Subject: May I share a simple story to help? |
Bible Note: I find nothing at all "static or limited" in availing ourselves of every reliable resource we can lay hands on that will enhance our understanding and appreciation of this most marvelous of all books, the Holy Bible. Somehow I've never been comfortable with the idea that God expects us to put the brains He gave us upon the mantle and practice some sort of voo-doo or divination in the belief that the full measure of the riches of the Bible will come to us through telepathy or mental osmosis..... Anyone who does not know a word of Hebrew or Greek and claims to have read the word of God has, in a sense, read nothing of it, because the Bible was not written in English or in any other living language of our time. So the translation of the Bible into English is, in a very real sense, a scholarly help, an aid, a vehicle through which we may come to know God and His will for our lives. If we discount and spurn every scholarly effort that has been made with the aim of transmitting God's message to us, then we must not only throw out every commentary, every map, every historical document, but every translation as well. We must go back to the original manuscripts, the autographs. But we fail there too. All that is extant in the world are copies, copies of the original autographs, not the autographs themselves. So when we in our haste throw out the works of dedicated scholars, men and women of faith and dedication who have labored long and hard to give us God's message in a medium in which we can understand it -- when we decry the scholars and cast them out, we are most assuredly throwing out the baby with the bathwater. --Hank |