Category Archive

Mike Grondin notes on the Gospel of Thomas email list that the Patterson and Robinson translation gets a little overenthusiastic in its use of gender-neutral language and I agree that in a translation of parables like the Hidden Treasure and the Assassin with the Sword it makes little sense to use the word “person” when it’s clear that the story is about a man, not a woman. In addition, since it’s not possible to recast these stories in the plural, using “person” instead of man has the effect of suggesting that “people” are male, so while it’s gender neutral, it ceases to be inclusive and is not at all helpful to the cause of including women as equals in church and society. I suspect that in the case of the Patterson and Robinson translation of Thomas, this is totally unintentional.

I was, however, reminded of some of the recent discussion on Iyov’s blog about the ESV which he and a number of other people don’t like very much for a number of reasons. In the comments, Suzanne (sometimes posting as Sue) makes an interesting point.

She says:

…the NIV, and older translations still used the word “men” to mean “people.” The ESV and HCSB do not. They use the word “people” for people and the word “men” to exclude women. Oddly they are translating the same Greek word [anthrwpos] , so it is the decision of the translator to exclude women.

She indicates that 2 Tim. 2 is translated in the ESV as:

And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, commit to faithful men (anthrwpois) who will be able to teach others also.

She then says that she asked Dr Packer, one of the members of the translation team about this and was told that the translation team thinks it means men, not people. Now, I can understand how it is possible to argue that there are circumstances where aner is clearly intended by the authors to mean men only and not to include women, but I find it very difficult to see that, given the choice between a word that means “people - male and female” and another that means “people of the male gender only”, you would choose the former if it actually mattered that people knew that women were excluded.

I keep forgetting how far my denomination has moved on in this regard, although there are people in our congregation who really don’t want us to call a woman minister, so perhaps we haven’t moved all that far. I also find it fascinating that women stay in churches that run this kind of line. I know a lot who have moved out of them, and often out of the church altogether, which I find sad, but so many women actually believe that God doesn’t want them to use their very obvious gifts for teaching etc!!

Note that this is not intended as a comment on the ESV as a translation. I haven’t looked at it, so I can’t comment. It is a reflection on the kind of theological approach that would do this kind of thing and the harm it has done to the church and to women.

There is an interesting discussion on Tim Bulkely’s Sansblogue about preaching. In it, one of the people who has posted comments talks about the need for expository preaching - preaching based on the text - rather than simply using the text selectively to back up personal opinions.

While I agree that it is good to base one’s sermons on a biblical text, I think there are a range of ways of doing this, and some of them are more valid than others. I am reminded of some sermons and talks at Christian conventions that I’ve attended, where the preacher/speaker takes the text serious in minute detail. He (it is always he) takes a few words from the text and expands on them, telling us how important a particular adjective or adverb is to how the text applies to the lives of the audience. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I used to find this fascinating and be quite awestruck by the depth of the speaker’s biblical understanding.

Looking back, though, this kind of speaker was rarely looking at the Greek/Hebrew text for his source, so he was basing his exposition on English synonyms and grammatical structure, which is quite often problematic. In addition, the more I look at oral transmission and the psychological literature on eyewitness testimony, the more convinced I become of the invalidity of this kind of text work. What people remember about an event they’ve witness can be so skewed by a range of factors that attributing some divine importance to one or two particular words is simply not on, unless you subscribe to the “divine secretary” theory of inspiration of Scripture (ie that the writers of the biblical texts simply took dictation from God).

I believe that we need to look at the big picture - the themes that are consistent throughout scripture - not the fine detail, for our understanding about authentic Christian lifestyles. Fine detail analysis of text is essential to ensure that we have the big picture right, but the fine detail analysis needs to be of the texts in their original languages as far as possible, and in the context in which they were written.

However, a day or three ago, Chris Tilling’s Quote for the Day over on Chrisendom was from Andrew Perriman and it reminded me of another problem with expository preaching. Perriman talks about the fact that the Bible is not a modern text and was not written to address modern circumstances and therefore should be strange and irrelevant, not immediately accessible to the modern reader/hearer. I’m not sure that I agree with the “should” but it often is and I think that one of the problems of the person who has grown up with or has extensive experience of Christianity from within the church is that they simply don’t realise just how inaccessible the Bible is to the modern reader without a church background. In your average church service, there simply isn’t the time to spend providing the background to help the congregation understand why you are saying that the big picture is what it is - at least in the churches I attend where people start fidgetting after about 15 minutes and cannot be guaranteed to come week after week so they will get all the parts of a series.

A preacher who is trying to work from the text is therefore left with no option but the “trust me - I’m ordained/have studied theology” line, and generally most members of most congregations do trust the preacher not to be making stuff up from thin air, which is quite a sobering thought, really. I mean, how many “biblical facts” have you believed for years on the basis that some preacher years ago said they were true only to find that they actually are not? Preaching is actually quite scarey if you stop to think about it for too long!

Update: Thanks to Pat McCullough of kata ta biblia for explaining how to get a direct link to the Sansblogue post.

Over on kata ta biblia, Patrick McCullough talks about assertions vs arguments and quotes Marianne Meye Thompson from Fuller. Along with much with which I agree he says that ‘She points out that you should never say “I think that” or “in my opinion,” but should rather give reasonings and simply remove those phrases’.

This is a convention in academic writing that has always made me uncomfortable when I am presenting original research or critiquing another person’s work in a public forum rather than simply writing a review of the literature.

If Bloggs, whose scholarship I generally respect, has says something with which I disagree, I would much rather say “In my opinion (or it seems to me that) in presenting this argument, Bloggs has overlooked X, because…”, rather than simply “In presenting this argument, Bloggs has overlooked X, because…”. I think that the “in my opinion…” softens my critique enough to give Bloggs the opportunity to say “Redman presents an interesting perspective and one that I had not previously considered…” rather than feeling the need to “come out fighting” to justify what s/he has said. I like dialogue and I think that the occasional “in my opinion” facilitates dialogue.

It also strikes me as somewhat dishonest to present something that is my own tentative opinion without indicating in some way that I am not articulating mainstream consensus, and I know it. And on the other hand, if I think that what I am about to articulate is exciting and groundbreaking work, I don’t want to say just that this is true because… I want to be able to at least give the reader a hint that this is new and different.

Meye Thompson’s position is, of course, the convention in the field and I am still a student, so that’s the way I write, despite my personal inclinations. Of course, you don’t want to overdo the “it seems to me”s or you run the risk of being thought opinionated, which would never do. YMMV, of course.

Over on Pisteuomen, Michael Halcomb has published a conversation with Chris Tilling of Chrisendom fame. In between discussing significantly less biblical issues, they touch on ways that we can begin to bridge the gap that exists between the academy and the Church. Chris suggests that we don’t try to suggest that everyone needs to read academic tomes to sort out their faith. I agree, but I also think that we ought to make sure that congregant/parishioners are aware that it is both OK and possible for them to read academic tomes if they’re interested.

I’m reminded of a Computer Science doctoral candidate who used to come and talk to me on a very regular basis. He had grown up in an atheist family where he had been told that only a fool believes in God. His previous contact with Christians had reinforced this notion but he was fascinated by the fact that I was clearly intelligent and also clearly believed in God and wanted to know more. (I know this because he told me so.)

One day he wandered in and I needed to finish something before I could talk to him, so he browsed my bookshelves. He found a copy of Jürgen Moltmann’s Creating a Just Future and asked if he could borrow it. I somewhat hesitatingly said yes, because I thought it might be rather complex for someone with no church background. The next morning he was in my office, blazingly angry. Why, he wanted to know, had no-one ever told him that you could be a Christian without putting your brain into neutral? Why hadn’t anyone told him that Christians were interested in more than just converting you? It had taken him over an hour to work out how to look up the Bible readings in the Gideons’ New Testament that he had at home and he hadn’t understood some of the finer points of Moltmann’s argument, but he was fascinated.

He took to systematic theology like a duck to water and read everything that Moltmann had ever written that was available in English translation, and then went on to Pannenburg, Bultmann and Elisabeth Moltmann Wendell (the last on the basis that anyone sensible enough to marry Jürgen must have something worthwhile to offer). I found this very challenging, having been much more interested in biblical studies, ethics and pastoral care when I was studying, but I think he found an on-line community that was more able to enter into the discussion with enthusiasm than I was.

I left the university at that point and lost contact with him, so I don’t know whether his enthusiasm for Moltmann resulted in a conversion experience, but it did suggest to me that churchgoers might find academic writing difficult to understand because they expect it to be difficult. The student had no idea that Moltmann was supposed to be difficult, so he didn’t find him difficult.

Of course, some theology/biblical studies is difficult. Some of the people in academe use such arcane language and such tortuous sentences structure that they’re almost impossible to follow. I suspect they think that they are showing how clever they are, but I tend to think that it simply shows what poor communicators they are, and I don’t bother reading them. I am often prepared to make exceptions for people who have published in a language other than English and who I am reading in English, on the basis that they may be suffering from poor translation. Ernst Käsemann is a case in point - some of the English versions of his books are much more readable than others and the more readable ones are translated by different people to the less readable ones.

April DeConick, over on The Forbidden Gospels blog, has three posts (starting here) reflecting on why the Society of Biblical Literature hasn’t set up a panel to discuss Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, which has not exactly received a standing ovation in biblical scholarship circles. If you want to see why, Gerd Lüdemann’s review in Free Inquiry provides some information from a secular humanist perspective.

I haven’t read the book and don’t have time to, but Geoff Hudson’s first comment on this post raises a bigger issue on which I do want to comment. He says:

So how did the public ‘religious illiteracy’ come about, if not through the academics who trained students and ministers?

This is something I have strong feelings about. As I say in my comment on April’s blog, during my ministry training and in conversations with colleagues, I have reasonably frequently heard it said that telling members of congregations about ‘modern’ biblical scholarship is not appropriate either because they wouldn’t understand or it would destroy their faith. I find this elitist and condescending and have been known to ask whether the person making the statement has understood the scholarship and if so, whether it has destroyed their faith.

In fact, quite a number of people have the opposite response when they are told about it - excitement that it helps them to make sense of things they’ve wondered about for decades and anger that no-one has told them before. Unfortunately, since preachers have, by and large kept this stuff under wraps for well over a century, there’s a lot of catching up to do, so the prospect of dealing with it is quite daunting but, at least in my experience, very worthwhile.

At the other extreme, I get really frustrated when biblical scholars try to use historical-critical method to ‘prove’ things that are actually faith-based. Bauckham’s work on eyewitness accounts in the gospels springs immediately to mind, but there are other examples. I continue to return to the fact that what makes the gospels trustworthy from the Christian perspective is that we believe that we have documents that are inspired by God, so that the processes through which they went to reach the final version were guided by God and can therefore be trusted to preserve “truth”. If someone is not reading them from a faith perspective then it doesn’t matter whether they are eyewitness accounts or not, there is no way to prove that they are accurate accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings. They are simply a corpus of writings that a group of people believe to be true and upon which they base their lives and the non-believer examines them from that perspective. It appears that a particular part of the Christian church is trying very hard to change Christianity from something that is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Co 1:23, NRSV) to something that can be scientifically proven to be correct and I really don’t see it happening this side of the eschaton. That is, after all, the point of Christianity being called a “faith” and there really is no way to stop people who don’t share that faith from thinking that you’re anything from not overly bright to seriously dangerous.

Update 15 Sept: Over on Euangelion, Michael Bird posts about developing a theology of early Christianity which takes seriously both what we know about the history Christian origins and the fact that the early Christians were writing about their encounters with God (sorry, Michael, if I’ve oversimplified).