Category Archives: Interpretation

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“Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it”—Psalm 81:10

Against preparing sermons, some preachers used to quote the verse, “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it” (Ps 81:10). Or perhaps I should say more precisely, they used to quote a single line of the verse. Their resistance to preparation apparently extended to examining the context of the lines they quoted.

In the verse itself, God reminds them that he redeemed his people from slavery in Egypt and spoke to his people in the wilderness (81:8-10). His people resisted obeying him, following other gods, so God punished them (81:11-12). But if they would obey him, he would bless them, as he wanted to do (81:13-16).

What would he fill their mouths with? In this case, not what should come out of the mouth (words) but what should go in (food). As God provided manna for his people when they were in the wilderness, so he longed for their obedience so he could bless them with food:

“But you would be fed with the finest of wheat;with honey from the rock I would satisfy you” (Ps 81:16, NIV)

The verse is about provision, but not about providing sermon material without study, when we have access to be able to read the Bible. It’s about God supplying the needs of his people when they follow his ways.

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Good news about Christobiography

Usually I just post Bible studies, videos, etc. (and often silly cartoons) here, but I did want to pause to acknowledge gratitude. Christianity Today listed my recent book Christobiography as its top biblical studies book for this year. There were many other great books out this year but I’m grateful for the further attention this brings to this book.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/january-february/christianity-today-2020-book-awards.html

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Brief Comments on the Passion Translation

Lacking time to engage the Passion Translation thoroughly, I offer just two comments here, one positive and the other negative.

First, in the passages that I surveyed, the author captured the spirit of the text well, communicating it in contemporary language. In this, the work can function like The Message or other paraphrases. The more a translation or paraphrase tends toward dynamic equivalents, the greater the risk of the translator’s interpretation being highlighted in a passage. The value of such renderings, though, is allowing hearers to experience and engage the text from a fresh angle, though I would recommend always having a more literal rendering handy, especially where the text is developing a detailed argument.

Second, and unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw that pervades the entire translation: its dependence on Aramaic. Although Jesus spoke Aramaic, that was not the language of Jews in Asia Minor, Greece or Rome, areas to which most of the New Testament is addressed. It is not the language of our Greek New Testament (with a few snippets of Aramaic words or phrases here and there), which Christians take to be canonical. Scholars are virtually unanimous on these points because a massive quantity of inscriptions, graffiti and other sources from antiquity renders them beyond dispute.

This pervasive dependence on Aramaic throughout makes the Passion Translation unreliable. It could be revised, with a great deal of effort, by going back through it and correcting any dependence on Aramaic by translating solely from the Greek text. Barring such revision, however, one cannot recommend it for devotional or other use, because the level of distortion is too high.

I note this with regret, since the ideal of the project—to bring readers to hear God’s voice in the text afresh—is a commendable goal (emphasized repeatedly in my 2016 academic book, Spirit Hermeneutics). But for this goal to be properly achieved, it must be closer to the voice actually communicated through the Greek New Testament, rather than depending heavily on a later and interpretive version other than the Greek New Testament. Perhaps, with sufficient labor, the work can be revised to better achieve the purpose for which it was designed.

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Faith hermeneutics

Some Christians handle Scripture as if figuring out its meaning is all that matters. They expound it, but don’t apply much of it today. Some other Christians lay hold of and claim Scripture, but they don’t pay attention to context and so misunderstand it. Faith is only as good as its object, so if we misunderstand Scripture we may believe what it’s not saying.

Some Christians value both, but are more gifted in understanding or in faith. We can learn from both sorts of Christians. So:

(1) Let’s do our homework, so we understand God’s Word. (Read Scripture in context, take into account background, genre, etc.)

and:

(2) Let’s believe God’s Word, embracing its truth for our lives and living that faith.

(This was the subject of my book, Spirit Hermeneutics, if anyone wants this argument in a few hundred pages of greater detail!)

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Differences in the Gospels, part 3

There are, as noted in parts 1 and 2, differences among the Gospels. So, picking up where we left off last time:

Second and third examples:

In Luke 7:3-6, after a significant sermon by Jesus, local Judean elders and the centurion’s friends intercede for and deliver messages for him; he does not come directly to Jesus. In Matt 8:5-7, shortly after Jesus’s parallel sermon, the centurion comes directly to Jesus, with no intermediaries.

Likewise, Matt 9:18 omits messengers in Mark 5; whereas in Mark messengers inform Jairus of his daughter’s death after he has asked Jesus to heal her (Mark 5:23, 35), in Matthew this synagogue official simply announces his daughter’s death to Jesus directly.

These examples fit not only ancient biographic conventions, but ordinary discourse. When we recount events to someone who may not want to hear every detail, we streamline a story down to the most essential points that we want to convey. I think that’s what Matthew’s doing here. If you disagree, that’s fine; you may in fact have better explanations. I have no personal stake in any particular way of explaining the differences. In some cases we are just guessing; in others, as in these second and third examples, a pattern appears to suggest one sort of explanation as more probable than another.

But whatever explanation you might prefer, please don’t try to deny what’s in the text, in the name of honoring it. That’s imposing your beliefs on the Bible, rather than submitting to what is actually there. That is not respectful to the biblical text. And certainly don’t deny what’s in the text in front of you while claiming that you are upholding biblical authority! Someone who denies what is in front of them in the text is not upholding biblical authority; they are denying it.

So here is my advice to those who, in the name of defending Scripture, don’t want to acknowledge differences. (Not that I meet many people like that; maybe I am preaching here to what I was right after my conversion.)

If they don’t see differences, it’s fairly obvious that they have never worked their way through a synopsis of the Gospels. Maybe it’s time that instead of hammering others with their theological or philosophical assumptions, they read the actual biblical text closely.

And here is my advice to those who, for the sake of attacking Scripture, see such differences as significant contradictions. (Not that those who do so normally consult me for advice.)

Look: if Matthew and Luke made changes in Mark, that means that they knew what Mark said and made the changes anyway. You yourself probably recognize that their audiences had probably already heard Mark. They obviously did not see a problem with this. Simply repeating their sources verbatim was not what they were trying to do. (In fact, most ancient historians paraphrased and adapted the wording of their sources more than the Gospel writers do in cases like this.) So chill out and quit making issues out of things that you know very well that your fellow scholars who are Christians do not find a problem with—especially since the Gospel writers and other writers of their milieu didn’t see a problem with it. What you accuse them of failing to do is not what they claimed to be doing.

For those of us who respect Scripture, let’s respect it enough to embrace it the way God gave it to us. He did not give Christians a Qur’an, dictated by a single prophet. He did not give us oracular utterances dictated by the Delphic priestess and put into nice Greek by Apollo’s priests. He didn’t even limit us to a single Gospel so that new converts would immediately understand that Jesus got crucified just once. He gave it to us the way that he gave it to us, and it’s our job to welcome it and then, by his grace, do our best to figure it out.