October 22, 2024 • 48 mins
- Rick’s website: https://www.rick.wadholm.com/
- Contact Rick: @rickwadholmjr
- Gordon Fee’s How to Choose a Translation For All Its Worth
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Halloween is approaching. Yeah.
(00:01):
The worst thing I ever dressed up as when I was six, I was a bumblebee in a play.
That's the worst thing that you ever dressed up. Yeah. Super embarrassing.
I could barely speak English. And I was just a bumblebee.
That was a bee. And that was bee number two.
Welcome to TikTok Theology, a podcast that tackles the major trending topics
(00:22):
on social media that concern the Christian faith. I'm Meagan and I'm Steven.
We know you can't form a theology in three minutes or less, but those videos can
identify current issues. TikTok will give us the prompt and then we'll do a deep dive.
Thanks for joining us in this exploration.
Hello, friends, and welcome back. Today we're going to be talking about
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canon of scripture. All right.
For those of you who don't know, don't worry, we'll define terms.
We'll get into it in a second.
I promise. So you can follow us along over the course of this conversation.
But today is special because this topic was requested by a listener.
Yes. And none other than my own sister,
none other who listens to a lot of this stuff.
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My sister, Jessica, who is a professor in social work, very, very smart person,
but then still has questions about theology and biblical stuff and all those sorts
of things. And she was like asking me about canon and translations and different
things. And I was starting to explain it a little bit.
And then she was like, you should do this as a topic and TikTok Theology.
That's a good idea. That's a good idea.
(01:24):
You know, but also that should encourage listeners, please make requests and
we'll get around to them. We're at the end of season three already.
So season four, we're looking for topics and stuff.
And obviously we always scour social media, but I would love...
You're on there. You're on social media.
And I'd love to just kind of directly like, Hey,
this is what our listeners want us to chat about. So let's get that going.
Absolutely. Well, as is everything hand in hand with request,
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this is a conversation on social media.
And as you all know, the theme by now is like, just because these conversations
come up on social media doesn't mean this is the first time anybody's been
having them. Canon, translations, all that good stuff has been in conversation
since it's been being formed. And so the early church had these questions
and we have them now just in a different format because they got asked in a poll
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or something on Instagram. I know for sure the theme I've seen a lot on social
media with Gen Z. This concept of translation, I viewed where it's been
weaponized, like these translation issues or these Canon conversations are
weaponizing what theology we want to believe, right?
Where it's like, Oh, well, this word actually didn't exist until this time.
And so the original translation says this. So actually you're wrong.
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So there is like affirming, they're trying to use translate matters of
translation to affirm their own beliefs.
I've seen that politically where it's like, actually the original translation
says this word and this word, which means that we should be interpreting
revelation as this or something, right? And it's become a whole mess where
people are using different translations, different thoughts, different specific
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words of original language and all that as a way to try and build their own
theology and to affirm their own belief system, whether it's right or not.
They want to find and pick one cherry pick one thing that's in an original,
a different translation and then build an entire theology off of that,
which we know is very dangerous.
And it's wrong to do it. Like you don't, you don't read into the Bible what you want.
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You let the Bible tell you what it says.
Yes. And so I think matters of translation interpretation are important
because we want to know what the Bible says.
So yeah, I think that's a huge thing.
But for those of us who say, what does the Bible say?
Well, we're going to have a conversation with you today about how the Bible ended
up saying what it's saying.
So I think let's start with some definitions before we go into our guess,
which I'm very excited about. Yes.
(03:38):
This is a good buddy of mine, Rick, Wadholm, Jr. who's awesome.
We have been to conferences together, shared like sweets and stuff like that.
He's just a hilarious dude that like loves God, loves the Bible, loves people.
Just a really, really great guy.
I think you'll see that in his personality.
He is a associate professor of Old Testament and he's written a few books.
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He's got a theology of the spirit in the former prophets.
He's also edited, receiving scripture in the Pentecostal tradition and community.
So those are different books that he's worked on.
He's just he's a great scholar.
He's a big fan of Bonhoeffer.
He's an egalitarian.
He's spoken about all these kind of things and just super
biblically astute and a great teacher in general.
(04:23):
So I'm super excited to have him talk through all these kind of issues.
But before we get into that, let's actually talk about canon.
What it is, what are some definitions?
So canon, like C-A-N-O-N.
Like the camera.
Yeah.
Not like, not the war canon.
It is the collection of books that Christians regard as authoritative
and inspired scripture.
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And so there's certain criteria that people would use for canonization,
like what made things canonized.
And one of them is, well, for the New Testament only is the apostolic origin.
So they wanted, they wanted to say that the books were written by the apostles
or their close associates.
And so there was a, you know, making sure that the authorship was close
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to the actual events.
That's for the New Testament.
It's different for the Old Testament.
We'll ask Rick about that a little bit too.
There's universal acceptance.
So these books were already widely accepted and used in worship and teaching
across all the different Christian communities in the first century.
They were already there.
They were already being used and they were used liturgically.
So they were read publicly in Christian worship services
and Jewish worship services for the Old Testament.
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And then they have a consistent message.
So books where their teachings are consistent with other accepted doctrines.
So if something said something like totally whack,
like we know about like Gnostic beliefs that they kind of defied the body
and the material realm.
And there was a whole like group of Gnostic Christians that were writing stuff.
The how to all this defilement.
And so those were left out because they're just,
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it was a small little weird group, but like there was really going against.
The consistent message.
The consistent message of like God made us, he made us body and spirit
and he called it good, you know.
It was theologically heretical actually.
So some of them have that.
Another definition for us is non canonical texts.
So these are books that are not in the canon.
Pretty obvious, right?
So some popular ones are in the Old Testament.
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There's the Apocrypha.
The Apocrypha is actually recognized by Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
And it includes a whole bunch of books like Tobit,
Judith, editions of Esther, Wisdom of Solomon,
Sirach, Baruch, the Letters of Jeremiah, the editions to Daniel,
like the prayer of Azariah, Susanna, Bell and the Dragon.
First and second Maccabees.
Now those are really interesting stories.
I actually liked them.
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I had to read them in college.
They're not like, they don't go crazy against scripture.
They're not like heretical, like some of the New Testament ones
that we'll talk about.
They're not anything like that.
They're actually used by Jewish scholars all the time
and even Christian scholars.
I've read sections of the Apocrypha for works they've done in school.
Yeah.
They're super interesting to trace history.
They do all sorts of stuff like that.
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So we'll ask Rick about that.
Why Protestants exclude the Apocrypha?
So we'll talk about that too.
Finally, there's the New Testament non-canonical texts.
Now these have not been included because they're
seen as wrong in some way.
They are like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter,
the Gospel of Mary Madeleine, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas,
Infancy Gospel of James, Acts of Paul and Tecla, Acts of Peter,
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Epistle of Barnabas, Shepard of Hermes, the Didache,
the Apocalypse of Peter.
Now I will say, like, and so a lot of these
have like Gnostic ideology and things.
Tell a quick story of one of my favorite stories
of this in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
I had to read that in my undergrad.
And there's a story of Little Jesus.
Oh, Little Jesus.
Little Jesus was a little dude, and he
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was playing with his little homie.
And I'm paraphrasing how it goes.
What?
Really?
Yeah.
This is a word for word?
Not exactly like this.
And they were playing, and Jesus did like a little miracle.
And he separated like this muddiness
into like clear water and then ground.
And he separated it.
And then the little homie took a stick
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and just muddied it back up.
And then Jesus got mad.
And he was like, curse you.
And so the boy, yeah.
So the boy shriveled up like a prune and died.
That's in the Infancy Gospel?
Yeah.
Then.
That's bold.
So it's not done yet.
Oh, good.
So then the dad of the boy, of the prune boy,
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came and took Joseph.
It's like, Joseph, you're so interested.
Like what?
And so the dad and Joseph come to Jesus.
And they're like, Jesus, did you just shrivel up this boy?
Shrivel this man up like a prune?
And then Jesus is like, who do you think you are talking
to me like that?
Straight up.
Like he was like throwing down.
He's like, I do what I want.
Like just like an arrogant little dude.
He was like, I will bring this kid back to life
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because I want to, not because he all told me to.
Like it's like that.
And so he brings him back to life.
And then that's kind of like the end of that.
And he also like, even before that,
like he made like these little dove thingies that like floated
away.
But like what was interesting is like the story,
most people think is not true.
But what was interesting is that they were like, OK,
there is actually crazy biblical illusions going on.
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So think about it.
Jesus separated.
Oh, yeah.
And that's exactly Genesis one.
He separated the water from the dirt, whatever.
A little boy who represents humanity,
money to back up.
And that's what would happen with sin.
Got less shriveled.
Then he got, then that man got killed only to be raised again
by Jesus.
Yes.
And so it's actually the gospel narrative
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in this little like story.
So some of these stories and stuff like that,
they were like that.
So is that like accurate historically, like how it went
down?
Yeah, very likely not.
Right?
Like that's not a thing that happened.
But they were used to kind of tell a gospel narrative.
So there's a lot of little weird things like that.
Those are basically the books.
They're interesting.
They're worth reading when you know the proper context,
I think, and just being like, hey, this is why they were
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excluded because they were kind of insane.
Some of them were did get kind of insane.
And then some of them are just like relatively helpful,
like the apocryphal writings and stuff like that, just helpful.
And you can learn from them.
We're allowed to learn from other texts.
Yeah, you can.
It helps you understand the Bible better.
You know what I mean?
I promise it's OK.
All right.
Well, let's go ahead and turn to our conversation with Rick.
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Awesome.
It's exciting to have you here.
Great.
I just want to say fun fact, Rick may feel youthful and young,
but that man is a grandpa.
That's right.
Twice sober, man.
Twice sober.
And it is awesome.
One of my favorite facts about you, Rick.
That's a call out.
Yes.
And I love it.
I love it.
It's on.
Thank you for joining us.
I couldn't think of anybody better to talk scripture with this.
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I know a lot of biblical scholars,
but few are as well-spoken as you and just able to just like
really break down stuff.
So I think our TikTok theologians on the other end of this
are going to have a real treat listening to you.
So I appreciate it.
Yeah.
Let's jump right in.
So first question.
How did books become regarded as scripture?
And so in this question, we're looking at like who decided
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what would make it in or not?
Because this is, I think, people who just first figure out
about canonization, the whole process and stuff like that.
They get real kind of freaked out about this.
Like so people actually decided this and like,
are they trustable?
Can we trust these kind of people?
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah.
This is always one of those problems, right?
When we talk about deciding canon,
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canons never really decided.
The nature when we talk of biblical canon,
the ancient Israel's texts that were received over time, right?
They were being compiled, written, edited, whatever processes
they went through.
They weren't all just like dumped out and like somebody sat
together and said, this is it.
Same technically for the New Testament.
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Even though we kind of like to tell these stories like,
oh, there were these certain councils
or there's a certain list that was created by someone.
No.
Those lists and those council discussions
in the early centuries of the church
weren't decisions about what books were in or out.
They were discussions about what texts did the church use
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as part of its faithful witness to the reign of God and Jesus,
right?
So for them, it was receiving and confessing texts
that were already used as part of the worship,
part of the liturgy, part of the readings,
part of their reflection.
So it was not really about deciding, though.
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I often hear people say, OK, well, they decided.
Or there was a council where a particular emperor,
he issued an edict that you guys need to decide.
These are the texts, right?
Man, we love conspiracy theories, right?
And we love to be able to point at some key moment.
But this is so much messier in a lot of ways
as these texts spread around the empire.
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And the churches that receive them
say, we hear in these the authority of the voice of God
for all churches for all time.
No, that's good.
That becomes the common confession.
So it really wasn't.
Yeah.
So there are some divergences.
That also helps us to appreciate some divergences
in the wider church communion, right?
Historically and today.
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Yeah.
When I tell this to students sometimes
when they ask me this, specifically for the New Testament,
it's like the books sort of just canonize themselves
through the community.
The community quickly started accepting and using
as scripture certain texts.
They were like, hey, this really does
speak towards the witness of Jesus Christ in a way that
is adequate and authoritative and authentic.
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And they just they used it.
And so it's almost like, would you
say that the council's role wasn't to pick text
but to codify what is being used already,
like to kind of like make standard what the church was
already doing?
Yeah.
And because you always have this, right?
The church is expanding, right?
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And things are not as organized as they are today.
Although sometimes it doesn't feel like the church is very
organized today, right?
Structurally, it's a lot looser organization
that is happening globally.
And so I mean, so you have some key bishops
or things like this, but you're having new churches being
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planted, right, all over the ancient world.
And it's like, what text do you commend to them as well?
Or when you have certain fringe groups
that are pushing up the boundaries of what maybe
should be used as part of the worship of these communities,
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that becomes a challenge that needed addressed.
But it was never about deciding these texts, not these texts.
It was more about how do we give common witness together,
again, to the reign of the God of Israel
in King Jesus, a faithful testimony to this.
So was there a different process for this acceptance
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of canonization for Old Testament versus New Testament?
Because I feel like Old Testament and how
that was coming about had a very different look
than the church deciding what was canon scripturally.
Or were the churches and the temples of that time
the ones who were deciding the canonization of Old Testament
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writings as well?
Yeah, that's a great question.
There's a couple of stories that we tell.
One of those, though, in particular,
that dominates the popular ideas of Old Testament
is that there was a gathering of rabbis, Jewish rabbis,
at a place called sometimes Jamnia or Yabne.
It's got a couple different names that essentially determined
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what was in or out.
Well, first off, they weren't discussing canon.
Canon is not a Jewish discussion.
It's not part of the equation.
That's a centuries later Christian conversation,
terminology, idea.
Further, throughout almost all of church history,
there were wider collections than what we're familiar with
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in the Protestant evangelical tradition, the 39 books
of the Old Testament.
You have these extra books that were used by basically
the churches everywhere that were never
given identical authority with those 39.
They were always regarded as secondary to them
in some fashion.
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But still ancient witnesses of Israel to the church.
And some of it was Protestant Reformation became this turn
to basically dump those extra by and large
to push them even further aside, though they were published
in most print Bibles up until about a century and a half
ago.
They were essentially all Protestants still included them
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in their Bibles and so forth.
But the Protestants said, we're going back to the sources.
That was kind of one of the ideas.
And so they went back to the Jewish sources.
And all they found in the Jewish scriptures,
the Hebrew Jewish scriptures, were what we call those 39
Old Testament.
Those other books, they don't exist in Hebrew.
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They exist in Greek.
So and that was the language of the church until Latin.
Like there's a whole conversation there.
But those Old Testament books seem to, I mean,
even before the time of Jesus, they
seemed to have held an authoritative sense.
And they were all independent.
This is the other problem.
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Our canon is in book form, which was a technology that had not
been invented yet.
Scroll was the tech.
And scroll meant you had individual texts
that might be kept together in a sort of library space,
a shelving area.
And these collections of scrolls held great authority
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for the community of Israel.
But there was some divergences of what texts the community used.
Fairly early on, pre-Jesus, they seemed to function for Israel
as sufficiently the word of God.
Like these are the authoritative texts.
Because the church inherits those.
They don't decide those.
They inherit those.
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As confessing the faith Israel had always confessed,
that is taken up in the man from Nazareth, Jesus.
And so their witnesses, the apostolic witnesses,
that end up becoming part of our canon,
were their own wrestlings with those texts,
those earlier texts, in light of the lived experience
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of Jesus by his spirit.
So seeking to faithfully witness to those things.
That's great.
So now that we've touched on how things were included,
let's touch on how things were excluded.
So I think because even as a Christian,
as someone who's loved the Lord her whole life,
always loved the Bible, all that stuff,
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I remember finding out about the non-canonical texts.
And I was like, oh my goodness.
I was like, I don't know how to process this.
What do I do about this?
And so it was very interesting.
And I was like, oh, how did we get here?
Because I'm a thinker and I ask a lot of questions.
I'm like, how did we decide these weren't included?
So Rick, if you could shed some light on,
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what were the reasons that some books were excluded
from canonical scripture?
And then were there any books that were disputed
about making it that or not?
Or was everyone kind of always on the same page?
Or people, which I feel like we know the answer
to that one, but.
Yeah, on any topic, everyone is not on the same page.
Same page ever.
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On any topic.
Ever at all.
Ever.
So could you touch on that a little bit for us?
Yeah, so like what kinds of things
meant that churches weren't using, for instance,
or Israel wasn't using, right?
So those extra apocryphal that get called Old Testament
apocrypha or Deutero canonical, I mean,
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it's got a couple of different names,
depending on who you talk to.
Those extra books, such as like First Maccabees,
Judith Tobit, Bell and the Dragon,
these were Jewish writings written in Greek.
So this is one of the reasons why Israel ended up eventually
within the rabbinic influence,
end up dropping use of these texts.
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But originally there were Israel's texts.
Yeah.
Right?
And texts may be useful without being functional
as the authority of the spirit speaking
to all peoples for all time.
Yeah.
Right?
They may be helpful.
First Maccabees is a very helpful text
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for knowing part of the Second Temple story
and what happens when the temple gets defiled,
desecrated, picking up that whole Daniel account
or what have you.
Like we get some history.
Hanukkah, the story of Hanukkah that gets retold
every year in Jewish communities,
it belongs to First Maccabees.
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So even the modern Jewish communities
that don't regard First Maccabees as scripture
or as part of their canon,
they still use it as part of their worship
and their liturgy, which is fascinating, right?
So you think, okay, so there are these texts
that sit outside and they may be helpful
for individual communities,
or they may be questionable.
(21:23):
Some of them are just weird.
The Old Testament ones less, so most of them,
but you have books, some of the New Testament writings
that were floating around.
There was a number of sort of gospel accounts
or so-called gospel accounts.
Gospel of Thomas that's really just sayings,
kind of like wisdom, pithy sayings,
(21:44):
but includes a line, this is me summarizing it,
so don't go looking for the exact quote,
but right towards the end of the Gospel of Thomas
says something like,
Peter is questioning Mary Magdalene
being present with the disciples.
Like she's a woman, she's not meant for the kingdom.
And Jesus looks at him and says,
what is it to you if I choose to make her a man
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that she may also inherit the kingdom, right?
It's something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
And so while there apparently was some sense of a community,
we actually believe it was a very small sect
that had all sorts of bizarre writings
about the luminaries and divine lights
and stuff like this in Egypt,
in one very small location that we found this text,
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that you have some scholars who wanna make a lot of this,
as if the church suppressed this.
It was very localized, right?
For good reason, because they were a weird church
or a weird, do we even call them a church?
They were weird communion using other weird texts
and practices that were laid outside of the broader church.
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So you have some weird outliers that everyone's like,
that's just not, no.
It's saying things that don't line up with these other texts
and the witness that had been passed down by Israel
and the apostolic group.
But some are still useful.
Wisdom of Siraq, for instance, he's got all sorts
of fantastic wise sayings.
(23:10):
So this is maybe one of your thoughts too,
like, should I be reading those books?
Sure.
Right?
And like I regularly encounter folks in the church
or my students are like, I don't know, it feels dangerous.
Like, what if it's demonic or what?
I was like, dude, you are more in danger
reading social media than you are reading those ancient texts.
(23:33):
Right?
Valid and fair.
Social media is gonna wreck your soul, man.
It's gonna make you angry or it's gonna make you bitter.
Or like those texts at least were used by some
ancient community as part of their worship.
Yeah.
Or as part of their self telling of their stories
and how they reflected on what they believed God had done.
(23:55):
Even if it was misled, but we do that
with all sorts of writers, modern writers.
Yeah.
Anytime a preacher preaches,
they believe they're expounding the word of God.
Right.
But they're not just quoting scripture.
We maybe don't have near the figure that we should
of preaching.
Good point, yeah.
The act of preaching.
I would agree with that.
That's good.
You know, I had to read the whole apocrypha in college
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and I had to read a whole bunch of non canonical texts too.
I think when you have a proper framework
for how to read them, like they're totally fine.
Like I think the problem is when people come in
and they have that fearful question
that these were left out for some kind of nefarious reason
or something like that.
You know what I mean?
And then they're thinking like, oh, what's this?
(24:39):
That's going to lead me astray or whatever.
Like, no, it's not.
I mean, it's fine.
Like you can just read them.
Check them out.
Especially the apocrypha.
You know what I mean?
That's like.
Yeah.
I've heard over the course of my life that people were like,
yeah, don't like they've been left out for a reason,
like banished to the corner, like all the things.
But it seems like from the way you're approaching it
is like that the apocrypha or non canonical texts,
(25:01):
whatever can be used for like studying.
And like, would you say that it can like inform
and enhance aspects of reading canonical scripture?
Context.
Because we have like a history bit or.
Yeah.
It can give context.
So, so maybe you get a sense that other people were writing
using similar language or ideas or types of literature,
(25:21):
like forms of writing, whether wisdom sayings
or wisdom stories or, you know, any number of things.
Now, again, not all these texts are equal.
Right.
Right.
OK.
Got it.
So you would ask a question about like,
were there some texts that were like, oh,
they're asking the questions?
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Yeah.
Yeah.
There were a couple of texts.
One in particular that seemed to be fairly widely used.
And I regularly refer to it in my preaching teaching.
And it's influenced by reflection.
It's a fairly short writing.
It is the diddake, D-I-D-A-C-H-E, diddake.
It's the teaching.
It's attributed to supposedly being written by the Apostles,
(26:04):
whether or not it was.
It's got a whole lot of echoes of the gospel traditions
already in it.
But it is a later like end of the first century,
perhaps early second century reflection on church community.
And lots of churches were using it.
Right.
(26:25):
Yeah.
But then, OK, let me, I don't know what church tradition you
belong to.
But for instance, the Anglican communion
uses the Book of Common Prayer, which is not simply scripture.
It includes all sorts of written prayers, hymns,
other texts that are sacred, significant,
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included for the worship of the community.
And it's an authoritative text for Anglican churches
everywhere.
Of course, they fight over which year of publication
and whatever.
Yeah.
But it's an example.
And other churches, like there was the London Confession
that has been used by certain Baptist groups,
(27:05):
for example, historically.
And most churches have some sort of confessional statement.
That's good.
The diddake, we use that all the time in worship studies.
Because I mean, those are some of your first,
you can see your orders of worship that the church was doing.
So yeah, super important.
So much.
And I was thinking also, another like a theological reason
(27:26):
that I used the Apocrypha a lot was because I
do work in eschatology, a good bit.
And you can actually see the shift
from this Jewish sense of the day of the Lord
being this local thing for the Israelites
to this universal sense of eschatology that
happens in the New Testament.
You see that shift in the Apocrypha.
And so that second temple writings
(27:46):
can help you bring that like, why did Jesus
speak on the end times in a way that's
different than the Old Testament folks.
So you can see that kind of thing.
So it's helpful.
And I think with a properly understood framework,
yeah, just check them out.
You're talking to, but the diddake and stuff like that.
And other religions also have this kind of distinction.
(28:08):
Like they'll have their holy texts,
and then they'll have texts that are helpful.
You know what I mean?
Like in Islam, you have the Koran and even parts of the Bible
that uses holy texts.
But then you have the hadith and stuff
like that that are used as just helpful books.
So that's not uncommon.
And it shouldn't be a thing that's fearful.
Yeah.
So that's really great.
Now I get a ton of other questions for students.
(28:29):
So like that's definitely like the canon thing.
And so another question I have is about translations.
Because people will get some, seriously,
there is a, you got your King James only people.
You know what I'm saying?
That was the anointed from the Lord translation
every 50 iteration of the King James version
that they did every other year.
You know what I mean?
Like, so why are there so many translations of the Bible?
(28:52):
And just to contextualize the whole conversation here,
like why do Catholics only read in the Latin
for the majority of church history?
What happened there?
And then we can talk about like which translations you think
are the best and why and if there's any translations that
are weaker.
Yeah, that's a massive question, bro.
Like the, yeah.
Translations are always an issue.
(29:12):
People have their preference, even if they don't think
that they do.
We think we know what the text already says
or what's the best way to represent the text
or even what the best original text is, right?
We're talking Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, whatever.
And frankly, it's a pretty fluid topic, right?
(29:33):
What we want is solid ground.
So we don't have to think about it anymore.
I have what I need and I can just trust it.
But we're imagining a trust in something
that was never so solid.
It was always a fluid living thing.
It's almost as if we've abandoned
the idea of a living word from a living God
(29:55):
and exchanged it for something else.
Tell them, Rick, tell them.
Yeah.
So are there translations which may be more faithful
to the sense of the text and less?
Absolutely.
But more faithful doesn't necessarily
mean more word for word.
Since by and large, language doesn't happen word for word.
(30:18):
It happens in a larger ideas communicated, right?
Sense for sense or something like this.
This is part of the debate.
If you go online, you can search for a spectrum,
a line that shows you word for word versus thought for thought
or something like this.
And so those are two dominant translation ideas.
How to best deal with the original language
(30:39):
is Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek.
You asked about why did the Latin get fixed?
Well, the Latin wasn't the first text to get fixed, right?
As being the text.
The Greek Septuagint had previously become the text
for much of, again, much of the church.
It became fixed for all time.
And we don't even want to ask if there
(31:00):
were divergent manuscripts that predate.
We don't want to ask about other communities.
Oh, your text says this.
Mine says this in Greek.
OK, so the Latin becomes fixed because, again,
we long for a sturdiness and unchangingness.
We're unwilling to recognize the moving, living nature
(31:21):
of what we're doing, of the act, even of trusting
the faithfulness of God, not a fixed text,
but the faithfulness of the God who has given us these texts,
who has preserved these texts in a way that
is not direct from Him.
He has chosen to mediate that in this complex way,
(31:41):
in this complex pattern.
That's good.
I think one idea is, I think you hit most of them,
most of the questions, because I asked like 53 in one shot.
So one that I get all the time is about the King James only
people.
Can you talk a little bit about why
there was different, a superior New Testament text
that people would use later on, like new discoveries?
(32:03):
First of all, how King James was a great translation
in a day, and then why scholars believe there's
other translations that are better.
Can you just narrate that a little bit, the history of that?
Yeah, the King James history is fascinating.
It was not the first English translation.
It stood in a line of English translations,
and stole slash borrowed an awful lot of its translation.
(32:29):
These folks were in a blank slate.
It wasn't like they were possessed by the spirit
and came out with this perfect translation.
In fact, it went through edits.
So people talk about original 1611.
There is nobody on planet Earth still
using the original 1611.
It's not a thing.
They're using some revision that came at some point,
(32:51):
because there was even typos, for example.
But there are changes that happen.
So they did the best they could with the manuscript
evidences they had.
They didn't know about the manuscript finds
that we would find over the last 150 years.
They didn't know.
And we can't charge them with ignorance on that.
(33:13):
They did the best they could with what they had.
But they stood already in a long line of translation, also
long line into English of translation.
And it's striking to me how at some point,
it became the dominant text, because for a long time,
it was rejected, particularly in the US, our early history.
(33:36):
Folks wanted nothing to do with it,
because it was connected with Great Britain.
Why would we?
So the Puritan text, the translation,
becomes like the dominant text in the early colonies,
not the King James version.
And you have other texts.
Of course, any Catholics never used it.
(33:59):
So we're only talking Protestants.
Yeah, and it just wasn't a dominant one.
So it's fascinating at some point, somebody gets it.
Yeah, like, hey, this is the one.
But that's the same thing people had done with the Latin
Vulgate.
That's the same thing people had done with the Greek Septuagint.
And we create this sort of mythology,
this mythological origin story of somehow
(34:20):
divinely descended from heaven.
It becomes almost like the Islamic Quran.
It is fixed for all time, and don't you dare ever change it.
Yeah.
And I mean, some of the reasons why the other translations,
like in the last 150 years, we had some major, major discoveries.
Right?
I mean, you had the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nakamadi Libraries
(34:41):
and stuff like that, like dozens, hundreds of manuscripts.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but essentially, what would be done
is they take all of the manuscripts, which is a copy of,
like, let's say a New Testament text, like a copy of John
or something like that.
And they take all the manuscripts,
and then they basically combine them to create a text that's
like the thing that everybody translates from.
(35:02):
In the last 150 years, there was many, many, many, many texts
that were added to it that actually changed the thing
that we would translate from to make it more firm and strong,
like closer to what the original text would have been.
Is that correct?
Is that how it's done?
Yeah.
So this is the field, right?
Textual criticism, trying to discern the history of the text,
(35:25):
the manuscripts behind, so these Hebrew, Greek texts.
At one point in time, the idea was to get back
to the original text, only to realize in the last many
number of years now, original text is so problematic,
most scholars have abandoned even that language.
(35:45):
Because what would we even mean by original text?
Which final form of a text?
Yeah.
What counts as original?
Even if it's written by whoever that author is,
at what stage of their own editorial process of production
are we at the original text?
Right.
It's just so problematic.
(36:05):
So you have some textual critical work
that simply tries to tell now the story of how
we got the various forms of texts that we got.
OK.
For instance, the majority text, what
leads to what we call majority text that
lays behind the King James translation tradition.
(36:25):
Of course, this is all just new testament.
Old testament, textual criticism, work
is a whole different beast.
Because we have a lot longer period of time,
a lot less manuscripts to deal with.
It's problematized what text are we dealing with?
And so one of the things that I try and challenge my students
with was, so were folks coming to good faith in the King
(36:48):
Jesus through the Greek Septuagint,
through the Latin Vulget, through other translations
into English King James, non-King James.
Like, is it possible our God is bigger
than any particular translation, whether with errors or not,
with all of the humanness involved,
that somehow our God transcends that
(37:11):
to cause his word to come alive to folks,
even when every single word may not
be what was written by the original hand of whoever
supposedly wrote it.
Like, somehow he's more faithful than that.
Come on, right?
That's great.
I think that lends to the last bit of your 53-point question,
which was.
(37:32):
So humbly, we're asking, so what translations
would you consider the best theologically?
Like, if you're going to do a study or something,
like, what would be like, OK, this translation is the best.
And then with the weaker translations,
are those still OK to be engaging with,
maybe is that more of a devotional text?
(37:52):
Do people pre-trim it?
I don't know.
Is there a line in how we should
be engaging with the quality of translation of scripture
that we have now?
That is a way better articulated question
than I normally ever hear.
Here's the question that I hear again and again and again.
And I know folks in church are wanting to know,
and my students are wanting to know,
(38:13):
what's the best translation?
That's usually how the question is asked, as if, oh, yeah,
it should just be obvious.
So what's the best one?
And my response to that is, so you didn't ask that question.
You asked a much more involved question.
My usually answer to, what's the best translation is,
well, what are you using it for?
Because again, there's a difference
between a devotional hearing of a text
(38:36):
and a communal use of a text.
Yeah.
Right, that liturgical or communal use.
They're not the same.
Like, this is one of those issues.
I think we're finding a lot of problems
with this in contemporary English communities of faith,
is that there's such a diversity, right?
There tends to be no common text shared
among many congregations,
(38:57):
accepting certain groups like KJV Only folks, right?
Who are in their own little corner
doing their own little thing.
But even then, you have some wild outliers
who are using the new King James.
Yeah.
Ooh.
Scandal.
Or one of the other thousand iterations
of folks who figured they could improve the King James,
but they wanted to still be the King James
because that was the idea one.
(39:18):
Yeah.
So for what purpose are we using it?
That's one of the first questions we should ask, right?
And your question already assumed that, right?
Like, what am I using it for?
For devotional purpose versus communal purpose.
Yeah.
So there are translations.
And I know some of your listeners,
they may even be angry that I would say it's the message.
Right, Eugene Peterson's The Message.
(39:38):
Yeah.
Like, that's not a translation, that's a paraphrase.
Well, I'm sorry, a paraphrase is just
another form of translation.
That's literally what a paraphrase is, right?
It's just saying translation in other words.
Oh, wait, it's a paraphrase of translation.
OK.
So what Peterson had intended was never
(39:59):
a communal tax like for liturgy for church reading.
What he had always intended was for a personal devotional.
Like, he was doing this work initially for his congregation
to have a devotional text to read where somehow
the newness, the freshness of ideas that immediately,
(40:22):
when if you read the message now,
there's so many metaphors or images where I'm like,
dude, that is so specific and it's already old.
It's just dated.
Yeah.
Right?
He uses some weird terms where I was like, OK,
that worked for his community at a particular point in time.
And by the way, he was an incredible scholar
of the biblical languages.
Yeah.
(40:42):
The man was incredibly sharp, but he was not
producing a communal text.
That became an issue of the publisher wanting
to mass produce this text.
Yeah.
Who actually pushed him to produce more of his translation,
his paraphrase.
So I find people who are like, no one should be preaching from it.
Well, maybe they're right.
No one should be preaching from it.
(41:02):
But I regularly will say, why not read it devotionally?
Yeah.
You're still better off than reading something
like Chicken Soup for the Soul, because it's at least someone
wrestling with the text of scripture, not someone trying
to tell a cute little story about a cat or a grandma.
It's still someone trying to wrestle with the text
to help us to feel what the text may have meant for us
(41:23):
to feel and encounter.
It's good.
Right?
It's good.
There are texts which, I had this conversation just
the other day with a friend.
The translation like the ESV or the New American Standard,
so the English Standard version or the New American Standard
Bible, which now has a new update.
I haven't familiarized myself with that.
I also haven't familiarized myself with the latest ESV.
(41:45):
Those are all their conversations.
Publishers just like to update.
OK.
So for instance, in the Old Testament,
it's pretty easy because they're kind of slavish in how
they translate the Hebrew word for word,
so that they almost always choose to translate into English
with the same word, whatever the Hebrew word was.
(42:06):
But that's not how translation really works.
Right.
If you are bilingual or ever get engaged in a bilingual context,
that's not translation.
Right.
It's ugly, and it becomes almost meaningless
if you carry it to it.
It's extreme.
You know it's a great example.
I use this sometimes as hilarious.
But you know Mark Anthony, so I'm half Puerto Rican,
so like he's one of our dudes.
(42:26):
You know what I mean?
Mark Anthony is one of our dudes.
So his song, I need to know, the funniest translation
from Spanish to English.
The lyrics read, they say around the way you ask for me.
It's like, who would ever say that in any common language?
They say around the way you ask for me.
But that's just talk.
And I was like, what?
Well, it's also like they say that when you take a language
(42:48):
in high school, if you were to actually go to the place
that you, like if you took Spanish and then went down
to Mexico, like you just sound dumb because it's like you could
and you could have killed it in class.
But like there is no nuance or there's no like slang.
There's no like conversational aspect that's just
like a literal, but, but, uh, like bar for bar,
like word for word kind of thing.
(43:09):
So I think that there's obviously something to like having
to engage in the context and the cultural realities
and like whatever of all of it.
Yeah, it's context.
It's all about context.
So that's the use, right?
Is context.
So I do find those translation, so I don't want to denigrate ESB
and ESB other than to say like I can read the English
(43:30):
and I can actually pretty much guess what the Hebrew
Aramaic is behind them in the Old Testament.
Because it's like backward translating is pretty easy.
But man, what a garbage text for a lot
of different purposes, right?
Yeah.
Maybe for study if you're wanting to practice,
but I'm still not always certain.
So you have other translations.
And again, they go through, so you have like the new
(43:53):
living translation being revised or like the NIV
that had massive pushback today's NIV,
which you can't find anywhere anymore.
There's early 2000s because of gendering language issues.
Yeah, but the sense of like sense for sense.
(44:16):
So there are times where I'm like, huh,
how in the world did they get at that?
You have to consider colloquialisms
or idiomatic expressions or as you were just giving
an example, Stephen, some sort of phrase like,
this does not work in this target language.
It works in the original language, not in the target language.
(44:36):
Now we're also supposing, this is gonna be a little bit,
maybe difficult for some people here,
we're also supposing that all of our writers, editors,
whoever that did our texts properly used their language.
As if they weren't like some folks today.
So yeah, the sense of what they're communicating is fine.
I can get it, but man, they could have used better terms.
(44:59):
Right?
It's kind of like how I wish Paul did not run on
and on and on and on and on with some of his sentences.
That dude doesn't know when to show up.
And then sometimes he interrupts his flow of thought
and it'll be like several paragraph thoughts later.
Oh yeah, by the way, I was talking about this.
Bro, stay on target, get to the point.
(45:19):
Our authors of scripture were diverse
even in their comprehension and use of language.
They had their own weird ways of doing or saying things
that were unique to them.
So trying to capture each of those in translation.
I'll just say this, when I teach,
or like I spoke for youth camp a couple of weeks ago,
(45:42):
new living translation.
Because it is written at a fourth slash fifth grade
readability level.
And that's where the average American actually reads
comfortably at.
So like functionally, we have a higher literacy than that.
The reality is we don't read higher than that.
(46:02):
So I find for more common use something like that
that hits at that upper elementary,
middle upper elementary level readability,
which sounds terrible, but that's the social reality
of English speakers.
And it works a little better as well
for second language English speakers readers.
But yeah.
(46:22):
You know, this conversation has been going for a while.
We could talk about this forever.
Cause it's just super good, good stuff you're saying.
Is there just like a quick, I don't know,
word of advice you'd give to someone
if Christians are iffy about trusting the Bible
as authoritative because of matters of canon translation?
Is there just kind of like a word of advice to give them?
Yeah, we trust the God of the Bible.
(46:46):
Right.
The moment that we shift it to a form of the Bible,
we put ourselves on other grounds, right?
Somehow this is God self-revelation,
but somehow it's incarnate, not identical.
So it's been in fleshed contextualized,
not identical with Jesus, the man from Nazareth
as the fullness of God's self-giving.
But like there's something about this.
(47:08):
And if we'll just give ourselves to this God,
I worry less about the translation.
I'm concerned more about yielding to,
are you hearing what God is saying?
And are you obeying?
Are you being changed by this?
Or being conformed to the image of God in Christ
through this?
So yeah, people, it's like we just want something
(47:29):
to fight about and we want to fight about words, right?
But we're just fighting about the wrong thing.
We would do better to love God more fully
and be conformed more and more to his image.
That's good.
That's great.
Thank you, Rick.
That was wonderful.
So thank you.
That was so excellent.
Grandpa Rick.
(47:50):
Grandpa Rick.
He really was throwing it down for us over there.
He's the man.
I love Rick.
He's so good.
He's so good.
Yeah, it's always such a joy for us to be on this set
of things and engage in conversations
with people who are experts.
Cause we know a lot of things, but not all the things.
Not all the things.
And so I was learning a whole bunch
and asking questions and stuff from Rick.
We rely on each other to learn and grow as a community.
(48:12):
He's part of our Christian community too.
Hey, we touched on community a whole bunch with that
within translations and the power of,
and how it was canonized, like all of it came
out of community.
For sure.
So all right, friends.
Well, I hope this was an enriching conversation
for you guys as it was for us.
If of course you have more questions,
comments, concerns and more study to be done
(48:33):
and curiosities to be had, we'll be putting a few sources
of Rick's in the show notes for you to keep doing
further study, cause these are conversations
that will you'll never stop learning.
So as always, this episode is sponsored
by these School of Theology and Ministry
at Like the Civic University.
All right, see you next time.
See ya.
Halloween is approaching. Yeah.
(00:01):
The worst thing I ever dressed up as when I was six, I was a bumblebee in a play.
That's the worst thing that you ever dressed up. Yeah. Super embarrassing.
I could barely speak English. And I was just a bumblebee.
That was a bee. And that was bee number two.
Welcome to TikTok Theology, a podcast that tackles the major trending topics
(00:22):
on social media that concern the Christian faith. I'm Meagan and I'm Steven.
We know you can't form a theology in three minutes or less, but those videos can
identify current issues. TikTok will give us the prompt and then we'll do a deep dive.
Thanks for joining us in this exploration.
Hello, friends, and welcome back. Today we're going to be talking about
(00:43):
canon of scripture. All right.
For those of you who don't know, don't worry, we'll define terms.
We'll get into it in a second.
I promise. So you can follow us along over the course of this conversation.
But today is special because this topic was requested by a listener.
Yes. And none other than my own sister,
none other who listens to a lot of this stuff.
(01:04):
My sister, Jessica, who is a professor in social work, very, very smart person,
but then still has questions about theology and biblical stuff and all those sorts
of things. And she was like asking me about canon and translations and different
things. And I was starting to explain it a little bit.
And then she was like, you should do this as a topic and TikTok Theology.
That's a good idea. That's a good idea.
(01:24):
You know, but also that should encourage listeners, please make requests and
we'll get around to them. We're at the end of season three already.
So season four, we're looking for topics and stuff.
And obviously we always scour social media, but I would love...
You're on there. You're on social media.
And I'd love to just kind of directly like, Hey,
this is what our listeners want us to chat about. So let's get that going.
Absolutely. Well, as is everything hand in hand with request,
(01:48):
this is a conversation on social media.
And as you all know, the theme by now is like, just because these conversations
come up on social media doesn't mean this is the first time anybody's been
having them. Canon, translations, all that good stuff has been in conversation
since it's been being formed. And so the early church had these questions
and we have them now just in a different format because they got asked in a poll
(02:11):
or something on Instagram. I know for sure the theme I've seen a lot on social
media with Gen Z. This concept of translation, I viewed where it's been
weaponized, like these translation issues or these Canon conversations are
weaponizing what theology we want to believe, right?
Where it's like, Oh, well, this word actually didn't exist until this time.
And so the original translation says this. So actually you're wrong.
(02:34):
So there is like affirming, they're trying to use translate matters of
translation to affirm their own beliefs.
I've seen that politically where it's like, actually the original translation
says this word and this word, which means that we should be interpreting
revelation as this or something, right? And it's become a whole mess where
people are using different translations, different thoughts, different specific
(02:54):
words of original language and all that as a way to try and build their own
theology and to affirm their own belief system, whether it's right or not.
They want to find and pick one cherry pick one thing that's in an original,
a different translation and then build an entire theology off of that,
which we know is very dangerous.
And it's wrong to do it. Like you don't, you don't read into the Bible what you want.
(03:16):
You let the Bible tell you what it says.
Yes. And so I think matters of translation interpretation are important
because we want to know what the Bible says.
So yeah, I think that's a huge thing.
But for those of us who say, what does the Bible say?
Well, we're going to have a conversation with you today about how the Bible ended
up saying what it's saying.
So I think let's start with some definitions before we go into our guess,
which I'm very excited about. Yes.
(03:38):
This is a good buddy of mine, Rick, Wadholm, Jr. who's awesome.
We have been to conferences together, shared like sweets and stuff like that.
He's just a hilarious dude that like loves God, loves the Bible, loves people.
Just a really, really great guy.
I think you'll see that in his personality.
He is a associate professor of Old Testament and he's written a few books.
(04:01):
He's got a theology of the spirit in the former prophets.
He's also edited, receiving scripture in the Pentecostal tradition and community.
So those are different books that he's worked on.
He's just he's a great scholar.
He's a big fan of Bonhoeffer.
He's an egalitarian.
He's spoken about all these kind of things and just super
biblically astute and a great teacher in general.
(04:23):
So I'm super excited to have him talk through all these kind of issues.
But before we get into that, let's actually talk about canon.
What it is, what are some definitions?
So canon, like C-A-N-O-N.
Like the camera.
Yeah.
Not like, not the war canon.
It is the collection of books that Christians regard as authoritative
and inspired scripture.
(04:45):
And so there's certain criteria that people would use for canonization,
like what made things canonized.
And one of them is, well, for the New Testament only is the apostolic origin.
So they wanted, they wanted to say that the books were written by the apostles
or their close associates.
And so there was a, you know, making sure that the authorship was close
(05:06):
to the actual events.
That's for the New Testament.
It's different for the Old Testament.
We'll ask Rick about that a little bit too.
There's universal acceptance.
So these books were already widely accepted and used in worship and teaching
across all the different Christian communities in the first century.
They were already there.
They were already being used and they were used liturgically.
So they were read publicly in Christian worship services
and Jewish worship services for the Old Testament.
(05:28):
And then they have a consistent message.
So books where their teachings are consistent with other accepted doctrines.
So if something said something like totally whack,
like we know about like Gnostic beliefs that they kind of defied the body
and the material realm.
And there was a whole like group of Gnostic Christians that were writing stuff.
The how to all this defilement.
And so those were left out because they're just,
(05:49):
it was a small little weird group, but like there was really going against.
The consistent message.
The consistent message of like God made us, he made us body and spirit
and he called it good, you know.
It was theologically heretical actually.
So some of them have that.
Another definition for us is non canonical texts.
So these are books that are not in the canon.
Pretty obvious, right?
So some popular ones are in the Old Testament.
(06:11):
There's the Apocrypha.
The Apocrypha is actually recognized by Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
And it includes a whole bunch of books like Tobit,
Judith, editions of Esther, Wisdom of Solomon,
Sirach, Baruch, the Letters of Jeremiah, the editions to Daniel,
like the prayer of Azariah, Susanna, Bell and the Dragon.
First and second Maccabees.
Now those are really interesting stories.
I actually liked them.
(06:32):
I had to read them in college.
They're not like, they don't go crazy against scripture.
They're not like heretical, like some of the New Testament ones
that we'll talk about.
They're not anything like that.
They're actually used by Jewish scholars all the time
and even Christian scholars.
I've read sections of the Apocrypha for works they've done in school.
Yeah.
They're super interesting to trace history.
They do all sorts of stuff like that.
(06:52):
So we'll ask Rick about that.
Why Protestants exclude the Apocrypha?
So we'll talk about that too.
Finally, there's the New Testament non-canonical texts.
Now these have not been included because they're
seen as wrong in some way.
They are like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter,
the Gospel of Mary Madeleine, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas,
Infancy Gospel of James, Acts of Paul and Tecla, Acts of Peter,
(07:16):
Epistle of Barnabas, Shepard of Hermes, the Didache,
the Apocalypse of Peter.
Now I will say, like, and so a lot of these
have like Gnostic ideology and things.
Tell a quick story of one of my favorite stories
of this in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
I had to read that in my undergrad.
And there's a story of Little Jesus.
Oh, Little Jesus.
Little Jesus was a little dude, and he
(07:38):
was playing with his little homie.
And I'm paraphrasing how it goes.
What?
Really?
Yeah.
This is a word for word?
Not exactly like this.
And they were playing, and Jesus did like a little miracle.
And he separated like this muddiness
into like clear water and then ground.
And he separated it.
And then the little homie took a stick
(08:00):
and just muddied it back up.
And then Jesus got mad.
And he was like, curse you.
And so the boy, yeah.
So the boy shriveled up like a prune and died.
That's in the Infancy Gospel?
Yeah.
Then.
That's bold.
So it's not done yet.
Oh, good.
So then the dad of the boy, of the prune boy,
(08:23):
came and took Joseph.
It's like, Joseph, you're so interested.
Like what?
And so the dad and Joseph come to Jesus.
And they're like, Jesus, did you just shrivel up this boy?
Shrivel this man up like a prune?
And then Jesus is like, who do you think you are talking
to me like that?
Straight up.
Like he was like throwing down.
He's like, I do what I want.
Like just like an arrogant little dude.
He was like, I will bring this kid back to life
(08:47):
because I want to, not because he all told me to.
Like it's like that.
And so he brings him back to life.
And then that's kind of like the end of that.
And he also like, even before that,
like he made like these little dove thingies that like floated
away.
But like what was interesting is like the story,
most people think is not true.
But what was interesting is that they were like, OK,
there is actually crazy biblical illusions going on.
(09:10):
So think about it.
Jesus separated.
Oh, yeah.
And that's exactly Genesis one.
He separated the water from the dirt, whatever.
A little boy who represents humanity,
money to back up.
And that's what would happen with sin.
Got less shriveled.
Then he got, then that man got killed only to be raised again
by Jesus.
Yes.
And so it's actually the gospel narrative
(09:30):
in this little like story.
So some of these stories and stuff like that,
they were like that.
So is that like accurate historically, like how it went
down?
Yeah, very likely not.
Right?
Like that's not a thing that happened.
But they were used to kind of tell a gospel narrative.
So there's a lot of little weird things like that.
Those are basically the books.
They're interesting.
They're worth reading when you know the proper context,
I think, and just being like, hey, this is why they were
(09:52):
excluded because they were kind of insane.
Some of them were did get kind of insane.
And then some of them are just like relatively helpful,
like the apocryphal writings and stuff like that, just helpful.
And you can learn from them.
We're allowed to learn from other texts.
Yeah, you can.
It helps you understand the Bible better.
You know what I mean?
I promise it's OK.
All right.
Well, let's go ahead and turn to our conversation with Rick.
(10:15):
Awesome.
It's exciting to have you here.
Great.
I just want to say fun fact, Rick may feel youthful and young,
but that man is a grandpa.
That's right.
Twice sober, man.
Twice sober.
And it is awesome.
One of my favorite facts about you, Rick.
That's a call out.
Yes.
And I love it.
I love it.
It's on.
Thank you for joining us.
I couldn't think of anybody better to talk scripture with this.
(10:37):
I know a lot of biblical scholars,
but few are as well-spoken as you and just able to just like
really break down stuff.
So I think our TikTok theologians on the other end of this
are going to have a real treat listening to you.
So I appreciate it.
Yeah.
Let's jump right in.
So first question.
How did books become regarded as scripture?
And so in this question, we're looking at like who decided
(11:00):
what would make it in or not?
Because this is, I think, people who just first figure out
about canonization, the whole process and stuff like that.
They get real kind of freaked out about this.
Like so people actually decided this and like,
are they trustable?
Can we trust these kind of people?
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah.
This is always one of those problems, right?
When we talk about deciding canon,
(11:22):
canons never really decided.
The nature when we talk of biblical canon,
the ancient Israel's texts that were received over time, right?
They were being compiled, written, edited, whatever processes
they went through.
They weren't all just like dumped out and like somebody sat
together and said, this is it.
Same technically for the New Testament.
(11:44):
Even though we kind of like to tell these stories like,
oh, there were these certain councils
or there's a certain list that was created by someone.
No.
Those lists and those council discussions
in the early centuries of the church
weren't decisions about what books were in or out.
They were discussions about what texts did the church use
(12:06):
as part of its faithful witness to the reign of God and Jesus,
right?
So for them, it was receiving and confessing texts
that were already used as part of the worship,
part of the liturgy, part of the readings,
part of their reflection.
So it was not really about deciding, though.
(12:29):
I often hear people say, OK, well, they decided.
Or there was a council where a particular emperor,
he issued an edict that you guys need to decide.
These are the texts, right?
Man, we love conspiracy theories, right?
And we love to be able to point at some key moment.
But this is so much messier in a lot of ways
as these texts spread around the empire.
(12:50):
And the churches that receive them
say, we hear in these the authority of the voice of God
for all churches for all time.
No, that's good.
That becomes the common confession.
So it really wasn't.
Yeah.
So there are some divergences.
That also helps us to appreciate some divergences
in the wider church communion, right?
Historically and today.
(13:11):
Yeah.
When I tell this to students sometimes
when they ask me this, specifically for the New Testament,
it's like the books sort of just canonize themselves
through the community.
The community quickly started accepting and using
as scripture certain texts.
They were like, hey, this really does
speak towards the witness of Jesus Christ in a way that
is adequate and authoritative and authentic.
(13:34):
And they just they used it.
And so it's almost like, would you
say that the council's role wasn't to pick text
but to codify what is being used already,
like to kind of like make standard what the church was
already doing?
Yeah.
And because you always have this, right?
The church is expanding, right?
(13:55):
And things are not as organized as they are today.
Although sometimes it doesn't feel like the church is very
organized today, right?
Structurally, it's a lot looser organization
that is happening globally.
And so I mean, so you have some key bishops
or things like this, but you're having new churches being
(14:16):
planted, right, all over the ancient world.
And it's like, what text do you commend to them as well?
Or when you have certain fringe groups
that are pushing up the boundaries of what maybe
should be used as part of the worship of these communities,
(14:36):
that becomes a challenge that needed addressed.
But it was never about deciding these texts, not these texts.
It was more about how do we give common witness together,
again, to the reign of the God of Israel
in King Jesus, a faithful testimony to this.
So was there a different process for this acceptance
(14:58):
of canonization for Old Testament versus New Testament?
Because I feel like Old Testament and how
that was coming about had a very different look
than the church deciding what was canon scripturally.
Or were the churches and the temples of that time
the ones who were deciding the canonization of Old Testament
(15:18):
writings as well?
Yeah, that's a great question.
There's a couple of stories that we tell.
One of those, though, in particular,
that dominates the popular ideas of Old Testament
is that there was a gathering of rabbis, Jewish rabbis,
at a place called sometimes Jamnia or Yabne.
It's got a couple different names that essentially determined
(15:42):
what was in or out.
Well, first off, they weren't discussing canon.
Canon is not a Jewish discussion.
It's not part of the equation.
That's a centuries later Christian conversation,
terminology, idea.
Further, throughout almost all of church history,
there were wider collections than what we're familiar with
(16:02):
in the Protestant evangelical tradition, the 39 books
of the Old Testament.
You have these extra books that were used by basically
the churches everywhere that were never
given identical authority with those 39.
They were always regarded as secondary to them
in some fashion.
(16:24):
But still ancient witnesses of Israel to the church.
And some of it was Protestant Reformation became this turn
to basically dump those extra by and large
to push them even further aside, though they were published
in most print Bibles up until about a century and a half
ago.
They were essentially all Protestants still included them
(16:46):
in their Bibles and so forth.
But the Protestants said, we're going back to the sources.
That was kind of one of the ideas.
And so they went back to the Jewish sources.
And all they found in the Jewish scriptures,
the Hebrew Jewish scriptures, were what we call those 39
Old Testament.
Those other books, they don't exist in Hebrew.
(17:08):
They exist in Greek.
So and that was the language of the church until Latin.
Like there's a whole conversation there.
But those Old Testament books seem to, I mean,
even before the time of Jesus, they
seemed to have held an authoritative sense.
And they were all independent.
This is the other problem.
(17:29):
Our canon is in book form, which was a technology that had not
been invented yet.
Scroll was the tech.
And scroll meant you had individual texts
that might be kept together in a sort of library space,
a shelving area.
And these collections of scrolls held great authority
(17:53):
for the community of Israel.
But there was some divergences of what texts the community used.
Fairly early on, pre-Jesus, they seemed to function for Israel
as sufficiently the word of God.
Like these are the authoritative texts.
Because the church inherits those.
They don't decide those.
They inherit those.
(18:14):
As confessing the faith Israel had always confessed,
that is taken up in the man from Nazareth, Jesus.
And so their witnesses, the apostolic witnesses,
that end up becoming part of our canon,
were their own wrestlings with those texts,
those earlier texts, in light of the lived experience
(18:35):
of Jesus by his spirit.
So seeking to faithfully witness to those things.
That's great.
So now that we've touched on how things were included,
let's touch on how things were excluded.
So I think because even as a Christian,
as someone who's loved the Lord her whole life,
always loved the Bible, all that stuff,
(18:57):
I remember finding out about the non-canonical texts.
And I was like, oh my goodness.
I was like, I don't know how to process this.
What do I do about this?
And so it was very interesting.
And I was like, oh, how did we get here?
Because I'm a thinker and I ask a lot of questions.
I'm like, how did we decide these weren't included?
So Rick, if you could shed some light on,
(19:17):
what were the reasons that some books were excluded
from canonical scripture?
And then were there any books that were disputed
about making it that or not?
Or was everyone kind of always on the same page?
Or people, which I feel like we know the answer
to that one, but.
Yeah, on any topic, everyone is not on the same page.
Same page ever.
(19:38):
On any topic.
Ever at all.
Ever.
So could you touch on that a little bit for us?
Yeah, so like what kinds of things
meant that churches weren't using, for instance,
or Israel wasn't using, right?
So those extra apocryphal that get called Old Testament
apocrypha or Deutero canonical, I mean,
(19:58):
it's got a couple of different names,
depending on who you talk to.
Those extra books, such as like First Maccabees,
Judith Tobit, Bell and the Dragon,
these were Jewish writings written in Greek.
So this is one of the reasons why Israel ended up eventually
within the rabbinic influence,
end up dropping use of these texts.
(20:19):
But originally there were Israel's texts.
Yeah.
Right?
And texts may be useful without being functional
as the authority of the spirit speaking
to all peoples for all time.
Yeah.
Right?
They may be helpful.
First Maccabees is a very helpful text
(20:40):
for knowing part of the Second Temple story
and what happens when the temple gets defiled,
desecrated, picking up that whole Daniel account
or what have you.
Like we get some history.
Hanukkah, the story of Hanukkah that gets retold
every year in Jewish communities,
it belongs to First Maccabees.
(21:01):
So even the modern Jewish communities
that don't regard First Maccabees as scripture
or as part of their canon,
they still use it as part of their worship
and their liturgy, which is fascinating, right?
So you think, okay, so there are these texts
that sit outside and they may be helpful
for individual communities,
or they may be questionable.
(21:23):
Some of them are just weird.
The Old Testament ones less, so most of them,
but you have books, some of the New Testament writings
that were floating around.
There was a number of sort of gospel accounts
or so-called gospel accounts.
Gospel of Thomas that's really just sayings,
kind of like wisdom, pithy sayings,
(21:44):
but includes a line, this is me summarizing it,
so don't go looking for the exact quote,
but right towards the end of the Gospel of Thomas
says something like,
Peter is questioning Mary Magdalene
being present with the disciples.
Like she's a woman, she's not meant for the kingdom.
And Jesus looks at him and says,
what is it to you if I choose to make her a man
(22:06):
that she may also inherit the kingdom, right?
It's something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
And so while there apparently was some sense of a community,
we actually believe it was a very small sect
that had all sorts of bizarre writings
about the luminaries and divine lights
and stuff like this in Egypt,
in one very small location that we found this text,
(22:28):
that you have some scholars who wanna make a lot of this,
as if the church suppressed this.
It was very localized, right?
For good reason, because they were a weird church
or a weird, do we even call them a church?
They were weird communion using other weird texts
and practices that were laid outside of the broader church.
(22:48):
So you have some weird outliers that everyone's like,
that's just not, no.
It's saying things that don't line up with these other texts
and the witness that had been passed down by Israel
and the apostolic group.
But some are still useful.
Wisdom of Siraq, for instance, he's got all sorts
of fantastic wise sayings.
(23:10):
So this is maybe one of your thoughts too,
like, should I be reading those books?
Sure.
Right?
And like I regularly encounter folks in the church
or my students are like, I don't know, it feels dangerous.
Like, what if it's demonic or what?
I was like, dude, you are more in danger
reading social media than you are reading those ancient texts.
(23:33):
Right?
Valid and fair.
Social media is gonna wreck your soul, man.
It's gonna make you angry or it's gonna make you bitter.
Or like those texts at least were used by some
ancient community as part of their worship.
Yeah.
Or as part of their self telling of their stories
and how they reflected on what they believed God had done.
(23:55):
Even if it was misled, but we do that
with all sorts of writers, modern writers.
Yeah.
Anytime a preacher preaches,
they believe they're expounding the word of God.
Right.
But they're not just quoting scripture.
We maybe don't have near the figure that we should
of preaching.
Good point, yeah.
The act of preaching.
I would agree with that.
That's good.
You know, I had to read the whole apocrypha in college
(24:18):
and I had to read a whole bunch of non canonical texts too.
I think when you have a proper framework
for how to read them, like they're totally fine.
Like I think the problem is when people come in
and they have that fearful question
that these were left out for some kind of nefarious reason
or something like that.
You know what I mean?
And then they're thinking like, oh, what's this?
(24:39):
That's going to lead me astray or whatever.
Like, no, it's not.
I mean, it's fine.
Like you can just read them.
Check them out.
Especially the apocrypha.
You know what I mean?
That's like.
Yeah.
I've heard over the course of my life that people were like,
yeah, don't like they've been left out for a reason,
like banished to the corner, like all the things.
But it seems like from the way you're approaching it
is like that the apocrypha or non canonical texts,
(25:01):
whatever can be used for like studying.
And like, would you say that it can like inform
and enhance aspects of reading canonical scripture?
Context.
Because we have like a history bit or.
Yeah.
It can give context.
So, so maybe you get a sense that other people were writing
using similar language or ideas or types of literature,
(25:21):
like forms of writing, whether wisdom sayings
or wisdom stories or, you know, any number of things.
Now, again, not all these texts are equal.
Right.
Right.
OK.
Got it.
So you would ask a question about like,
were there some texts that were like, oh,
they're asking the questions?
(25:41):
Yeah.
Yeah.
There were a couple of texts.
One in particular that seemed to be fairly widely used.
And I regularly refer to it in my preaching teaching.
And it's influenced by reflection.
It's a fairly short writing.
It is the diddake, D-I-D-A-C-H-E, diddake.
It's the teaching.
It's attributed to supposedly being written by the Apostles,
(26:04):
whether or not it was.
It's got a whole lot of echoes of the gospel traditions
already in it.
But it is a later like end of the first century,
perhaps early second century reflection on church community.
And lots of churches were using it.
Right.
(26:25):
Yeah.
But then, OK, let me, I don't know what church tradition you
belong to.
But for instance, the Anglican communion
uses the Book of Common Prayer, which is not simply scripture.
It includes all sorts of written prayers, hymns,
other texts that are sacred, significant,
(26:45):
included for the worship of the community.
And it's an authoritative text for Anglican churches
everywhere.
Of course, they fight over which year of publication
and whatever.
Yeah.
But it's an example.
And other churches, like there was the London Confession
that has been used by certain Baptist groups,
(27:05):
for example, historically.
And most churches have some sort of confessional statement.
That's good.
The diddake, we use that all the time in worship studies.
Because I mean, those are some of your first,
you can see your orders of worship that the church was doing.
So yeah, super important.
So much.
And I was thinking also, another like a theological reason
(27:26):
that I used the Apocrypha a lot was because I
do work in eschatology, a good bit.
And you can actually see the shift
from this Jewish sense of the day of the Lord
being this local thing for the Israelites
to this universal sense of eschatology that
happens in the New Testament.
You see that shift in the Apocrypha.
And so that second temple writings
(27:46):
can help you bring that like, why did Jesus
speak on the end times in a way that's
different than the Old Testament folks.
So you can see that kind of thing.
So it's helpful.
And I think with a properly understood framework,
yeah, just check them out.
You're talking to, but the diddake and stuff like that.
And other religions also have this kind of distinction.
(28:08):
Like they'll have their holy texts,
and then they'll have texts that are helpful.
You know what I mean?
Like in Islam, you have the Koran and even parts of the Bible
that uses holy texts.
But then you have the hadith and stuff
like that that are used as just helpful books.
So that's not uncommon.
And it shouldn't be a thing that's fearful.
Yeah.
So that's really great.
Now I get a ton of other questions for students.
(28:29):
So like that's definitely like the canon thing.
And so another question I have is about translations.
Because people will get some, seriously,
there is a, you got your King James only people.
You know what I'm saying?
That was the anointed from the Lord translation
every 50 iteration of the King James version
that they did every other year.
You know what I mean?
Like, so why are there so many translations of the Bible?
(28:52):
And just to contextualize the whole conversation here,
like why do Catholics only read in the Latin
for the majority of church history?
What happened there?
And then we can talk about like which translations you think
are the best and why and if there's any translations that
are weaker.
Yeah, that's a massive question, bro.
Like the, yeah.
Translations are always an issue.
(29:12):
People have their preference, even if they don't think
that they do.
We think we know what the text already says
or what's the best way to represent the text
or even what the best original text is, right?
We're talking Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, whatever.
And frankly, it's a pretty fluid topic, right?
(29:33):
What we want is solid ground.
So we don't have to think about it anymore.
I have what I need and I can just trust it.
But we're imagining a trust in something
that was never so solid.
It was always a fluid living thing.
It's almost as if we've abandoned
the idea of a living word from a living God
(29:55):
and exchanged it for something else.
Tell them, Rick, tell them.
Yeah.
So are there translations which may be more faithful
to the sense of the text and less?
Absolutely.
But more faithful doesn't necessarily
mean more word for word.
Since by and large, language doesn't happen word for word.
(30:18):
It happens in a larger ideas communicated, right?
Sense for sense or something like this.
This is part of the debate.
If you go online, you can search for a spectrum,
a line that shows you word for word versus thought for thought
or something like this.
And so those are two dominant translation ideas.
How to best deal with the original language
(30:39):
is Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek.
You asked about why did the Latin get fixed?
Well, the Latin wasn't the first text to get fixed, right?
As being the text.
The Greek Septuagint had previously become the text
for much of, again, much of the church.
It became fixed for all time.
And we don't even want to ask if there
(31:00):
were divergent manuscripts that predate.
We don't want to ask about other communities.
Oh, your text says this.
Mine says this in Greek.
OK, so the Latin becomes fixed because, again,
we long for a sturdiness and unchangingness.
We're unwilling to recognize the moving, living nature
(31:21):
of what we're doing, of the act, even of trusting
the faithfulness of God, not a fixed text,
but the faithfulness of the God who has given us these texts,
who has preserved these texts in a way that
is not direct from Him.
He has chosen to mediate that in this complex way,
(31:41):
in this complex pattern.
That's good.
I think one idea is, I think you hit most of them,
most of the questions, because I asked like 53 in one shot.
So one that I get all the time is about the King James only
people.
Can you talk a little bit about why
there was different, a superior New Testament text
that people would use later on, like new discoveries?
(32:03):
First of all, how King James was a great translation
in a day, and then why scholars believe there's
other translations that are better.
Can you just narrate that a little bit, the history of that?
Yeah, the King James history is fascinating.
It was not the first English translation.
It stood in a line of English translations,
and stole slash borrowed an awful lot of its translation.
(32:29):
These folks were in a blank slate.
It wasn't like they were possessed by the spirit
and came out with this perfect translation.
In fact, it went through edits.
So people talk about original 1611.
There is nobody on planet Earth still
using the original 1611.
It's not a thing.
They're using some revision that came at some point,
(32:51):
because there was even typos, for example.
But there are changes that happen.
So they did the best they could with the manuscript
evidences they had.
They didn't know about the manuscript finds
that we would find over the last 150 years.
They didn't know.
And we can't charge them with ignorance on that.
(33:13):
They did the best they could with what they had.
But they stood already in a long line of translation, also
long line into English of translation.
And it's striking to me how at some point,
it became the dominant text, because for a long time,
it was rejected, particularly in the US, our early history.
(33:36):
Folks wanted nothing to do with it,
because it was connected with Great Britain.
Why would we?
So the Puritan text, the translation,
becomes like the dominant text in the early colonies,
not the King James version.
And you have other texts.
Of course, any Catholics never used it.
(33:59):
So we're only talking Protestants.
Yeah, and it just wasn't a dominant one.
So it's fascinating at some point, somebody gets it.
Yeah, like, hey, this is the one.
But that's the same thing people had done with the Latin
Vulgate.
That's the same thing people had done with the Greek Septuagint.
And we create this sort of mythology,
this mythological origin story of somehow
(34:20):
divinely descended from heaven.
It becomes almost like the Islamic Quran.
It is fixed for all time, and don't you dare ever change it.
Yeah.
And I mean, some of the reasons why the other translations,
like in the last 150 years, we had some major, major discoveries.
Right?
I mean, you had the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nakamadi Libraries
(34:41):
and stuff like that, like dozens, hundreds of manuscripts.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but essentially, what would be done
is they take all of the manuscripts, which is a copy of,
like, let's say a New Testament text, like a copy of John
or something like that.
And they take all the manuscripts,
and then they basically combine them to create a text that's
like the thing that everybody translates from.
(35:02):
In the last 150 years, there was many, many, many, many texts
that were added to it that actually changed the thing
that we would translate from to make it more firm and strong,
like closer to what the original text would have been.
Is that correct?
Is that how it's done?
Yeah.
So this is the field, right?
Textual criticism, trying to discern the history of the text,
(35:25):
the manuscripts behind, so these Hebrew, Greek texts.
At one point in time, the idea was to get back
to the original text, only to realize in the last many
number of years now, original text is so problematic,
most scholars have abandoned even that language.
(35:45):
Because what would we even mean by original text?
Which final form of a text?
Yeah.
What counts as original?
Even if it's written by whoever that author is,
at what stage of their own editorial process of production
are we at the original text?
Right.
It's just so problematic.
(36:05):
So you have some textual critical work
that simply tries to tell now the story of how
we got the various forms of texts that we got.
OK.
For instance, the majority text, what
leads to what we call majority text that
lays behind the King James translation tradition.
(36:25):
Of course, this is all just new testament.
Old testament, textual criticism, work
is a whole different beast.
Because we have a lot longer period of time,
a lot less manuscripts to deal with.
It's problematized what text are we dealing with?
And so one of the things that I try and challenge my students
with was, so were folks coming to good faith in the King
(36:48):
Jesus through the Greek Septuagint,
through the Latin Vulget, through other translations
into English King James, non-King James.
Like, is it possible our God is bigger
than any particular translation, whether with errors or not,
with all of the humanness involved,
that somehow our God transcends that
(37:11):
to cause his word to come alive to folks,
even when every single word may not
be what was written by the original hand of whoever
supposedly wrote it.
Like, somehow he's more faithful than that.
Come on, right?
That's great.
I think that lends to the last bit of your 53-point question,
which was.
(37:32):
So humbly, we're asking, so what translations
would you consider the best theologically?
Like, if you're going to do a study or something,
like, what would be like, OK, this translation is the best.
And then with the weaker translations,
are those still OK to be engaging with,
maybe is that more of a devotional text?
(37:52):
Do people pre-trim it?
I don't know.
Is there a line in how we should
be engaging with the quality of translation of scripture
that we have now?
That is a way better articulated question
than I normally ever hear.
Here's the question that I hear again and again and again.
And I know folks in church are wanting to know,
and my students are wanting to know,
(38:13):
what's the best translation?
That's usually how the question is asked, as if, oh, yeah,
it should just be obvious.
So what's the best one?
And my response to that is, so you didn't ask that question.
You asked a much more involved question.
My usually answer to, what's the best translation is,
well, what are you using it for?
Because again, there's a difference
between a devotional hearing of a text
(38:36):
and a communal use of a text.
Yeah.
Right, that liturgical or communal use.
They're not the same.
Like, this is one of those issues.
I think we're finding a lot of problems
with this in contemporary English communities of faith,
is that there's such a diversity, right?
There tends to be no common text shared
among many congregations,
(38:57):
accepting certain groups like KJV Only folks, right?
Who are in their own little corner
doing their own little thing.
But even then, you have some wild outliers
who are using the new King James.
Yeah.
Ooh.
Scandal.
Or one of the other thousand iterations
of folks who figured they could improve the King James,
but they wanted to still be the King James
because that was the idea one.
(39:18):
Yeah.
So for what purpose are we using it?
That's one of the first questions we should ask, right?
And your question already assumed that, right?
Like, what am I using it for?
For devotional purpose versus communal purpose.
Yeah.
So there are translations.
And I know some of your listeners,
they may even be angry that I would say it's the message.
Right, Eugene Peterson's The Message.
(39:38):
Yeah.
Like, that's not a translation, that's a paraphrase.
Well, I'm sorry, a paraphrase is just
another form of translation.
That's literally what a paraphrase is, right?
It's just saying translation in other words.
Oh, wait, it's a paraphrase of translation.
OK.
So what Peterson had intended was never
(39:59):
a communal tax like for liturgy for church reading.
What he had always intended was for a personal devotional.
Like, he was doing this work initially for his congregation
to have a devotional text to read where somehow
the newness, the freshness of ideas that immediately,
(40:22):
when if you read the message now,
there's so many metaphors or images where I'm like,
dude, that is so specific and it's already old.
It's just dated.
Yeah.
Right?
He uses some weird terms where I was like, OK,
that worked for his community at a particular point in time.
And by the way, he was an incredible scholar
of the biblical languages.
Yeah.
(40:42):
The man was incredibly sharp, but he was not
producing a communal text.
That became an issue of the publisher wanting
to mass produce this text.
Yeah.
Who actually pushed him to produce more of his translation,
his paraphrase.
So I find people who are like, no one should be preaching from it.
Well, maybe they're right.
No one should be preaching from it.
(41:02):
But I regularly will say, why not read it devotionally?
Yeah.
You're still better off than reading something
like Chicken Soup for the Soul, because it's at least someone
wrestling with the text of scripture, not someone trying
to tell a cute little story about a cat or a grandma.
It's still someone trying to wrestle with the text
to help us to feel what the text may have meant for us
(41:23):
to feel and encounter.
It's good.
Right?
It's good.
There are texts which, I had this conversation just
the other day with a friend.
The translation like the ESV or the New American Standard,
so the English Standard version or the New American Standard
Bible, which now has a new update.
I haven't familiarized myself with that.
I also haven't familiarized myself with the latest ESV.
(41:45):
Those are all their conversations.
Publishers just like to update.
OK.
So for instance, in the Old Testament,
it's pretty easy because they're kind of slavish in how
they translate the Hebrew word for word,
so that they almost always choose to translate into English
with the same word, whatever the Hebrew word was.
(42:06):
But that's not how translation really works.
Right.
If you are bilingual or ever get engaged in a bilingual context,
that's not translation.
Right.
It's ugly, and it becomes almost meaningless
if you carry it to it.
It's extreme.
You know it's a great example.
I use this sometimes as hilarious.
But you know Mark Anthony, so I'm half Puerto Rican,
so like he's one of our dudes.
(42:26):
You know what I mean?
Mark Anthony is one of our dudes.
So his song, I need to know, the funniest translation
from Spanish to English.
The lyrics read, they say around the way you ask for me.
It's like, who would ever say that in any common language?
They say around the way you ask for me.
But that's just talk.
And I was like, what?
Well, it's also like they say that when you take a language
(42:48):
in high school, if you were to actually go to the place
that you, like if you took Spanish and then went down
to Mexico, like you just sound dumb because it's like you could
and you could have killed it in class.
But like there is no nuance or there's no like slang.
There's no like conversational aspect that's just
like a literal, but, but, uh, like bar for bar,
like word for word kind of thing.
(43:09):
So I think that there's obviously something to like having
to engage in the context and the cultural realities
and like whatever of all of it.
Yeah, it's context.
It's all about context.
So that's the use, right?
Is context.
So I do find those translation, so I don't want to denigrate ESB
and ESB other than to say like I can read the English
(43:30):
and I can actually pretty much guess what the Hebrew
Aramaic is behind them in the Old Testament.
Because it's like backward translating is pretty easy.
But man, what a garbage text for a lot
of different purposes, right?
Yeah.
Maybe for study if you're wanting to practice,
but I'm still not always certain.
So you have other translations.
And again, they go through, so you have like the new
(43:53):
living translation being revised or like the NIV
that had massive pushback today's NIV,
which you can't find anywhere anymore.
There's early 2000s because of gendering language issues.
Yeah, but the sense of like sense for sense.
(44:16):
So there are times where I'm like, huh,
how in the world did they get at that?
You have to consider colloquialisms
or idiomatic expressions or as you were just giving
an example, Stephen, some sort of phrase like,
this does not work in this target language.
It works in the original language, not in the target language.
(44:36):
Now we're also supposing, this is gonna be a little bit,
maybe difficult for some people here,
we're also supposing that all of our writers, editors,
whoever that did our texts properly used their language.
As if they weren't like some folks today.
So yeah, the sense of what they're communicating is fine.
I can get it, but man, they could have used better terms.
(44:59):
Right?
It's kind of like how I wish Paul did not run on
and on and on and on and on with some of his sentences.
That dude doesn't know when to show up.
And then sometimes he interrupts his flow of thought
and it'll be like several paragraph thoughts later.
Oh yeah, by the way, I was talking about this.
Bro, stay on target, get to the point.
(45:19):
Our authors of scripture were diverse
even in their comprehension and use of language.
They had their own weird ways of doing or saying things
that were unique to them.
So trying to capture each of those in translation.
I'll just say this, when I teach,
or like I spoke for youth camp a couple of weeks ago,
(45:42):
new living translation.
Because it is written at a fourth slash fifth grade
readability level.
And that's where the average American actually reads
comfortably at.
So like functionally, we have a higher literacy than that.
The reality is we don't read higher than that.
(46:02):
So I find for more common use something like that
that hits at that upper elementary,
middle upper elementary level readability,
which sounds terrible, but that's the social reality
of English speakers.
And it works a little better as well
for second language English speakers readers.
But yeah.
(46:22):
You know, this conversation has been going for a while.
We could talk about this forever.
Cause it's just super good, good stuff you're saying.
Is there just like a quick, I don't know,
word of advice you'd give to someone
if Christians are iffy about trusting the Bible
as authoritative because of matters of canon translation?
Is there just kind of like a word of advice to give them?
Yeah, we trust the God of the Bible.
(46:46):
Right.
The moment that we shift it to a form of the Bible,
we put ourselves on other grounds, right?
Somehow this is God self-revelation,
but somehow it's incarnate, not identical.
So it's been in fleshed contextualized,
not identical with Jesus, the man from Nazareth
as the fullness of God's self-giving.
But like there's something about this.
(47:08):
And if we'll just give ourselves to this God,
I worry less about the translation.
I'm concerned more about yielding to,
are you hearing what God is saying?
And are you obeying?
Are you being changed by this?
Or being conformed to the image of God in Christ
through this?
So yeah, people, it's like we just want something
(47:29):
to fight about and we want to fight about words, right?
But we're just fighting about the wrong thing.
We would do better to love God more fully
and be conformed more and more to his image.
That's good.
That's great.
Thank you, Rick.
That was wonderful.
So thank you.
That was so excellent.
Grandpa Rick.
(47:50):
Grandpa Rick.
He really was throwing it down for us over there.
He's the man.
I love Rick.
He's so good.
He's so good.
Yeah, it's always such a joy for us to be on this set
of things and engage in conversations
with people who are experts.
Cause we know a lot of things, but not all the things.
Not all the things.
And so I was learning a whole bunch
and asking questions and stuff from Rick.
We rely on each other to learn and grow as a community.
(48:12):
He's part of our Christian community too.
Hey, we touched on community a whole bunch with that
within translations and the power of,
and how it was canonized, like all of it came
out of community.
For sure.
So all right, friends.
Well, I hope this was an enriching conversation
for you guys as it was for us.
If of course you have more questions,
comments, concerns and more study to be done
(48:33):
and curiosities to be had, we'll be putting a few sources
of Rick's in the show notes for you to keep doing
further study, cause these are conversations
that will you'll never stop learning.
So as always, this episode is sponsored
by these School of Theology and Ministry
at Like the Civic University.
All right, see you next time.
See ya.
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