BIBLE, TEXTS AND VERSIONS

BIBLE, TEXTS AND VERSIONS OF Ancient manuscripts and translations of the Bible which exist as important witnesses to the text of the Old and New Testaments. Ancient translations into other languages provide important evidence in establishing the text of the Bible.

Importance

The books of the Old Testament were originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic and then copied and transmitted from generation to generation. Similarly, the New Testament was written in Greek and then copied as it began to spread throughout the Church. The vast majority of our English versions of the Bible today are based upon texts that resulted from this transmission in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

Faith communities going back to 250 BC were also translating the Bible into their own languages so that they could read and understand it:

  •      Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria, Egypt translated the Old Testament into Greek.

  •      Christian converts in Edessa, Syria translated the entire Bible into Syriac.

  •   The New Testament was translated into Latin, Gothic, and Armenian.

These ancient translations of the Bible in different languages are very important in two essential ways:

  1.   They provide additional witnesses to the text of the Bible.

  2.   The ancient versions provide examples of ancient exegesis and interpretation of the Bible.

The available Hebrew and Greek manuscripts are late and come from the latter part of the transmission process. Although the copying of texts was done very carefully, scribes would often commit some errors, including:

  •      misreading handwritten letters

  •      smudging the ink

  •      accidentally omitting a word

  •      repeating a word they had already written

Once an error was introduced into a text, the copies of that text would also repeat the error. The ancient versions present a “snapshot” of the biblical text at an earlier time. In the process of textual criticism, Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible are compared to the ancient versions in an attempt to determine which readings most accurately reflect the original documents.

Additionally, translation is essentially a form of interpretation; translators come to an understanding of the source text and then convert it into a different language system. The ancient translator was required to interpret the Bible in order to communicate it to his audience. Therefore, in addition to explicit interpretive texts demonstrating how faith communities understood the Bible, translations provide insights into Jewish and Christian opinions of biblical interpretation and passages of significance. Some ancient versions, such as the Aramaic Targumim (plural), intentionally expanded and interpreted the text. Other versions, such as the Greek Septuagint, attempted to give a more literal rendering of the text; the translator still interpreted, but in a less obvious manner. The versions are also helpful in interpreting the minutia of the biblical text. When translation of a particular Hebrew or Greek word or idiom is difficult, the versions demonstrate how ancient exegetes understood it. Many of these exegetes were near-native speakers of Hebrew and Greek and who lived closer in culture and time to the original authors of the Bible.

Old Testament

Hebrew Texts

The biblical texts found at Qumran, near the Dead Sea, in 1947 are extremely important. Dating from the middle of the second century BC to the middle or late first century AD, they were likely created by a Jewish religious sect called the Essenes (Vanderkam, Dead Sea Scrolls Today, 97ff). These “Dead Sea Scrolls” are significant early texts in Hebrew. They provide direct evidence from the turn of the era—almost 1,000 years earlier than the oldest complete Hebrew manuscript possessed before their discovery.

A number of additional Hebrew texts with fragments of biblical material have also been discovered. The oldest known fragments are the “Silver Scrolls,” which date to the seventh century BC and contain part of the priestly blessing in Num 6:22–27. Other texts include:

  •      Nash Papyrus—first century AD: a damaged copy of the Decalogue or “Ten Commandments”

  •      Manuscripts from Masada—first century AD: fragments of Psalms, Leviticus, and Ezekiel

  •      Nahal Hever manuscripts—first century BC—first century AD: fragments of the Pentateuch

  •      Biblical manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza—AD 1000–1400 (Wegner, Textual Criticism, 148–55)

The absence of vowels or punctuation in Hebrew texts until about AD 500 resulted in certain ambiguity in some readings. Between AD 500 and 1000, Masoretes—Jewish scribes—in Palestine and Babylon began updating the text of the Old Testament so that it contained accents, vowels, and other annotations designed to remove uncertainty and preserve a vocalization tradition. The Aleppo Codex was completed about AD 930, but 1/4 of it was destroyed in a later fire during persecutions of Jews in Syria. The Leningrad Codex, completed about 50 years later, is the best complete surviving manuscript of the Old Testament in Hebrew. It is the main source for most recent critical editions of the Hebrew Old Testament and the basis for most English translations.

For further details, see these articles: Codex Leningradensis; Masoretic Text; Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, History of Text; and Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Methodology.

Versions in Other Languages

Significant versions in other languages include:

  •      The Septuagint (from Latin Septuaginta, often abbreviated “LXX”)—created for Jews living in Alexandria, Egypt who needed a copy of the Torah in their own language—Greek. According to the Epistle of Aristeas, the Torah was translated in the third century BC with the Prophets and Writings following in stages by the end of the second century BC (Tov, Textual Criticism, 136–37). This translation was influential on the writers of the New Testament who worked in Greek. It is the basis for many of their quotations and references to concepts in the Old Testament.

  •      Targum (תַּרְגּוּם, targum, plural Targumim), “interpretation” or “translation” (Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targumim, 1695)—Translations into Aramaic to enable Jews in Palestine and abroad to understand the Bible once they began to lose their knowledge of Hebrew. The Aramaic Targum was read alongside the Hebrew liturgical reading as an interpretive guide in the synagogue or personal study.

  •      Peshitta (ܦܫܝܛܬܐ), “simple”—Translations of the Old and New Testaments into Syriac, a late dialect of Aramaic. The translation was made in Edessa (modern-day Syria) in the second century AD, probably by Jews who had converted to Christianity (Weitzman, The Syriac Version, 258–59).

  •      Vulgate—(Vulgata), “common”—A translation of the Bible into Latin made at the end of the fourth century AD. The church father Jerome undertook to translate the Old Testament, with help from Jewish scholars, directly from the Hebrew. The name “Vulgate” probably reflects the version’s everyday language and popularity.

  •      Other minor versions of the Old Testament are of limited value except to understand the transmission of the Greek Septuagint (Tov, Textual Criticism, 134):

    •      Coptic (the final stage of Egyptian) in the third and fourth centuries AD

    •      Ethiopic in the fourth century AD

    •      Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries (Wegner, Textual Criticism, 139)

For further details, see these articles: Aquila’s Version; Greek Versions of the Hebrew Bible; Hexapla of Origen; Masorah; Masoretes; Masoretic Text; Pentateuch, Samaritan; Peshitta; Septuagint; Symmachus’ Version; Syriac Language; Targum; Theodotion’s Version; and Vulgate.

New Testament

Greek Manuscripts

Many more manuscripts and texts exist for the New Testament than for the Old Testament. The Greek manuscripts of the New Testament have traditionally been divided into four categories (Black, New Testament Textual Criticism, 18–20):

  1.      Papyri—the oldest and most fragile type of manuscript. They are notated with a “p” followed by a number. For example, p45 in the Chester Beatty collection comprises portions of the Gospels and Acts, and it dates to the beginning of the third century (Wegner, Textual Criticism, 257).

  2.      Uncials—There are approximately 274 known uncials, named for their style of Greek letters which might be compared to capital letters in English. They are designated with either a capital letter taken from Hebrew, Latin and Greek, or by a number. Significant uncials include (Black, New Testament Textual Criticism, 19):

    •      Codex Sinaiticus (א, ') dating to the fourth century AD,

    •      Codex Alexandrinus (fourth century and designated with the letter “A”)

    •      Codex Vaticanus (fourth century and designated with the letter “B”)

  3.      Minuscules—Named for their small letters. By the end of the 10th century, miniscules had essentially replaced uncials (Black, New Testament Textual Criticism, 20). Denoted by a number, there are presently 2,555 minuscules on record.

  4.      Lectionaries—Contains biblical text in a liturgical sequence rather than in a canonical order. All the books of the Bible except Revelation are found at least partially in lectionaries, which date from the fifth to the 10th centuries or later. Lectionary manuscripts are denoted with the letter “l” or the abbreviation “Lect” (Black, New Testament Textual Criticism, 20–21). There are presently about 2,300 lectionary manuscripts (Wegner, Textual Criticism, 264).

For further details, see these articles: Bodmer Papyri; Chester Beatty Papyri; Codex Alexandrinus; Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis; Codex Ephraemi Syri; Codex Sinaiticus; Codex Vaticanus; Codex Washingtonensis; Elephantine Papyri; New Testament Manuscripts; Oxyrhynchus; Papyri, Early Christian; and Textual Criticism of the New Testament.

Versions in Other Languages

Early translations also provide a witness to the text of the New Testament. As is the case for the Old Testament versions, translations must be used with care as all translators must interpret their source text. The target languages themselves may also be fundamentally different than Greek, which introduces obligatory shifts and changes into the text.

The early versions of the New Testament can be divided into eastern and western. The eastern versions include translations in Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and Ethiopic. The western versions include Latin, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic. There are also many minor eastern and western versions of more limited value.

Bibliography

  Black, David Alan. New Testament Textual Criticism: A Concise Guide. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994.

  Fernández Marcos, Natalio. The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Version of the Bible. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009.

  Hurtado, Larry W. The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006.

  Jastrow, Marcus. Dictionary of the Targumim, Almud Bavli, Talmud Yerushalmi, and Midrashic Literature. New York: Judaica Treasury, 2004.

  Metzger, Bruce Manning. The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

  Shanks, Hershel. Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reader from the Biblical Archaeology Review. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

  Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Old Testament Text.” Pages 159–99 in The Cambridge History of the Bible. Edited by P.R. Ackroyd and C.F. Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

  Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.

  VanderKam, James C. The Dead Sea Scrolls Today. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.

  Wegner, Paul D. A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible. Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2006.

  Weitzman, Michael. The Syriac Version of the Old Testament. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1999.

ERIC TULLY

Eric Tully, “Bible, Texts and Versions of,” ed. John D. Barry et al., The Lexham Bible Dictionary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).

Psalm 21

1  The LORD controls the mind of a king as easily as he directs the course of a stream.

2 You may think that everything you do is right, but remember that the LORD judges your motives.

3 Do what is right and fair; that pleases the LORD more than bringing him sacrifices.

4 Wicked people are controlled by their conceit and arrogance, and this is sinful.

5 Plan carefully and you will have plenty; if you act too quickly, you will never have enough.

6 The riches you get by dishonesty soon disappear, but not before they lead you into the jaws of death.

7 The wicked are doomed by their own violence; they refuse to do what is right.

8 Guilty people walk a crooked path; the innocent do what is right.

9 Better to live on the roof than share the house with a nagging wife.

10 Wicked people are always hungry for evil; they have no mercy on anyone.

11 When someone who is conceited gets his punishment, even an unthinking person learns a lesson. One who is wise will learn from what he is taught.

12 God, the righteous one, knows what goes on in the homes of the wicked, and he will bring the wicked down to ruin.

13 If you refuse to listen to the cry of the poor, your own cry for help will not be heard.

14 If someone is angry with you, a gift given secretly will calm him down.

15 When justice is done, good people are happy, but evil people are brought to despair.

16 Death is waiting for anyone who wanders away from good sense.

17 Indulging in luxuries, wine, and rich food will never make you wealthy.

18 The wicked bring on themselves the suffering they try to cause good people.

19 Better to live out in the desert than with a nagging, complaining wife.

20 Wise people live in wealth and luxury, but stupid people spend their money as fast as they get it.

21 Be kind and honest and you will live a long life; others will respect you and treat you fairly.

22 A shrewd general can take a city defended by strong men, and destroy the walls they relied on.

23 If you want to stay out of trouble, be careful what you say.

24 Show me a conceited person and I will show you someone who is arrogant, proud, and inconsiderate.

25 Lazy people who refuse to work are only killing themselves;

26 all they do is think about what they would like to have. The righteous, however, can give, and give generously.

27 The LORD hates it when wicked people offer him sacrifices, especially if they do it from evil motives.

28 The testimony of a liar is not believed, but the word of someone who thinks matters through is accepted.

29 Righteous people are sure of themselves; the wicked have to pretend as best they can.

30 Human wisdom, brilliance, insight—they are of no help if the LORD is against you.

31 You can get horses ready for battle, but it is the LORD who gives victory.

I KNOW YOU KNOW WHAT YOU THINK I SAID...

I KNOW YOU KNOW WHAT YOU THINK I SAID …

The most recent books of the Bible are almost 2,000 years old. Therefore, the customs, ideas, and common everyday knowledge that was shared by the apostles and their first-century readers are as foreign to us as the rhythm of village life in Indonesia’s remotest valleys.

Even if we could come to the text with intimate knowledge of the history and folkways of biblical times, to read the Bible the way it was written would require an understanding of three ancient languages that only a few scholars can claim. The Bible I read is an English translation, and all of us who read our Bibles in translation stand one step removed from reading it the way it was written.

Every translation, no matter how literally the translators intended to duplicate the original, is to some extent an interpretation because no two languages are alike in vocabulary, grammar, or thought.

A missionary friend of mine is fond of reminding me that English has no decent word for “worship.” Although we think we know what worship means, it’s not because our English word for it tells us. If it did, we wouldn’t hear so many sermons, see so many articles, or have such heated disagreements over worship in the Christian community.

Some things that can be said easily in one language, can hardly be said at all in another.

I served as an intern under a remarkable man who is both a brilliant scholar and a godly pastor. One of his multitude of talents is the ability to preach in Swedish as well as English. This ability stood him in good stead in the community his church served, because many people there had grown up speaking Swedish (the way they knew the Lord intended). Every year or so he’d be called to conduct a Swedish service where they could sing, pray, and hear some good preaching, all in Swedish. On occasion, when Dr. Nelson was preaching to his regular, largely English-speaking congregation, he’d stop in mid-sentence, assume a characteristically pensive look, and then say, “I can’t think of a good way to say this in English, but in Swedish it would be …,” and then favor us with a phrase or two in that language.

All we transplanted Irishmen, Germans, and assorted Anglo-Saxons would scratch our heads in bewilderment at this, but those old Swedes would beam with new understanding, certain they’d heard the Word exactly the way the apostles had written it!

Translators are faced with Dr. Nelson’s predicament on every page of the Bible. A word or phrase that makes perfect sense in Greek or Hebrew may have no English equivalent, but only rarely do they dare say, “I can’t think of a way to say it in English, but in Hebrew it would be …”

The chance of there being any Hebrews or Greeks from the old country to understand that word are zilch. The translator needs to make an informed judgment on what English word, or group of words, comes closest to the meaning of the original. As any comparison of English translations will show, there are many places on almost every page where the informed judgment of different translators is simply not the same.

The first verse of the Bible offers a good illustration. The KJV reads, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The NIV, along with most contemporary translations, translates the same Hebrew word as heavens. The difference that one letter can make in the way we understand the verse is profound.

For us, the word heaven overflows with theological meaning. Heaven is the dwelling place of God. It is the home that all believers look forward to some day. It’s the place that is as high above the earth in splendor, majesty, peace, and holiness, as God is above humanity. The word heaven rings with the anthems of angelic choruses and the shouts of adoration rising from the throats of God’s people gathered around His throne. It would be hard for most of us to read Genesis 1:1 and not hear the echoes of that sound.

With the single letter s added, however, those overtones are hushed. Moses wrote not about heaven, but about the heavens, not about pearly gates and golden streets, but about the vast expanses of the universe. The reason there is a difference in the two translations is that translation work involves far more than looking up Hebrew words in a Hebrew/English dictionary and finding their English equivalents.

In this case, although the words themselves are among the first learned by beginning Hebrew students, Genesis 1:1 uses them in a figure of speech.

Scholars call it hendiadys (hen-DIE-a-dees). In hendiadys a writer will use two words, linked by the conjunction and, to convey a single concept. Flesh and blood is a good example of hendiadys. When we speak of flesh and blood we usually mean natural, material, human life, as opposed to supernatural, immaterial, or non-human.

The KJV translators rendered Matthew 18:17, “Blessed art thou, Simon-Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my father which is in heaven.” If we read the same verse in the NIV, we see that the translators recognized the figure of speech and translated it using the single word man.

Both translations are accurate, although in this instance I prefer the King James because it retains the figure of speech Jesus used to make his statement more colorful and memorable. That’s what figures of speech are for. In reducing the hendiadys to its ultimate meaning, the NIV translators were accurate but they robbed Jesus’ statement of its poetry.

Understanding Genesis 1:1 as an example of hendiadys yields the meaning: “In the beginning God made everything that is, without exception.” Moses opened the recorded revelation of God’s activity with the magisterial pronouncement, so vital in the polytheistic world of ancient Israel, that nothing existed without the creative Word of God. To today’s non-theistic world it says that God’s creative act included everything the eye of humanity could see and the mind of humanity could imagine. Every new scientific discovery has already been explained as merely another fragment of God’s handiwork.

THE GREEKS HAD A PARTICIPLE FOR IT

No one who has struggled with the first year of a language will ever forget the frustration of translating every word in an exercise perfectly, according to the dictionary, learning exactly what every word meant, and coming up with a sentence that might have been composed by an orangutan pounding on a typewriter with a ball-peen hammer. As slippery as the meaning of words can be, however, understanding their meaning is the easiest part of translation. Words are only the building blocks of language. Without the mortar of grammar to hold them together, they have about as much meaning as the barking of dogs or the cackling of chickens.

Knowing how difficult it is to translate words directly from Hebrew to English, think how much more difficult it is to translate the grammar of Greek or Hebrew into English. In Hebrew, for example, there are not tenses as we think of them in English. Struggle with that for a minute. Hebrew tenses have more to do with kinds of action than time. Hebrew verbs are concerned with such questions as:

Is an act completed?

Is it ongoing?

Is it intensified or turned back on the one who did it?

So how do we get Hebrew verbs into English, where sense of time is so important?

The two Hebrew “tenses” are called “perfect” and “imperfect.” The Hebrew perfect tense is usually translated into the English past or perfect tenses. It isn’t always precise, but it gets the job done. What it really tells us is that an action has already been completed in the past, or is so certain that it can be spoken of as complete even though it won’t actually take place until some time in the future.

Prophets used the perfect tense in this latter sense, so it’s called the “prophetic perfect.” An event can be far in the future from the perspective of the prophet, but since the act is promised by God it can be spoken of as if it had already happened. The time sense of the tense is past, but the action is still future.

When God promised Abraham, “To your descendants I give this land” (Genesis 15:18), He spoke in the perfect tense. Even though He spoke to Abraham 600 to 800 years before the promise was fulfilled, it could be spoken of as a fact of human history because it was already accomplished in the mind of God.

Translation is an incredibly complicated process. That beloved phrase of some preachers, “If you could only read it in the original language …,” contains a kernel of truth. (Most of us preachers can’t actually read it in the original language, either, but we like our congregations to think we can!) But if we can’t read it in the original language, we’ll never actually read it “the way it’s written.”

OF THE MAKING OF TRANSLATIONS THERE IS NO END

As difficult as translation is, however, godly scholars through the ages have labored diligently to bring the Word of God to His people in languages they can read and understand. Even before the time of Jesus, devout Jews in Alexandria had translated the Old Testament into Greek for the growing number of people who no longer spoke, or read, Hebrew. The Roman scholar Jerome rendered the Greek and Hebrew into the Latin of the common people in the fourth century A.D. Wycliffe and Tyndale performed the same service for the English-speaking world. The German translation of Martin Luther has held the same place of honor among German speakers as the Authorized, or King James Version has among English speakers.

Through the work of translators on the committees that gave us the New American Standard Bible, the New King James Version, Today’s English Version (Good News Bible), and the New International Version, believers today have access to God’s revelation in language they can understand and trust. Beyond our English-speaking world, numerous Bible Societies, teams of Bible translators, and men and women from a multitude of mission boards strive to reduce non-written languages to written forms so that residents of the Third World can also read the words of God.

In many ways, the process of Bible translation testifies to one of God’s great, on-going miracles. He not only inspired Scripture, but He continues to oversee the faithful transmission of His Word. An infallible original would be of little value if the copy we read is riddled with error. Our Bibles are so faithfully preserved that we can read our English translations with nearly the same confidence and reverence as the first century church read its personal letters from the apostles. No important doctrine or teaching of Scripture is subject to question because of the problems with translation that I’ve mentioned earlier. The ideas that God taught His prophets and apostles are accessible to us today, even though we are sometimes unable to fine-tune our interpretation the way we’d like.

Problems in interpretation usually arise out of isolated passages dealing with obscure issues. When it comes to knowing how to be saved, how to live the Christian life, or what God requires of us, we need have no doubts about the reliability of our Bibles.

Think of it! God’s self-revelation took place over thousands of years, to people who spoke at least three different languages, and lived lives as foreign to us as the lives of an Afghan nomad or a Vietnamese rice farmer. Yet we and others from all over the world can read that revelation, learn from it, grow by it, and meet the God whose book it is!

LITTLE PIECES OF KITTY, AND OTHER MYSTERIES

The problems in translation aren’t all on the side of biblical languages. The English language also places a barrier between us and the Bible. The language we speak both shapes and limits our understanding. We interpret the unfamiliar in terms of what we already know.

When my wife was about two and one-half years of age she was introduced to her first litter of kittens. Peering into the box and seeing those tiny, squirming creatures, she exclaimed, “Look, Mommy! Little pieces of kitty!”

No one today, including my wife, knows exactly what reasoning process was going on in her young mind. Perhaps she thought someone very naughty had dropped the cat and it had shattered into “little pieces of kitty.”

The sayings of children, filtered as they are through such limited experiences, are filled with examples like this. To understand sights, experiences, and ideas far beyond their powers of comprehension children translate them into terms of their familiar world. We find their statements amusing and adorable. We treasure them because they outgrow that sort of thing so quickly. Or do they?

In the late 60’s or early 70’s some ingenious graphic artist devised that maddening bumper sticker that said JESUS in large white, block letters on a black background. It sounded straightforward, but it was a visual riddle. The artist ran his white letters to the limit of the page, eliminating their outer edges. To read block letters, our minds depend on those dark borders. Without them, we are forced to interpret the word from outside our usual experience.

Almost everyone I knew tried to find letters in the black shapes because experience teaches us that letters are printed black on white. That led quickly to frustration. Only after we learned to read the white spaces and allow the black to recede into the background did the name of Jesus become visible.

We can almost hear Him saying, “If you have eyes to see, then see.”

Our problem was perceptual. We were not used to seeing letters presented that way and our minds refused to process the otherwise obvious information. Even today, knowing what the sign says, I have to struggle when I see it to make my mind overcome the conventions it’s used to working with.

This illustrates, in a trivial way, a problem that sometimes obscures our understanding of Scripture. Our known world limits our abilities to understand what is unknown. Our use of language is one of the most subtle forces at work in shaping our perceptions.

In recent works on decision making, its effect would be called “framing.” We “frame” an issue when we start out with assumptions of what can and can’t be. Because we think in words, we will usually perceive reality in forms for which our language has words and ignore realities for which we have no language.

Because words are arbitrary symbols, they take on whatever meaning we give them. For instance, near Wausau, Wisconsin, stands a hill named “Rib Mountain.” To people from Colorado, the word mountain conjures up images of the majestic Rockies, so they would laugh at Rib Mountain. It rises out of the north woods to the lofty height of 1,950 feet. It’s not Mount McKinley, or even Long’s Peak, but for those who live in the flatlands of northern Wisconsin, it’s the closest thing to a mountain they’ve got.

One of my favorite students was a bright young woman who’d come from Hawaii to attend school among God’s frozen people. After the first mild snow fall in November, I asked her how she liked it. She’d never seen snow before and thought it was beautiful and fun.

The following spring, after five months of living the semi-snowbound life of a Minnesotan, I asked her whether or not she still thought winter was fun. As I’d expected, the fun had worn pretty thin by that time.

Prior to her experience, how could I have explained adequately to Vicki what living through that winter would be like? She had never even seen frost, let alone 19 inches of snow in one day.

I had a seminary classmate from Nagaland, India. He had grown up in a village that probably hadn’t changed much in hundreds of years. One day shortly before we graduated and he returned to minister among his people, I invited him to speak at the church I was working in. On the way home we stopped at a fried chicken place for lunch. As we ate, he began to laugh, thinking about the problem he’d have explaining Colonel Sanders to his people. In his village, if you wanted a chicken dinner you first had to catch the chicken. Depending on the comparative athletic abilities of the catcher and the catchee, that procedure alone might take longer than it took us to order, eat, wash our hands on the packaged towelettes, and leave. He finally decided it would be better not to mention it because they’d never believe him.

People from his village might understand “chicken dinner,” but there was no way to convey the image of a red-and-white striped box filled with pre-caught, pre-killed, pre-cleaned, pre-cooked chicken.

The Bible often presents us with similar perception problems. Psalm 1 was written from the semi-arid climate of southern Palestine. In most of that country, wild trees are rare. Yearly rainfall barely supports scrub vegetation, and in some places the deserts are as desolate as any in the world.

When the psalmist wrote of “a tree planted by the streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither,” he knew that trees growing away from the steady water supply of canal, river, or oasis were doomed to fruitlessness, if not death. When the burning desert winds blew from the east, the trees whose roots had no constant source of water, withered, lost their leaves, and struggled to survive.

Readers from the American southwest understand the power of that image better than I do. As I look out my dining room window at a grove of trees in their spring foliage, I have to struggle to see trees as the psalmist saw them.

When the woman with the issue of blood touched the hem of Jesus’ robe, Jesus said, “I perceive that virtue is gone out of me” (Luke 8:46, KJV). Today, virtue is a feminine word, often a synonym for chastity. Generations of preachers have struggled to make sense of what it meant for Jesus to lose virtue. But virtue had a different meaning in Elizabethan England when the KJV was translated. The word in the Greek text was dunamis (DUNE-a-miss), and it meant power. How different the verse is in the NIV, where we hear Jesus saying, “Power has gone out of me.”

What meaning fills our mind when we read the word church in Scripture? Biblically, it never refers to a building, nor to an organization. Yet in our world confusion exists between the building, the organizational structure, and the true church. To avoid this damaging confusion the Pilgrims, when they landed in Plymouth in 1620, built a “meeting house,” not a church. They understood, as the writers of the New Testament had, that they themselves were the church. Now, after centuries of intermingling meanings, the word needs to be qualified very carefully to avoid confusion.

Even when dealing with words in our own language, the meanings intended by the translator and the meaning our background has taught us may not be the same.

How loaded with meanings words can be! Whether Greek or German, Hebrew or English, they all carry burdens of meaning far beyond our casual understanding. The fullness of language is a great gift, but when it comes to precise understanding of Scripture, it can be a great stumbling block in the way of “reading it the way it’s written.”

David E. O’Brien, Today’s Handbook for Solving Bible Difficulties (Minneapolis, MN: David E. O’Brien, 1990), 111–119.

Schism

schism

John 7:43

So there was a division among the people because of him. 

John 9:16

Therefore said some of the Pharisees, This man is not of God, because he keepeth not the sabbath day. Others said, How can a man that is a sinner do such miracles? And there was a division among them. 

John 10:19

There was a division therefore again among the Jews for these sayings. 

1 Corinthians 1:10

Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. 

1 Corinthians 11:18

For first of all, when ye come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you; and I partly believe it. 

1 Corinthians 12:25

That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. 

SCHISM

SCHISM

The Greek word schisma literally denotes a rent, or cleft (cf. Matt. 9:16; Mark 2:21); hence metaphorically, discord or division (John 7:43; 9:16; 10:19). This is its meaning in 1 Cor. 1:10; 11:18; 12:25.

1 Corinthians 12:25 is vital to a proper understanding of a schism: “That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another.” Thus, schism is a rending of the body of Christ. It is a sin that exhibits a carelessness about the welfare of the body in general and its other members in particular. It is a sin against charity, a selfish introduction of dissention and division where there ought to be mutual tolerance and love.

This distinguishes schism from scriptural separation.* Scripturally, heretics (see Heresy) must be rejected (Titus 3:10) for they are schismatics from the body of true believers, having followed a self-willed opinion in preference to God’s revealed truth. Thus, separation from a communion on the grounds of the purity of fundamental Christian doctrine is not schism. For example, Calvin argued that the scriptural marks of a true church are the preaching of the pure gospel and the valid administration of the sacraments. Rome did not maintain these basic marks of a true church. Therefore, in separating from her the Reformers were not guilty of schism. Rome was the party, or sect, guilty of schism, for she had departed from the faith of the gospel.

The same argument holds good today. In an age when ecumenism is rampant, those who stand for Biblical separation are denounced as schismatics and are frequently likened to such sects as the Donatists.* But no Christian can deny that the ecumenical movement progresses by compromising the essentials of the gospel. Christians should therefore separate from ecumenical churches. The same goes for churches where modernism* and liberalism* dominate.

It is not right to remain in such fellowships merely because they nominally retain their ancient confessional standards. The argument is frequently put, for example, that while a Presbyterian church retains the Westminster Standards, it would be schism to separate from it. However, when the Reformers separated from Rome, she avowed her acceptance of the ancient creeds of the church. But that did not make her a pure church. It merely denoted the fact that lying and falsehood were added to her other impurities. Calvin said, “If the Church is ‘the pillar and ground of truth’ (1 Tim. 3:15), it is certain that there is no church where lying and falsehood have usurped the ascendancy.” If that was true of Rome with her professed acceptance of the ancient creeds of the church, it is no less true of those once Protestant churches that are seeking reunion with an unrepentant Rome, or are open to all great doctrinal impurity.

To sum up: schism is an expression of self-will or of heresy that leads to the setting up of sects—any group that is built on heresy is a schism from the body of Christ. Separation is on Biblical grounds, is commanded by the Lord (Eph. 5:11; 2 Cor. 6:14–18; 1 Tim. 6:3–5), and aims at maintaining essential Christian doctrine and practice.

Alan Cairns, Dictionary of Theological Terms (Belfast; Greenville, SC: Ambassador Emerald International, 2002), 404–405.

Flee Schism

Calvin, who saw that the Devil's chief device was disunity and division and who preached that there should be friendly fellowship for all ministers of Christ, made a similar point in a letter to a trusted colleague: "Among Christians there ought to be so great a dislike of schism, as that they may always avoid it so fast as lies in their power. That there ought to prevail among them such a reverence for the ministry of the word and the sacraments that wherever they perceive these things to be, there they must consider the church to exist...nor need it be of any hindrance that some points of doctrine are not quite so pure, seeing that there is scarcely any church which has not retained some remnants of former ignorance." 

Charles W. Colson, The Body, 1992, Word Publishing, p. 107-108.

Unity

Unity of body

The Greek word schismata (English, “schism”) is used. There were factions within the church. Paul is calling for harmony.

Unity of mindset

                                                    

They were told to think the same attitude and opinion; to have the mind of Christ (Phil 2:3-8). The word katartizo, “to join together,” was used by the Greeks for “the setting of broken bones and for reconciling political factions.” [Robert G. Gromacki, Called to be Saints (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1977), 10.]. In Matt 4:21, it is used for the mending of fishing nets.

Far Eastern Bible College/Lecture Notes/1 Corinthians/Dr Jeffrey Khoo

1 Co 12:25

Paul said these words regarding divisions in Corinthian Church.

"For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified." 


(1 Co 2:2)


"That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another." 

(1 Co 12:25)

"There is such a thing as sinful schism. Schism, as defined by Calvin, is sin ... But to separate because of established apostasy is lawful and honoring to Christ."

(Mcintire)

     

The Sword is the Word of God

Ephesians 6:10–17 NKJV

Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God;

Transformed