Which Biblical scriptures are we reading incorrectly?

Okay.

Hello. Hello, James. How are you?

Good, Cassian. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I'm really excited to talk about our topic today about translations. How are you doing?

I'm doing well.

I'm excited about this as well. I've been thinking about the original languages and translation and even interpretation issues for quite some time.

Okay.

Yeah.

And you're a professor. I'd love to just let you introduce yourself and the work that you're doing currently in Ohio.

Yes.

So, I'm a professor of biblical languages. I teach courses at several institutions right now. I'm under contract for an institution called Israel Institute of Biblical Studies. And for them, I teach Hebrew and Greek.

I'm also on contract to teach Greek at a school called God's Bible School and College. And I'm teaching master's level courses there. My background is in both Hebrew and Greek. And along with that, the different languages that help us understand something about rare words in Greek and Hebrew.

Wow.

Would you say that you're fluent in Greek and Hebrew then?

We define fluency of ancient languages a little differently than how modern languages get defined as fluent. For example, in a modern language, you're fluent if you can carry on a conversation and read the most recent novels produced in that language.

Not technical books, but a regular reading level. For biblical languages, fluency is defined as being able to read the text and interpret their meaning. Being able to speak and hear someone else speak in the ancient language is not really tested for the most part.

There are a few institutions that work on something called immersion in biblical languages that attempt this. But generally, fluency is described as being able to read and interpret. And I do that.

Got it. Got it.

So I shouldn't call you when I need to order food in Greece, but definitely to interpret the original text of the Bible.

I can get by. I can get by, but I wouldn't consider myself fluent in modern Greek at all. I can read some. I can speak some. But it's slow.

Okay.

Got it.

And do you have any areas of specific interest when it comes to translations of the Bible? Like any personal favorites when it comes to books of the Bible or just things that you think are the most profound things to translate and just more thorough meaning when you do translate it?

I get excited sometimes. I wouldn't say there's a particular place in the Bible that I like to translate from. I like to translate any of it that I happen to be reading for whatever reason. If I feel like reading something in the Bible, I might look at it in English first.

I might not. I might go straight to the Greek or Hebrew first and read it there. And then if something sparks my interest, then I'll do research in that area.

Got it.

Translating, the things that I notice when I'm reading that sparks my interest is when I see something I know isn't the typical, most common way to express an idea. And I've been reading enough for enough years that I can spot these things.

When you see something that's unusual, that's when you jump and see how did the English translations handle that. And then you see them all over the place and then you know why. It was a place that was a little more challenging to translate.

But it also sometimes is a center of a theological debate. And those are my favorites.

Got it. Got it.

So there's sometimes translations where what it may be, if it's in Greek, it means something completely different. But if it's in Hebrew, it means something else.

Well, the ones I'm thinking of are the ones that are in Greek, but in our English versions, they mean a variety of different things instead of the same thing. One verse that comes to mind is Romans 5 .12.

When we read how our English Bibles handle that one, they're all over the place, especially if you take a look at older and newer Bibles. If you look at the latest five translations off the shelf, they're almost saying the same thing.

But if you look at the history of the English Bible, go back 400 years and work your way forward through a lot of translations, you can see that the translators were making a lot of different choices there.

And the key word, I would say, in Romans 5 .12 is the one just before all sinned at the end of the line. I can read that verse if you like.

Please.

I'll read it out of the ESV. That's a fairly recent translation. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because, and that's the key word I want you to think about, because all sinned.

It almost reads like there's a cause and effect going on here in this verse. And if you look at your latest three English translations, they all say that. In fact, there's probably half of all English translations that say because there.

If you look at some older translations, in so much that all sinned, in whom all sinned, in who all sinned, for that all sinned, and that's probably the clumsiest one, but you know that the translators are wrestling with something if they put a clumsy construction in there that doesn't sound very smooth in English.

They don't want to go to cause. They don't want to go to in whom, but they can't decide what to do. And that was the King James that went with for that all have sinned, which is a really odd construction, even in Shakespeare's day, which was the time that was translated.

What the issue is, is because is normally written a completely different way in Greek. It's not written the way the Greek is here. We have a little preposition there that's pronounced F, but it's an adaptation of epi.

And epi normally means on or upon. So neither one of those translations sounded like on or upon. Because doesn't sound like on or upon, and neither does in whom. And so it's one of those things that once you see the phrase that's there in Greek, it's like, well, I can see why the translators are going different ways, but none of them landed on the most natural reading of that preposition.

The most natural reading for that preposition is to say on the basis of which. In other words, there's just a pattern here. Human beings sin on the same pattern that Adam sinned. It's not that Adam's sin caused people to sin, and it's not that some other force that Adam brings in caused people to sin.

People just simply sin on the same pattern that Adam did.

I'm so glad you spelled that out, because I was trying to remember all of the translations and find the connection. But yeah, I mean, I definitely grew up thinking, you know, because Adam and Eve sinned, that's why we sin.

They kind of set the precedent. They set the standard. But that is way more humanizing for the Bible to say, listen, they were human too. You're human too. It's what's going to happen. You guys are very sinful creatures.

And I think if we just read that text naturally and let the words that are there do the speaking rather than theological concerns, which is where I think our translators have gone. They've reached out to theological concerns about original sin.

And these original sin debates get very, very particular at times on exactly how did it go from Adam to us. And a lot of times this verse is the key text, and we're looking at this epipreposition that is actually simple to translate, but none of our English translations translate it the simple way.

On the basis of which we all sin. It's actually natural read, and it actually flows naturally here with what Paul's doing in Romans 5.

What do you mean by theological concerns? Are you saying that when people translated the Bible, they wanted to, I want to say, stick to an agenda? Or is that what you're trying to allude to here? People just didn't want to make any presumptions beyond what they're...

I don't know. I don't want to say anything that might be assuming, but what do you mean by concerns?

The English translation doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? It happens in the middle of the Protestant Reformation. During phases of it, different English translations that come out are in different phases of the Protestant Reformation.

There's these debates that are going on that are forming the way that they're reading the Greek text. Now, some of these debates go all the way back to Augustine. Augustine was a church father, lived in and around the year 400, a famous writer, famous theologian, but he also had some things to say about Romans 5 .12 that I think have been impacting the later generation's understanding of that phrase.

He was a bishop that lived in what we'd think of as Carthage. It was the Carthaginian empire that was now part of the Roman empire. That's where he was from.

I'm sorry, I don't know what that is.

Sure, no worries. Modern day. Tunisia, a North African shoreline. It's the closest part of Africa to Sicily.

Oh, okay.

That was a time period, or that was more location, or that was a ruling era?

Carthage is a place. It was the place that Tunisia used to be called. Inside that, the period of the 400, that was the time Augustine lived, that's about the same period that the New Testament canonization was taking place.

He is in the debates on that as it's forming. He's one of the guys that's there then when that happens.

Right. I mean, it makes perfectly good sense why at the time period at which the Bible was translated, the current group thought of that time period would be definitely inserted within those translations and just the directions that it takes.

Can we go back to the written, the God-breathed word, and then to the first writing of the Bible on paper or a tablet, carved into stone, and then from there, the translation? Just historically speaking, how did that process go?

Who was designated to begin writing it, and then who was decided to begin translating.

It?

Because that's a huge role that can't just be any Joe Schmo.

Right.

So the first person that we know of that's actually writing Scripture down is Moses. And he lived, oh, 3 ,500 years ago.

Okay.

And he was writing on papyrus or a tablet, or he had a slave taking notes. How did that probably go?

We don't know. We do know that some things got wrote on stone, so scratched into stones, like the Ten Commandments, for example. But other things were written down that we weren't told exactly how they're written down.

But we can surmise that desert antelope hide was probably what they wrote on, and they probably used an ink for most writing. Yeah. That was at least traditionally what we know happens later. But in actually Moses' day, we're a little fuzzy on the details of when he wrote.

Okay.

The only thing we know is that he wrote five books, and they came down through history as five individual scrolls and sometimes as one combined scroll that we call the Torah.

Scroll.

Got it.

So that is the way the first writing took place. Now, when he writes, though, only four of the five books happen in his lifetime. The first book is way before his time period. So he's going back to recount a lot of things that took place before he was alive, before the kingdom that he's a part of was a kingdom.

And so it has always raised conjectures as to where did he get his footnotes from? Because we don't know. We're not told. There's never a statement that, oh, by the way, Moses got it from here. And another assumption that we sometimes make is that, oh, a voice out of heaven just said the words and he wrote them down.

But it never says that either. There are places in the Bible where it says God spoke and the prophet wrote, but we don't get that for Genesis when Moses writes. And one of the things I always tried to emphasize when I was teaching an intro to Bible or intro to Scripture, that God got his message down to mankind a wide range of ways.

It wasn't just one standard way. Somebody heard a voice saying, write this down, they wrote it down. Somebody else had a dream, woke up and said, well, that was divine. I better write that down. Somebody else lived a chunk of life and then they reflected on it and said, wait a minute, God's hand was at work in my life.

I better write this down.

Yeah.

Do you think, like, just thinking about the Gospels, do you think, like, John and all of them were hanging out with Jesus and then also scribbling down notes at the same time? Or do you think they lived their full life and then looked back and started writing things.

Down?

That's a good question. And when we get to the four Gospels, we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew was the tax collector that was one of Jesus's disciples. He was located around Tyre, Sidon area.

It's a north of, it's basically on the coast of Lebanon. It was part of the old Phoenician, it was the old Phoenician capital. It was no longer an empire, but that was their capital city. That's where he was found.

A lot of the other disciples of Jesus were found in the fishing industry on Lake Gennesaret. That was their place where they did fishing. Peter, James, John, Andrew, Nathaniel, and several others. We don't know the precise location of all of his disciples, but Mark is kind of like not one of them.

So who is he and why did he write? Well, in the Church Fathers, we find a tradition that it was Peter's voice, but Mark was writing it down for Peter. And it was written before Peter dies, so it makes sense that it's Peter's words, but Mark's penmanship.

Why do you think Mark wrote about Peter and not himself?

Well, he wrote the Gospel that Peter wanted written. That's so Mark probably wasn't in contact with Jesus, like personally, but he wanted to write Peter's Gospel for Peter. And so we probably should be calling it the Gospel of Peter instead of Mark, but it is Mark's handiwork.

He wrote it, so we want to give credit to the author of the words that are actually on the page. But it's probably a good thing that Mark wrote it, honestly. Peter was not a good grammar guy. He had a lot of problems.

If you ever look at 1 Peter and 2 Peter in Greek, you'll see the difference in the style and the vocabulary, the grammar, and you'll realize that you're thankful that there was a scribe writing one of them.

Are you saying 1 Peter was written by Peter and 2 Peter was written by somebody else?

It's the other way around, I think. Yeah, 2 Peter's the rough one to read.

Got it, got it.

So it's probably a good thing that Mark wrote for him and probably why he wanted somebody like Mark to write it for him. He probably wasn't a strong person with Greek. Where he was located, it wasn't necessary to know Greek.

So he was in an area that spoke Aramaic, where some of Jesus' disciples were in an area that spoke Greek, like Matthew. Luke, on the other hand, would have not met Jesus, probably. But in his day, he's concerned that there's a bunch of different accounts going out about Jesus that's causing confusion.

So he's a journalist. He wants to get the record right and set into detail the right chronology of events so that it can be understood as a comprehensive whole. Instead of this story and this story butting heads and we don't know how to put them together or one story conflicts with another because we think they're at the same time, but really they're a year apart and that kind of thing.

So he tried to create a comprehensive understanding. And probably his biggest contribution was personally interviewing Mary. He got the scoop on the before-Jesus-was-born stories and the after-Jesus-died stories from.

Mary.

What was it like for her? Wouldn't have Jesus' disciples also gotten the scoop on that? Like, why did Luke get that?

I think they could have. They just don't. In their Gospels, they don't present Mary's perspective the way Luke does. And so Luke, as a journalist, he wanted to go... If you think about how modern journalism is done, it's similar.

He wanted to go to the source. Jesus has gone to heaven now, so let me find the closest person to Jesus.

Mary.

She's still alive. Let's talk to Mary. And he gets some scoop on stuff that probably the other disciples know, but it wasn't what they witnessed. So they didn't write it down. Luke isn't trying to write what he witnessed.

He's trying to write an orderly account of what several witnesses have seen. A comprehensive, multi-witness account.

Oh my gosh.

That is such good insight.

I had no idea. So that's the only book written that way?

Yeah.

Luke's Gospel is the only one in the New Testament written that way.

Very interesting.

Other philosophers would have written similar things about the lives of other famous people. So in Greco-Roman literature, the life of so-and-so kind of stories, they would do similar things. They would try to get to a close source, try to provide detail that wasn't available in other places because they want their version of the biography to be accepted and useful, probably more so than acceptance.

I have a quick question.

Yeah, go ahead.

I'll ask it after Luke. It's going to take us on a different path. So you just keep going about Luke. I'm sorry.

Oh, no worries. No worries. When I think of Luke, I think of somebody who was a physician in his day. So whatever version of medical school the first century would have had, he would have been to it. And the style of his Greek writing in Luke reminds me of classical Greek more than other New Testament documents.

I tend to think he was trained in Athens. That was the number one medical school of the ancient world, especially the Greco-Roman world. And it was also the place that still used and wrote materials in a classical feel using the old Attic rules of grammar rather than the Koine period.

And Luke does this in places. Your other writers don't do that as much as Luke. Paul does it a little bit. John, Mark, Matthew, no, not a chance. They're using standard Koine Greek. And so when we think of Luke, he was a trained expert in something in his world, a highly trained expert who decided to create a more orderly account.

What was disordered? When we look at the other Gospels, we don't necessarily find them disordered. But the order of events is different in Matthew, for example, than Luke. And it's caused a lot of commentators to wonder about this.

But if we notice how Matthew groups the stories, he's grouping the stories of Jesus into five topics. He never says they're chronological. Well, so it's always been. We've always read it with the assumption that chapter six happens after chapter five, and that's the Sermon on the Mount.

So they probably do, but like chapter eight happens after seven or chapter 13 happens after six. And we can't make that assumption. The Matthew tends to have a five, fivefold pattern where he groups all of his thoughts about Jesus's ministry.

And those are identical. They match up very neatly with the five books of Moses. We mentioned Moses earlier. Matthew is trying to pattern Jesus as a new Moses. And so these five sections merge. And if we're not paying attention to those patterns, then we misread sometimes the flow in Matthew.

And we say wrong things about why Matthew's different than Luke. They're not different because one of them had the facts and the other one has all its facts mixed up. They're different because Matthew groups the stories of Jesus according to five themes, and Luke puts them in chronological order.

This is insane. It's so many things that are going on right now because there is, you know, the people that experienced Jesus in real life writing down their experience or covering his story. And then there is the people that translated it according to kind of their socio-political time period.

You know, the way that they translated it for St. Augustine versus if they translated it today in President Biden's world, you know, it's going to be a completely different path, I want to say. And then there is just the multiple translations and the way that it's getting interpreted in different religions and different types of Christianity, not religions, but Protestant versus, you know, non-denominational or Catholic.

So all of these factors are so interesting because they all come down to, you know, how do you experience Christ? The question that I had earlier, that was just my own comment. The question that I had earlier was, do you, the scrolls found in the cave?

Oh, yes.

Where does that come into play here?

Yes, yes. So the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the Qumran area, pretty near where Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River, pretty near where the Israelites crossed over from the wilderness into the Canaan land, the big crossing over under Joshua.

So both of those events take place at the same spot. And I don't think it's accidental that Jesus' baptism is in that same spot. A lot of times, this is something I'll probably say more than once, a lot of times our New Testament experts have only been reading New Testament and they haven't looked at the Old Testament to see how they're connected.

Hmm.

And so when Jesus is doing things in the New Testament, they often have something that they're parallel to in the Hebrew Bible. And these are the things that I like to bring out with the Jewishness of the New Testament and the things that your typical Western mindset on the New Testament overlooks or misses.

Yeah, let's jump into it.

So thinking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, they were a big find. A shepherd boy throws a rock in a cave and hears something shatter, decides to see what it is, comes across and finds the first scroll that would later become called the Dead Sea Scrolls.

There was more than one cave there. Once people realized that there's more of these things in the caves and they didn't want these things to just end up in a marketplace somewhere being sold as a trinket.

They wanted them to be preserved and studied and not dissected, cut into pieces and sold as trinkets for your jewelry or something. And so scholars went and tried to recover these things, preserve them to the best they knew how.

The earliest people there didn't use the best methods. For example, one manuscript I'm aware of was held together with scotch tape. They put scotch tape on it to hold the pieces together and that actually ruined later the ink that was under the scotch tape.

But it was a growing field. How to preserve ancient texts that are fragile grew from the 1950s to what we now see. When I went over to the Manchester Library Scriptorium, things are under vacuum sealed glass and you've got to wear white gloves.

You can't use certain kinds of light around the manuscripts and that would be standard for any place that's storing old manuscripts. I think in the Smithsonian we also have some old manuscripts as well that are preserved there.

I think University of Michigan also has some. There's a lot in Jerusalem. There's a lot in Oxford and Cambridge and there's various places that have old manuscripts. But these Dead Sea Scrolls are interesting because we found some things in Hebrew, some things in Greek, some things in Aramaic, and it gave us a picture of what's been happening to the text in different points of time.

For example, when we translate today the Hebrew Bible into English, for example, we use something called, well most translation committees are going to use the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and that's produced in Tübingen, Germany.

It's the Bible in Hebrew based on what we call the Masoretic Text. The oldest, it's just a name for the Masoretic. It's the name for the Hebrew scrolls that are actually being used. For a typical thing, a way to say it is this is what the Jewish communities received in their Jewish communities as they were scattered around the world.

This is what came to them in their hands. We might call it a received text because that's what it is. The oldest manuscripts we can find that are definitely what we would call Proto-Masoretic Text or Proto-those received texts that are in these communities are not extremely old.

A thousand, A .D. 1000 or A .D. 900 is the oldest ones and these are way after the time of the New Testament. Well, and that's a little concerning because it's like, how do we know that for the previous thousand years, the text was always the same?

That was an issue.

That's a great point.

And a lot of people conjectured and debated a few things about the text. And we might have time on this call. I don't know, but there's one that I discovered that I wouldn't mind sharing in the text of Samuel.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

But the search was to find older, if possible, older Hebrew manuscripts. And we had Greek ones of the Old Testament that were older. So, for example, talking about translation, about a hundred, two hundred years before Christ, the scribes, the Jewish scribes in Alexandria, Egypt, were commissioned by the Ptolemy king, one of the four breakaway Greek empires when the Alexander the Great's empire went four ways.

So under that king, he commissioned the Jewish scribes to translate the Jewish Hebrew Bible into Greek. This was about 200 years or maybe a little more before Jesus's birth. And then this fresh translation, and for the lack of a better term, we'll call it the Septuagint.

That's the term we call it today. They probably did not call it that back in their day. But the Septuagint.

What is a Septuagint?

A Septuagint is, it means the number 70 in Greek. It's just like calling it the 70 in English, if we want to do it.

So this is like the 70th version? Or why did they say 70 of all the numbers?

So the tradition has it that when the Torah scroll, that's Moses's first five books, was being translated, the committee of translators was 70.

70 people.

70 people worked on it.

And how were those 70 chosen?

They were already Jewish Torah scribes. That was their expertise. They were fluent in Greek, fluent in Hebrew, and they would be the kind of person that if you saw them in the marketplace and you had plenty of time and you paid them enough money, they could produce for you a manuscript of the Torah from memory.

Oh my gosh.

This was during Egyptian times under King Ptolemy.

Yes, in the Egyptian sphere of the world and under the Ptolemies, the Greek Ptolemies.

Before Jesus was born.

Yeah, yeah. A couple hundred years before. We don't have an exact date. We have some conjectures about that date that are all landing somewhere around 200, 250, something like that. And the other thing is, is they didn't stop there.

They translated the Torah and then they kept going and translated the rest of the Hebrew Bible. And we don't know how many people worked on the rest, but the whole thing is still called the Septuagint because the 70 translated the Torah.

That's why the name.

Got it.

When going back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, they found multiple scripts in multiple languages. What does that suggest?

That suggests that the community was already doing translating work, making sure they could translate the Hebrew text into Greek and into Aramaic for people that didn't speak Hebrew.

So you're saying the script, the scrolls were all the same text, just different translations, or are you saying that, because I guess I assumed that one scroll was written by Peter and another was written by Moses and we just happened to stumble upon the original text.

But that doesn't sound like that's correct.

These would be all scrolls that were copied from other texts that this community kept. So think about a manuscript collector culture who collects manuscripts from all over and they want to make sure they have a copy in their scriptorium of every manuscript that's out there.

And then they may make copies for people who need it too. But they were involved in some translation work, some what I would call that collector mode, just trying to preserve scripts.

Okay, so we found somebody's stash, essentially.

Yeah, we found a community's or maybe more than one community's stash. There's also some thought that when the Jewish-Roman War happens in 66 to 73, that a lot of people would have been fleeing the destruction of that period.

They may have also contributed scrolls into these collections. But we don't know for a fact on any one scroll if that was the case. But it's at least a possible thing.

Yeah, you'd never think. If you were fleeing war, the first thing you would do is to preserve some paper.

You know what I mean?

That just shows the value of that at that time, that you're basically seeking asylum and your first thought is, I need to preserve not some of my artifacts or my family heritage, but the written word of God that is so important to me right now.

And that's true.

And one of the big finds in the Dead Sea Scrolls was something we call the Great Scroll of Isaiah. And it flows from what we can read on it. There's a couple places where it's got some damage, but it's still fairly complete.

I would say it's the most complete scroll from that time period. And it matches the Masoretic text of the 900s. So now we see a document that's 1 ,100 years older than what we thought was our oldest one that's agreeing with it in most respects.

Yeah, that was the big find. Now for Isaiah, that's been great. Yeah, the same story can't be said of all books, but for Isaiah, that's great. For Torah, that's great. We found Torah copies that agree with the Masoretic text.

For some books, we find three different traditions of Hebrew text. They're not the same text on the Hebrew. I'm not talking about Aramaic translations or Greek translations. I'm talking about the actual Hebrew manuscript.

And so the scholars that have looked at the manuscripts that are different have grouped them and thought about three basic text families for them. Babylon, for example, is the place of the Judah kingdom's exile, and then they return later.

Some of these are called Babylonian texts because they went to Babylon and back. And the Babylonian text tradition matches what we think of as the Proto-Masoretic text, the one that is received into the Jewish communities of the diaspora.

But there's two other text families that are not on that track. They're not from the Babylonian exile and back. Because you have to remember, when a nation goes through hardship and people are carried off and exiles happen, not everybody travels on the same path.

Some people scatter ahead of the invasion. Other people are still around after the invasion's over and wondering what to do. They just go move somewhere comfortable. So you had a bunch that are carried into Babylon that later return and rebelled.

You also have some that just scattered north to wherever they could find a place. And then you had some that went down to Egypt. I don't think it's an accident that the Septuagint was translated in Egypt.

The communities of Jews that would have went into Egypt would have been the forerunners of the ones who later do the translation into Greek. And in some of these Hebrew texts, we call them the Alexandrian family of Hebrew texts, because those have a bunch of similarity.

And it's amazing, in places where the Greek Septuagint reads a little bit differently than our standard Hebrew Bible does, it matches the Alexandrian Hebrew texts rather than the Babylonian ones. And this is kind of an eye-opener kind of thing in the last 40, 50 years.

It's like, oh, there's more than one Hebrew text tradition. And the Greek Septuagint Bible, in books outside of Torah and Isaiah, used a different text tradition than what is now in the Masoretic Bible.

Really interesting.

That all translators use. Like, if you're translating the newest English Bible, you're going to translate from the Masoretic text on the Hebrew text. But the Septuagint, in certain books, isn't coming from that text tradition.

It's coming from an Alexandrian Hebrew text tradition that we don't always have a full picture of. We just have some scraps. Some books here and there. So, for example, one of the test cases is Samuel.