... We, however, are simply not authorized writers of Scripture. What Paul did, we are not authorized to do. The allegorical connections he was inspired to find between the Old Testament and the New Testament are trustworthy. But nowhere does the Scripture say to us: "Go and do likewise".

But of course the Scripture never told Paul to do it either. The message is clear: there are two types of Christian. The first type is the "inspired writer", the second type is the "illumined reader". (I am using Fee and Stuart's terms.) The Holy Spirit, which we are supposed to believe is unchanging and lives in all believers, speaks in a special authoritative way to the first type of Christian, and in a more tentative way to the second type of Christian. The first type of Christian is special and may bend the Scriptural text in any way the Spirit tells him to, and the second type of Christian is ordinary and may never bend the Scriptural text in any way at all.

Oh, and there are no more of the first types of Christian at all. How convenient! This explains why the same unchanging Holy Spirit inspired a bunch of books a few thousand years ago, but has not been particularly interested in inspiring anything at all since then.

When people come up with exegetical and historical contortions like this, and like with the case of Biblical authority, in order to defend a doctrine, I can't help but wonder whether it's a doctrine we need to be holding on to, and whether we'd be any poorer if we let go of it. In this case, I don't think we would.

Incidentally, what does the Bible say about the two-types-of-Christian hypothesis?

Elijah was a man just like us.

Oops.

Here's Jonah 1:5-6:

The sailors were so afraid that each cried out to his own god and they flung the ship’s cargo overboard to make the ship lighter. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold below deck, had lain down, and was sound asleep. The ship's captain approached him and said, "What are you doing asleep? Get up! Cry out to your god! Perhaps your god might take notice of us so that we might not die!"

And Maclaren's commentary on it, typical of many commentaries:

No wonder that the fugitive Prophet slunk down into some dark corner, and sat bitterly brooding there, self-accused and condemned, till weariness and the relief of the tension of his journey lulled him to sleep. It was a stupid and heavy sleep. Alas for those whose only refuge from conscience is oblivion! Over against this picture of the insensible Prophet, all unaware of the storm (which may suggest the parallel insensibility of Israel to the impending divine judgments), is set the behaviour of the heathen sailors, or ‘salts,’ as the story calls them. Their conduct is part of the lesson of the book; for, heathen as they are, they have yet a sense of dependence, and they pray; they are full of courage, battling with the storm, jettisoning the cargo, and doing everything possible to save the ship.

OK, so sitting down in a boat when there's a storm on and going to sleep is a Bad Thing for a prophet to do, and demonstrates stupidity, insensitivity and unawareness. Fine.

Now let's change the prophet:

Now a great windstorm developed and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was nearly swamped. But he was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. They woke him up and said to him, "Teacher, don’t you care that we are about to die?"

This, of course, is just fine.

Jesus is our pattern in small common things as in great ones, and among the sublimities of character set forth in Him as our example, let us not forget that the homely virtue of hard work is also included.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Graeco-Buddhism is a really fascinating thing: it's about how Buddhism came to the Greek empire and the syncretism that took place between Buddhist thought and Greek philosophy between around the 4th century BC and the 5th century AD. Rather an important time frame from Christian theologians, one might think.

So with that in mind, how do we translate James 3:6? The KJV goes for this:

And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.

But that "course of nature" bit is a little funny. It actually reads τὸν τροχὸν τῆς γενέσεως - literally, "the wheel of life" or, perhaps better "the wheel of becoming". And actually that "iniquity" is a bit odd as well. OK, I'll grant that most of the time "αδικια" means "unrighteous". But looking in TDNT, we see that αδικια can refer to "what is of purely illusory value". Let's translate that as "maya".

So we've got the wheel of life being set on fire, the pollution of the body, and the illusory cosmos. Seen that anywhere before?

So here's another Accordance tip. I got the wonderful Theological Dictionary of the New Testament this morning and started to play about with it. I selected the second word of Matthew 1:1, and was surprised to see this:

Come on, it's the second word of the New Testament. You've got to find that! Well, the trick is this: if the module you're looking things up in is the default Greek/Hebrew dictionary (usually Strong's) then the word is looked up by key number. This means that the word is searched by its uninflected (dictionary) form. Search for "γενεσεως", and it internally looks for "word number 1078", and you get the entry for "γενεσις". Perfect. But if the module you're using is not the default Greek dictionary, it looks the word up by the exact form, so you end up looking for "γενεσεως" in TDNT, and unsurprisingly it's not there.

The utility of this feature is questionable, but anyway, there's a way around it. When you select the module to search in - let's say the TDNT again - you need to hold down the option key. This searches for the uninflected form, which is what you want - the TDNT article for "γενεσις". In which there is a real theological gem, of which see the next post.

In the absence of a really good library, getting Accordance has helped me get back into theological geekery in a big way. One of the modules I got with it was the NET Bible, or "New English Translation". As a straight translation for reading I'm not all that fond of it, but the notes that come with it are solid gold. I'll just give you the notes from Mark 1:1 as an example:

sn By the time Mark wrote, the word gospel had become a technical term referring to the preaching about Jesus Christ and God’s saving power accomplished through him for all who believe (cf. Rom 1:16).

tn The genitive in the phrase τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ (tou euangeliou Iesou Christou, “the gospel of Jesus Christ”) could be translated as either a subjective genitive (“the gospel which Jesus brings [or proclaims]”) or an objective genitive (“the gospel about Jesus Christ”). Either is grammatically possible. This is possibly an instance of a plenary genitive (see ExSyn 119–21; M. Zerwick, Biblical Greek, §§36–39). If so, an interplay between the two concepts is intended: The gospel which Jesus proclaims is in fact the gospel about himself.

tc ℵ^* Θ 28 l 2211 pc sa^ms Or lack υἱοῦ θεοῦ (huiou theou, “son of God”), while virtually all the rest of the witnesses have the words (A f^1,13 33 M also have τοῦ [tou] before θεοῦ), so the evidence seems to argue for the authenticity of the words. Most likely, the words were omitted by accident in some witnesses, since the last four words of v. 1, in uncial script, would have looked like this: ιυ̅χ̅ρ̅υ̅υ̅υ̅θ̅υ̅. With all the successive upsilons an accidental deletion is likely. Further, the inclusion of υἱοῦ θεοῦ here finds its complement in 15:39, where the centurion claims that Jesus was υἱὸς‚ θεοῦ (huios theou, “son of God”). Even though ℵ is in general one of the best NT mss, its testimony is not quite as preeminent in this situation. There are several other instances in which it breaks up chains of genitives ending in ου (cf., e.g., Acts 28:31; Col 2:2; Heb 12:2; Rev 12:14; 15:7; 22:1), showing that there is a significantly higher possibility of accidental scribal omission in a case like this. This christological inclusio parallels both Matthew (“Immanuel…God with us” in 1:23/“I am with you” in 28:20) and John (“the Word was God” in 1:1/“My Lord and my God” in 20:28), probably reflecting nascent christological development and articulation.

sn The first verse of Mark’s Gospel appears to function as a title: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is not certain, however, whether Mark intended it to refer to the entire Gospel, to the ministry of John the Baptist, or through the use of the term beginning (ἀρχή, arche) to allude to Genesis 1:1 (in the Greek Bible, LXX). The most likely option is that the statement as a whole is an allusion to Genesis 1:1 and that Mark is saying that with the “good news” of the coming of Christ, God is commencing a “new beginning.”

So the first thing to say about the notes is that there are a lot of them, and they're very detailed. Four to a verse is not uncommon. They're divided between study notes, which are explanations about what the text means; translators notes, which go into detail about why they chose to translate things in a particular way; and textual notes, which explain the differences between different manuscripts. There's plenty in there to keep a Greek geek like me happy.

For instance, in the notes above we see perhaps the most significant textual variant in the New Testament: does Mark 1:1 say that Jesus is the son of God or not? We don't have an original copy of Mark's Gospel, so frankly, we don't know. I suspect it doesn't, to be honest, given that the whole theme of Mark is that Jesus is the son of God but this supposed is a surprise. It would be a bit silly to give away the surprise at the start. As the notes say, ℵ (which is a manuscript called "Codex Sinaiticus", one of the oldest full copies of the New Testament we have) is a very good manuscript, and it's more likely (in my view) that "the son of God" wasn't there initially but was added later to give the work more weight, rather than being there initially but being weakened later. One of the principles of textual criticism is that we generally take the more theologically unpleasant reading, because that's more likely to be "corrected" by well-meaning scribes later. But at the end of the day, it's a judgment call. We weigh up the evidence, and we decide what the Bible probably said.

How much this is a problem depends on your understanding of Scripture. If the very words of Scripture are the very words of God, then you're going to have quite a problem with humans sitting down and deciding what the words of God probably are. As I mentioned the other day, those with a Qu'ranic understanding of Scripture will get really freaked out by this, and sure enough, I came across Muslim apologists saying that since we have a scientific and critical approach to manuscript evaluation, we can't say for sure that anything is the word of God and therefore all bets are off. To be honest, this is a good argument against those who believe in a literal inspiration of Scripture: the original Scripture can be literally inspired if you like, but we don't have the original Scripture, so that doesn't help us, really. (And then there are the crazies, which proves the principle that people have to find something to anathematise other people over.)

John 5:4 is a fantastic case in point:

For an angel of the Lord went down and stirred up the water at certain times. Whoever first stepped in after the stirring of the water was healed from whatever disease which he suffered.

Is that the word of God? It's the word of God according to manuscripts C³ Θ Ψ 078 f^{1, 13} M. It's not the word of God according to manuscripts p^{66, 75} ℵ B C^* T pc co. How would you like to make the call?

As I've said, whether or not you think this is a good thing depends on your view of Scripture. I think it is a good thing, that we are able to evaluate multiple sources for the texts that have come down to us. There's an integrity there. Acknowledging the existence of variants, and dealing with them as a present reality, is much, much preferable to denying them and suppressing them in an authoritarian manner, even burning all the variants. (Which, let's face it, has happened in at least one major world religion, and tends to be a trademark of sectarian Christian groups as well.) We have to speak a lot more tentatively about Scripture if we can't even agree on what it says. We speak in terms of probabilities, which is a lot more honest a way to handle it.

A hard (what I've been calling "Qu'ranic") view of Scripture sees multiple variations as a weakness, because you have to "choose" which one God really said. That is the unfortunate consequence of going down the road of inerrancy and infallibility and all those other categories which the Bible does not appropriate to itself. But you don't have to do down that road. A flexible view of Scripture sees multiple variations as a strength. And I would argue that a flexible view is actually more in keeping with Biblical tradition itself. We have four Gospels because we know it's a bad idea to single-source a news story; there will be differences between those Gospels, but that's the nature of testimony. Textual criticism is just a logical extension of that: we're not single-sourcing a Gospel, and there will be differences between our sources of an individual Gospel, but that's the nature of human manuscript transmission.

But I think it's a good thing for another reason; it causes us to go back to what's important. The vast, vast majority of the textual variants of the New Testament are unimportant. In Mark 1:4, it really doesn't make any difference whether John the Baptist was in the wilderness, (Sinaiticus and others) or John was baptising in the wilderness (Alexandrinus and others) or John was in the wilderness baptising (Cantabrigiensis and others). Does it change what the text is saying? It doesn't matter whether John's gospel was written "that you may come to believe" or "that you may continue to believe". The net effect is the same.

Even Mark 1:1, which I can see people getting freaked out about, doesn't change the story one bit. It doesn't matter whether or not it says right there that Jesus is the son of God or not. The rest of the book is going to go on and demonstrate it, and if you don't believe the rest of the book, then having it in the title isn't going to help. Paradoxically, the indecidability of textual criticism, with its minute study of the individual words, forces us to take our eyes off the original words and look at big picture of the story.