The Bible in Youtubeland

That beard is definitely fake.

This blog is a-political (for an explanation see the above tab “The Grand Book” and go down to the section called “Pitfalls”)

But sometimes it is educational to look at how people massacre scriptures in order to try and prove a point they already believe.  This is called “eisogesis” which simply means “reading into the text” (eiso= “into” working off of exegesis, which means to explain “out” of the text.). In simple terms:

Eisogesis – very very  bad

Exegesis – pretty good and cool

Now the lengths that people and organizations will go to in their attempt to Eisogete a passage to their liking is dazzling. Take a look at this one “proving” Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ and that Jesus named him specifically in the Gospel of Luke.

I originally was sent the video by a brother in the faith who wanted my opinion from a linguistic point of view. I admit…the argument made in the video was so convoluted that it took my a few hours to break down all the fallacies and gross errors of interpretation. I wrote, in detail, to my friend and he received it quite well (he still cannot stand Obama, but he no longer feels the need to think he is the anti-christ).

I will share with you snippets of what I wrote only because another guy already did the exact same work…on a video that has both the original Eisogesis and twisting of the passages by the orginal guy AND has well reasoned and firmly coherent interpretation practices that are instructive.

I also like his attitude. He doesn’t get mad…he is actually quite gracious…he just tells the truth. Here it is:

That is more than enough really so feel free to stop here. BUT, if you wish to read my own debunking of this sad affair months ago, you will see some of the same arguments along with some that Matt Bell did not have time or inclination to bother with.

[This, perhaps,  qualifies as "too much time on the Internet"]

Letter:

Well, dear friend and brother…the argument from the video  is so convoluted one hardly knows where to begin. Let me see if I can quickly cut through it then follow with longer comments.

1) Attempting to a) read Luke 10:18 utterly out of context (read the whole chapter), then b) infer back to two words that have a straight forward reading in the New Testament Greek text; c) citing Jesus’  speaking in Aramaic then rendering that through a sister language where the meanings are different is beyond ….hmnnn…well it is ingenious!  But it  has nothing to do with the Bible.

2) So, having ignored the Greek text, and reverting to Hebrew by more the spurious means, let’s have a look at the derivations (in Hebrew) of Strongs #1299 via an even more conservative and scholarly work  The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (my Hebrew library is significantly updated from when Augustus Strong did his truly remarkable work. The Hebrew word has several derivations.

The word for “Lightening” is “baraq” and is used throughout the Old Testament both for Yahweh’s divine presence (texts too numerous to site) and also for the show of opposition by Baal, the Cannanite god.

The more interesting derivation is right next to it: “Barak” an actual name of a biblical figure. Reading Hebrews 11 you will see that Barak is listed in the “Heroes of Faith” right alongside Samson, Gideon, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the Prophets (including Isaiah one would think)!

3) Now for someone to suggest that because the Hebrew name of a Hero of Faith was a foreshadowing of Barack Obama would be as ludicrous and as bad an interpretation as the work of these folks. It would make basically the same errors in interpretation.

Now some suggestions. First I imagine you remember that in the 80s I was a researcher and de-bunker of Cults and “Isms”. As such, dealing with what James Sire called “Scripture Twisting” was a daily grind. It was amazing both how gullible people were and how much muddy thinking went into  ideas/formulas like: “Well IF this is true, and then we suppose that, then read this other thing in another light and ignore the plain meaning of the text it all equals Absolute Truth!

I suggest you find and read Sire’s book (InterVaristy Press..I think). [ Note, or get the book that Matt Bell mentions in his video.]

Also, give up tiny “proof-texting”.  Jesus get’s to do it, and Paul or John etc…we suck at it because we start piecing things together out of context. Kind of like trying to construct a car using ford truck parts, motorcycle parts, baking goods and some donated organs.

Study the passage at hand and get a good Greek Commentary! Stay in the text and resist the temptation to see what you want in it…go where it goes.

NOTES:

It would be different if the context of Luke was Jesus teaching about the Anti-Christ directly (instead of about immediate demon-possession and other related matters; and if Jesus had come out and said something (I suppose..because he did not) “The Name of the Anti-Christ will be…”

As it stands this video does violence to the text in question.

It is this text (the New Testament Greek text) that the Church abides by and not conjecture of what it “might” have said (also there are wide differences between Hebrew and Aramaic. The wikipedia article from the offensive video (before it is chopped up to mean something else) says “Aramaic is a part of the Northwest Semitic group of languages, which also includes the Canaanite languages such as Hebrew and Phoenician.” The article elsewhere notes that “Aramaic’s long history and diverse and widespread use has led to the development of many divergent varieties which are sometimes treated as dialects. Thus, there is no one Aramaic language, but each time and place has had its own variety” (italics mine). It also notes that Aramaic could “likely” have been the spoken tongue of Jesus (which most scholars except).

There are notable exceptions in the New Testament where Jesus’ words are recorded in Aramaic …then the writer is careful to translate the meaning into Greek (one obvious example is “My God, My God, Why have You forsaken me?”).

So the Luke passage is meant to be interpreted in context and in the Greek.

Also note that it is Satan referred to in Luke 10:18. No mention of the Anti-Christ or of naming him…Nothing.

Final note: it is crap (and it is crap) like this that gets Christians painted as the Lunatic Fringe. You wanna wear that moniker with honor? Let it be because you profess Jesus as risen from the dead…or “Him crucified”. Let people write you off for that…but not because you bought some silly argument about an American politician being the Antichrist.

Grace and peace
Mac

The Shack, Liberty and Interpretation.

I posted at SPOKE earlier this a.m. using mostly the right hemisphere of my brain. You know we are (I am assuming) given both for a reason and reasoning in some integrating way.

We live in a world dominated by dualistic thinking. Thus we are trained to look for up/down, yes/no, 0/1, right/wrong, good/bad, and PC/Mac ways of thinking and distinguishing.

This is not a bad thing at all, and has been very helpful in science and most every other discipline. But often the right side of the brain is left a tad atrophied or under appreciated (except perhaps in the area of music as I am currently listening to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss singing Killing the Blues…lovely) . So, my attempt at talking about The Shack this a.m. on SPOKE was to hit a more personal, intuitive note. Another aspect of the right brain is it tends to see the bigger picture, where the left brain tends to break things into little pieces.

So, having said that, this is the left brain’s turn.

Much of Biblical “hermeneutics” (interpretation) is very scientific, logical, exacting and detail-oriented. The notion that the Bible can be “interpreted any way you like” is patently false. That you may choose to ignore or reinterpret it’s words, wrench passages out of context, or “make it prove” anything you like is certainly true. But it is also dishonest, duplicitous, dumb and a bunch of other D-words.

The real joy of exploring biblical texts is allowing them to take you where THEY wish to go. In this way, I suppose it is like a good scientist trying to discover “what is” and how things work…come what may.

I was once teaching a Gospel of John class and I had done my homework in the text. I have a weird way of teaching. I roam and work conversationally. Well at one point my friend (and at the time “patowan”) John Paul spoke up and said “but what about verse 3 where it says…”

I stopped and did the “math”. I had missed it utterly and it turned the passage on a dime.

“Um,…er…well John ..haha…that just kinda changes everything..” I laughed. And on we went to explore in a new direction.

Well, on an intuitive level I appreciate what the author (Wm. Paul Young) is trying to do…and if this was billed as a book of “revelation” it would be at great odds with biblical literature on a number of issues we shall discuss. But as fiction, there is nothing wrong with exploring all number of ideas. I myself have a book of short stories that do similarly. Many move beyond death in the afterlife. I wouldn’t for a minute say any of them was accurate given what little is revealed about the afterlife in the Bible. But it’s a nice way to ask “what if”s.

First, remember I am only on page 125, so I am just halfway through.

Lesson: There is a decided difference between “stated theology” and “inferred” theology. Stated theology is just that “God is Spirit and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and in Truth.”  Those are statements about God.

The “Trinity” on the other hand is NOT a piece  of stated theology. Nowhere in the Old or New Testaments will you find a statement about the Trinity or even the term. Our Jehovah’s Witness  and Mormon friends make great sport of this with average Christians who do not study their Bible, or who have not been taught to study.

The Trinity is “inferred”. It is obvious from a clear reading of various texts, both old and new, that the “Father” is God; the “Son” is God; and the “Spirit” is God. It is equally clear that there is only “ONE God”.

Now if God was a mathematical equation or within the confines of creation this would be a problem. Being as it is the very nature of God, it is not such a jump. I mean, as Buechner suggests, go to the beach and try explaining to  “a little necked clam what it means to be human”.  For that matter, try explaining it to another human including yourself.

Get my point?

The thing about “Inferential Theology” is “how big is the inferential jump”?

Serious scholars are gonna have legitimate problems with all three members of the Trinity being “incarnate” (having a tangible body) and having “limitations” (self-imposed). I think allowing the various passages that would be pertinent (once read and understood in their own context) as regards Jesus would support such an idea…for Jesus.

Others will have problems with “Papa” or the “Father” being portrayed as a Black woman. One wonders if they would have the same problem if he was depicted as an older white man?

I did sneak a peak at Mark Driscoll’s (of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church) video on The Shack. He didn’t like it  at all. I think he would place it in the camp of “heretical”. Well, I suppose if it was issued like the latest book by Bishop Spong, or others, who are selling their wares as straight theology, he might be able to make a case. As such, just as “context is everything” with biblical texts…so they are with literary texts.

That is all I can say for now. A good scholar/reader always takes in all the information before evaluation. Hopefully a level of real openness is there and the texts at hand are not pre-judged.

In future articles you will see that these same ideas are not any different from a sane approach to interpreting passages, or whole “books” of the Bible. All things need to be welcome to the table: literary style, historical situation, language, social norms, political situations, inter-personal dynamics…so many that help us “excavate” what we have been blessed with.

I was given an autographed copy of Christopher Moore’s  Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal . Moore inscribed it “To Mac, Blessed are the “Fxxxkups for they shall inherit the Earth. Best, Christopher Moore”.

I read the book not expecting much, but it was, in fact, delightful. I was particularly surprised by the attention to detail on Jewish customs and the whole situation during the First Century in Palestine. I wrote him as much and we corresponded a bit (he was living in Hawaii at the time and is now in Paris. You can follow his very funny adventures here) .

Now some (not all by any stretch)  “inferences” that Moore made in Lamb were HUGE leaps (like leaping from Hawaii to Paris without a plane). And that is the rub.

When it comes to the “Trinity” The evidence from the biblical records is that (well see above). There is absolutely NO conjecture on HOW this nature of God works. You can see it in action in various passages, but not a single author of any Old or New Testament book even ettempts to explain it…not even an analogy. It just IS.

Which means that, surprise of surprises, some things end in the realm of “mystery” at least to us. I imagine that God understands God’s own nature quite well. Probably thinks the notion of “Trinity” is quaint and a respectful attempt at approximate.

Well off to bed soon…after a call to my son.

Popular Hermenutics: What is the Bible?

For our present purposes, we will start out by asserting that it is the single most unique book ever “brought together”. Scholar F.F. Bruce, former Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester,  in his notable work, The Book and the Parchments, says this:

“The Bible, at first sight, appears to be a collection of literature—mainly Jewish. If we inquire into the circumstances under which the various Biblical documents were written, we find that they were written at intervals over a space of nearly 1400 years. The writers wrote in various lands, from Italy in the west to Mesopotamia and possibly Persia in the east. The writers themselves were a heterogeneous number of people, not only separated from each other by hundreds of years and hundreds of miles but belonging to the most diverse walks of life. In their ranks we have kings, herdsmen, soldiers, legislators, fishermen, statesmen, courtiers, priests and prophets, a tentmaking rabbi and Gentile physician, not to speak of others of whom we know nothing apart from the writings they have left us. The writings themselves belong to a great variety of literary types. They include history, law (civil, criminal, ethical, ritual, sanitary), religious poetry, didactic treatises, lyric poetry, parable and allegory, biography, personal correspondence, personal memoirs and diaries, in addition to the distinctively Biblical types of prophecy and apocalytptic.”

Adding some work done by a few others on the Bible to Dr. Bruce’s notes, we could summarize the following unique credentials:

1. Written over 1,400 year span.
2. Written by over  40 authors from every walk of life including poets, kings, herdsman, soldiers, prophets, priests, legislators, statesmen, a tent-making Rabbi, a Gentile Doctor, a tax-collector, and a cupbearer.
3. That these authors wrote from three different continents, Asia, Africa and Europe
4. That these authors wrote in one of three different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek).
5. That these authors wrote from a variety of different circumstances: Jeremiah in a dungeon, Daniel in a palace, Luke while traveling on the road, David running as a fugitive, Solomon during a time of peace, John on the Island of Patmos and Paul from prison, to name but a few.
6. The authors wrote in a great variety of literary types and created a number of original ones.

So the Bible is a vast number of writings from a great diversity of authors, times, and situations.

We will deal shortly with how it came to be a collection and also how it was translated down through the centuries without the benefit if printing presses (not that those are any guarantee).

To be sure this is a brief overview. Please write in any questions you have.  Comment here, or on the forum (to come).

Shit Yeah.

Editor’s note: I am not allowed here (on this blog) to bring politics or other issues into the fray. This blog is strictly about what the Bible is, and tools for interpreting this amazing collection of writings that some call Holy Writ, and others, simply respect. The following, therefore, is restricted to only issues of interpretation. But I cannot think of a better example to use than the biblical usage of the word “shit”. That being said, I have no such restrictions at the book site for The Doghouse Diaries. So please feel free to go there afterward and comment or question (or okay…condemn if you must).

Reading some good blog posts from pastors, laypeople and writers on the issue of “language”. Specifically swearing. This morning there was a question from one friend who asked what we all thought of a Derek Webb song from his Cd Stockholm Syndrome which uses the word “shit.”

TO which I replied with a poem written years ago (just could not find the right audience):

No Shit

No shit
Made the
Translation
Not Exodus 29:14
Not Judges 3:22
Not Isaiah 57:20-21
Not Philippians 3:8
All modern
Translators

Refuse

To spell the
Simple truth.

___________________________

Profane? Coarse? Inappropriate?

No. Biblical. Unless you count all that is above (which some do) as such.

This is why Hermeneutics is so crucial (accurate biblical interpretation). Becasue if you have a question and you go DEEPER you will be surprised what you find.

Exodus 29:14

The making of priests including Aaron comes directly from God to Moses. It is not even via a prophet. In verse 13 specific instructions continue on what must be done in the  sacrifice of the bull and which pieces of the bull are to be placed on the alter and what is to be done with the blood of the bull. Next, the remaining parts are to be taken outside the camp as an “offering to take a way sin”. These include the bull’s meat, skin and it’s shit.

Yes, literally bull shit.

Modern translations have tried to “soften” the literal meaning to “lower intestines” etc. Does not say that. Says shit.

The bull shit was part of the sin offering outside the camp. (you can see how restrained I have to be…)

Judges 3:22 Ehud and The Fat Man

In Judges 3 Eglon the King of Moab has defeated Israel and ruled over them for 18 years. After they had enough of being oppressed, the Israelites cried out to God for help and he send Ehud as a “judge”.  Ehud, was left-handed and he fashioned  sword 18 inches long and fastened it to the inside of his right leg under his garment. After the servants that accompanied Ehud to deliver the payment that Eglon had demanded, Ehud told the King that God had a secret message for him.  The King, who is described in verse 17 as “a very fat man” sent his servants and the men who had accompanied Ehud out so he could hear in private the message.

At which point Ehud got close and talking the sword from the inside of his right leg “stabbed the sword deep into the king’s belly! Even the handle sank in, and the blade came out his back”. That is the New Century Version.

The NASB is closer: “The handle also went in after the blade, and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not draw the sword out of his belly; and the refuse came out”.

The King James allows for “dirt” to somehow come out.

So, When Ehud came to the King to deliver God’s message it was with a sword and ended in shit.

Isaiah 57:20-21 Evil folk like an Angry sea

You will have to see other writings on the difference biblically between sinners (missing the mark), and those given over to evil. If you have ever met a person who has given themselves over to evil….”I mean Eeee-ville as in the Fru-its of the Dev-vil” (So I married an Axe Murder) then the description by Isaiah will make sense “they are like an angry sea which cannot rest whose waves toss up dirt and shit”.

“Waste” or “dung” are the closest translators (knowing full well) will allow themselves.

NT: The most Infamous Shit: Philippians 3:8

This passage is crucial because on it almost all of the questions of “righteousness” depend. Paul, Jew of Jews, a Pharisee who kept the law of God and was so zealous for his religion that he persecuted Christians before his conversion says flatly.

But indeed I also consider everything to be loss on account of the surpassing knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, on account of whom I forfeited all things; and I consider them shit so that I may gain Christ…

The Greek word is “skabula” and it means human shit and was meant to be as vulgar in its day is it is meant today. Paul’s wished the contrast to be shocking between his self-righteousness (read whole chapter for context) and the value of that compared to “knowing Christ” and trusting in Christ’s righteousness. He counts all his best religious efforts as shit.

Now this does not directly answer the ever-generational question of pastors dropping F-bomb in sermons or an incident (small) that I had yesterday.

No. In this limited context (accurate reading of the Bible) all it means is it says what it says. So stop sanitizing it. And if you are a preacher and you preach on Phlippians 3:8 for example, to not say Paul said “shit” is dishonest and gutless.

And with that I will stop. But move over to The Doghouse where much more open and wide discussion can be held.

The point here is accuracy is very important, and context is everything.