Let me qualify what follows by saying:
I do believe that we have several excellent translations available to us of the holy scriptures.
I do believe that they have certain flaws, which I will not detail here due to other more important matters.
Having said this, let me begin.
I would love to see every believer equipped to handle the scriptures in their original languages. I was motivated to write this blog after my best friend responded to a quote on my facebook profile. The quote comes from a Evangelical Presbyterian minister’s profile.
The quote is this:
“Reading the Bible in translation is like kissing the bride through a veil.”
Sh’muel Agnon
How that sums it up immediately and so comprehensively. Think about it! When we are about to get married, we are caught up in the greatest expectation outside of salvation that we can possibly have. We anticipate the first sight of our betrothed enfolded in the purest, most expensive garments our money can buy. We await our bride at the end of a long and painful march that requires so much of us in terms of character and integrity that we might arrive in full obedience at the place of character and holiness that the L-rd has intended for us. We say our death-ending vows before the holiness of His throne and the witness of many who compass us round about, and we literally on that altar are altered as we lay down a substantial sum to purchase that bride through the exchanging of a diamond engagement ring, and if we are blessed, have only the stress place on us by our crabby families being forced to sit next to each other and somehow figure out a way to get along for the sake of those two (nowadays some would say stupid) kids recklessly pledging to ante up their lives and go all in for each other, and to hell and back, if necessary, whether that means abuse or violence from all corners of this world, their flesh, and the devil, and unfortunately in some cases from each other.
Then when all is said and done and life is given up to death as the pledge, we are allowed the privilege of pulling back the veil and kissing our lover’s satiny, stage-ready lips.
But if our lover does not allow us to pull back the veil, what do we get a mouthful of? Lace? Silk? Synthetics? Cottons? Some cellulose-laden alternative? Without the pullback of that veil, there is no full intimacy.
Such is it with knowing and reading the scriptures in their original languages.
I remember the feeling at the end of my first semester of New Testament Greek. I was armed and equipped with a few tenses and much of the more common vocabulary, and ready to translate all of the New Testament. It felt like a new playground had been opened up to me. And when January came., we dove straight into what all New Testament Greek students start out with: 1 John. Now, I know they say it’s because the Greek in 1 John is the simplest in all of Scripture, but I tell you, that is a heavy and strong dose of prophetic medicine to start students out transtlating on, and it effectively says some really pride-breaking and flesh-convicting pithy statements, some of the heaviest in all the Bible.
And so the veil came off for me, and I found something I was really anointed to do and passionate about doing, besides other things I do. There is nothing quite as sweet for a child of God to find what Eldredge calls “what makes you come alive.” We need more people who have come alive. I had the same reaction to my poetry workshop in college. It was like some veil had been lifted and I was sharing intimately and speaking and thinking intimately in a different way than I had ever been accustomed to sharking, speaking, and thinking.
And the taste. It’s interesting when you become a believer, and with believing eyes and a believing spirit you come to Scripture in a translation and the Lord begins to open things up to you about His word. But then the same thing happens, when you are saved, and come to the Scriptures in thier original languages. Something in you comes alive. But a more full alive. Because while translations tell you something, the original languages color and paint and express and expound and litigate and soliliquize in ways the translations never could. We learn in a translation that the darkness was pushed back because the light was revealed, but in the original languages, we learn the ways and the hows and the many dimensions in which that darkness was pushed back, because we are reading words that have more than just the translated meaning, all compacted in one text.
It’s like the L-rd is doing several things with the text. Adonai is so adept and dexterous with language. You notice this with the wordplay and punmanship of our Lord with the text. Take Adam’s name. He was man and he was Adam and he was also Dirt. And then Elijah’s name, which means “Elohim is my Yah” but is also a play on the word Aliyah, meaning ascension or ladder. And you recall that Elijah ascended to heaven by a whirlwind and a fiery chariot.
Like a child with an intricate toy
Like a skilled craftsman with a toolbelt
Like a master poet with a pallate of words
Like an master physicist with strong and weak, electromagnets, gravitation, and tensor mathematics
Like a master director and actor with the perfectly improvised script
Is our L-rd with the Holy Writ.
Is Adonai El Elyon Adonai Tsevaot with His Holy Wit
Never has one person said so much with so few, and done so much with so little as He.
How great is Yeshua
How great is our G-d.
October 13, 2009 at 4:03 pm |
You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree with your blog.