The Bible Is Really Old

I like to listen to my parents' stories about their time in college. They met each other in college, so that's fun. But the most fascinating part of their stories is that they went to college in a different time. There were curfews. Women couldn't go in male dorms and vice versa. My parents went to a small school and everyone ate their meals at one cafeteria. They didn't have video-games. But at the same time, it was college, and there's a lot of the same types of experiences. Young adults were going through a lot of the same things in the late 60s as they were at the turn of the new millennium. So in listening to their stories, I'm simultaneously relating to their experience while intrigued by the jarring differences.

The jarring differences in their experience and mine don't cause a great problem in our communication on account of two things:
1. They themselves are aware of how society has changed, so they can recognize how things from their stories are different than they now are. And so a lot of sentences take the structure, "These days X happens, but back then you have to understand that Y was the case." They provide context to the parts of the stories that seem strange to me.
2. I can say with deep gratitude that my parents are both alive and actively a part of my life. I'm in communication with them. I can ask questions immediately after something strikes me as odd. And they can provide the context.

How does this relate to the Bible?

The Bible is very old. Much much older than my parents. All of the documents in the New Testament date back to at least the middle of the 2nd century, and some of the Old Testament texts date back much further than that.

Like my parents' college stories, there are aspects of the Bible to which we strongly relate, and there are parts that seem foreign and odd. Many people can relate to the sibling rivalry between Jacob and Esau. Few modern readers can understand why there's so much sacrificing of animals going on.

The problem with the Biblical stories, as compared to my parents' college stories, is that the context is not easily accessible. The authors and editors of the Biblical texts did not include explanatory phrasings for the people who would be reading their words 2,000 years later in another language on an ipod.

What does this mean? It means that to read and interpret the Bible, we have to try to gain as much knowledge as we can about the world of the Bible. It's extra work, and that's a drag. Nonetheless, it's not nearly as much of a downer as the idea of people misreading and misunderstanding the foundational text of their religion.

The Bible deserves the extra work. And that extra work just goes to show that the Bible is hard.

The Bible Was Not Written In English

An acquaintance of mine in Divinity School used to work in a Christian bookstore. And he recounted to a small group of fellow students how while helping someone interested in buying a Bible, they asked him for the Bible in its original version. They did not trust those newer versions, they wanted the real deal. Unfortunately, they were not scholars of Hebrew and Greek. They simply wanted the King James Version of the Bible. Apparently this happened a lot.

And everyone in Divinity School had a little laugh at how little so many Christians know about the Bible. And then we thought about how that kind of ignorance is more often than not the face of our religion in America, and we had a little cry.

The Bible was not written in English. It was neither written in modern English, nor in the 17th century English phrasings of the King James Bible. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, with a teensy little dash of Aramaic (a similar Semitic language). The New Testament was written in Greek. Those facts are basically beyond dispute. If I wanted to really cover my bases I would say that the earliest known transcripts of the Bible are in Hebrew and Greek. That way I don't rule out the possibility that the very first authors were ancient Trekkies who wrote everything down in Klingon and then immediately translated everything into Hebrew and Greek, destroying any trace of the true original language. But the bottom line is clear. If you want to get down to the closest thing that we have to the original text, you had better be able to read Hebrew and Greek.

Hebrew and Greek are hard.

I know firsthand that Greek is hard. I took a year of it in Divinity School. Like some old blowhard, I can say to you, "I've forgotten more Greek than you'll ever know." That's probably true because a) I've shamefully forgotten a LOT of what I learned in Greek class, and b) you will probably never make any effort to learn Biblical Greek. Why? Because Greek is hard. It spawns expressions like "It's Greek to me." People don't say "It's Spanish to me." They don't say that because a lot of people know Spanish, it uses the same alphabet as English, and in the grand scheme of languages the two are very similar.

Greek has its own alphabet. You see a lot of the letters if you hang around a fraternity. In my undergraduate experience Alpha Tau Omega was a three word phrase for douchebag. It's also a grouping of three Greek letters. Some Greek letters have the same function and/or appearance of English letters. A capitalized alpha looks and acts like a capitalized A. But as you'll see below, that's not always the case.



There are some really weird squiggly letters in there! I still don't trust myself to write a good lowercase 'xi' (or 'ksi' as it's weirdly labeled on the little pic I posted). And even worse, there are letters that look like English letters that mean something different entirely. The Greek 'r' looks just like 'p'. And that sucks because your teacher could ask you to read a verse in Greek and you could badly mispronounce a word, and your teacher would say something like "why don't we give that one another try", and all of your classmates would giggle at you. That's something that could happen.

Growing up in my public school system, we had to choose one of three foreign languages to study: Spanish, French, or Latin. Spanish was the easy one. Latin was for people who didn't feel like learning a language that they could use, but wanted to prove that they were smart. I took French because my two older brothers took French and sometimes they would make little jokes to each other in French and I wanted in on that. I have no idea why anyone else, given those choices, would take French.

Biblical Greek is like Latin. It's really hard and nobody speaks it anymore, at least not in the form in which you're learning it. Nobody knows for sure how the ancient Greeks spoke the language, instead scholars have simply agreed on particular pronunciation rules so as to make one huge Bible dork comprehensible to another huge Bible dork when they're discussing the meaning of dikaios in Paul's letters. So you can't study abroad Spring Semester in Greece and get a crash course in the language by absorbing it from everyone around you. Unless you have a time machine.

If you do not yet believe me that Greek is hard, know this: depending on its usage within a given sentence, there are 16 different forms of the definite article. For those who haven't had a grammar lesson in a while, that means that there are 16 different forms of the word "the." That's insane. Greek is hard.

To be honest, I have never taken any classes in Hebrew. I have heard some people say that over the long-run it's actually easier than Greek. However, I know two things. First, its alphabet is also comprised of totally different symbols than our English alphabet. And it looks even less like our alphabet. Check it out:

You may recognize some of that from dreidels, and nowhere else. We had a Jewish fraternity at my college, but interestingly they still used Greek letters.

Second, you have to read Hebrew from right to left. No thanks. That sealed the deal for me. Hebrew is hard too.

So who cares? The Biblical languages are hard. What's the big deal. We don't need to worry about those languages because we have lots of smart people who have translated the Bible for us into English. They've even given their many versions of the Bible fun acronyms like NIV, NAB, NRSV, and ESV. Hooray! We're saved from all of the weird squiggle letters and the backward-reading!

Well, the very fact that there are many, many translations of the Bible into English means that people have disagreed on how best to put those ancient words into our modern language. So you can't even just point to your Bible and say "aha! I'm right because the NIV says so." Well, despite their well-meaning intentions, the NIV could have translated it incorrectly. A lot of Greek defies translation into easy, readable English. Translators have to make a lot of subjective decisions. So if you really want to find out what the Bible has to say (and I think this should be a priority for most Christians), you need to do your best to compare and contrast translations to see how they differ and why. If not, you're trusting that one particular group of scholars or one particular publishing house got it completely right and all the rest have come short.

Working through numerous translations (and ideally the original languages) is step one in terms of becoming a literate reader and interpreter of the Bible. Step one of many.

Why many steps?

Because the Bible is hard.

The Bible Is Hard

Well, not necessarily, I guess. I have several Bibles that are bound in a soft leather. I wouldn't want them thrown at me, but I wouldn't call them hard either. So allow me to rephrase:

The Bible is difficult.

It is the most popular book in the Western world. There are free versions easily accessible online. There are copies in most hotel rooms. They're not difficult to find. But the Bible is very difficult to understand.

For two years I attended Duke Divinity School. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Masters in Theological Studies. My focus was New Testament Studies, and my thesis was an exegesis of three verses in the Gospel of Luke. After that time of intensive study the message that I most want to convey to people is that the Bible is hard.

It's not just something you can pick up and read and get right. It requires a lot of knowledge outside of the text itself.

So this blog is where I'm going to gripe about how the Bible is hard, and why people who think the Bible is important need to educate themselves on how to read and interpret it.

Let the fun begin!!!