#5 MISUNDERSTOOD BIBLICAL TEXTS AND MISINTERPRETED VERSES + Dr. James Sedlacek

The Podcast’s Purpose and the Guest’s Background

Hello, hello, welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion. Now I'm sharing these recorded conversations with you. On this podcast, we talk about the facts, the history, and the translations to make the Bible make sense so we can get to know God, our creator, better.

Hello, everybody.

You are listening to Biblically Speaking. I'm your host, Cassian Bellino, and I just wanted to welcome everybody here that's listening to this episode. We took a little bit of a break over the Thanksgiving break and no doubt going to probably take a break over the next holidays, but I'm trying to squeeze in as many episodes as I can as I get a hold of professors and PhDs and trying to get people to get scheduled on my calendar in the midst of this crazy holiday time.

I just appreciate everybody being patient and even though there was a gap, that you guys came back and kept listening. For those of you that are new to the podcast and maybe this is your first ever episode, I wanted to welcome you and say thank you for listening in.

Biblically Speaking was born out of me trying to just really understand God and the Bible on a more personal note. The way I wanted to do that was by learning the things that church couldn't teach me.

I wanted to personalize Jesus and imagine how he might be operating if he were to exist and be present. Obviously, he does exist, but be present in 2023 the way he was present during Jesus's living time.

So I am curious and I am confused. In order to get my questions answered, I don't sit down with church leaders per se, not always, but I target the PhDs and the theologian experts that can give me the historical, socioeconomic and political context of these Bible verses.

It's not really to disprove or prove the verses. I'm already coming into here believing that they're true, but it really is to add much more enrichment to the verses by understanding how, why, when, what vibe these verses were said in.

Things make much more sense when you understand why they were being said rather than just taking them for face value. In conversations such as the one today, I sit down with Dr. James Sedlicek and Dr. James Sedlicek is a teacher.

He's got his BA at God's Bible School and College. He's got his master's at Cincinnati Christian University, who my friend, Logan Hauer, shout out to Logan, referred him to me. So thank you so much for thinking of me when you met an expert.

If anybody else has somebody that they think would be perfect for letting me drill with questions, have no fear, slide into my DMs and let me know. I'd be happy to connect with them. Dr. Sedlicek also has a PhD with the Nazarene Theological College.

How Biblical Languages and Translation Work

And the goals of today's call are to understand translations. So we had a first version of the Bible. How did we get that data? Was it God breathed? Did God give it to somebody in a dream? Where did it come from?

Were people just writing down notes as they interacted with Jesus? We explore that. And then there's translations. Why are there multiple translations? At what point, who was doing the translations? How can we be sure that these translations are on point as to what actually happened?

The Bible has been translated multiple times. Are we understanding the original text thoroughly? We explore that. And then my most favorite topic that we dive into are the most common Bible verses that we interact with.

We hang on our fridge. We get tattooed. Are there Bible verses that maybe were translated into English that kind of miss the point of the original text? Are we fully understanding the Bible verses in their original form?

Since he is literally an expert in all these topics, James provides a comprehensive and extensive explanation on translations, how they're developed, and what the original text is trying to say. So you guys are in for a real treat.

This was probably one of the longest podcasts we're going to have just because there's so much to say. And yet we still did not say all of it. So he's definitely going to be back. I mean, I had so much fun just learning so much about him and what he does.

And through that, finding more value in the Bible. So thanks so much for listening. I hope you guys enjoy.

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.

Or 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, 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.

And 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.

Romans 5:12 and the Meaning of “Because”

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 first, if you like.

Please.

So, 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 sinned.

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 epi preposition 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? That 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?

Here's the, 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.

So there's these debates that are going on that are forming the way that they're reading the Greek text. And now some of these debates go all the way back to Augustine. So Augustine was a church father, lived in and around the year 400, a famous, 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 generations understanding of that phrase. And he was a bishop that lived in what we think of as Carthage.

It was the, 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.

So that was a time period or that was more location or that was like a ruling era?

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

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

Right.

I mean, it makes perfectly good sense why, you know, 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.

Moses, the Torah, and the Origins of Scripture

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

Go?

You know, 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 like tablet, or he had like a slave taking notes. Like, 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 10 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. 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.

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. 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? 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. 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.

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's 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. Well, 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. 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's 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.

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.

Whoa, please go on.

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-fold 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.

Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, and Competing Hebrew Text Traditions

This is insane. It's so many things that are going on right now because there is the people that experience Jesus in real life writing down their experience or covering his story, and then there is the people that translated it according to their socio-political time period, the way that they translated it for St. Augustine versus if they translated it today in President Biden's.

World.

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 non-denominational or Catholic.

So all of these factors are so interesting because they all come down to. How do you experience.

Christ?

The question that I had earlier, that was just my own comment. The question that I had earlier was, the scrolls found in the cave, where does that come in to play here?

Yes, yes.

So the Dead Sea Scrolls are 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.

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, you know, cut into pieces and sold as trinkets for your jewelry or something, you know.

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.

Like 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. It's the, 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 they, what came to them in their hands. 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.

1000, AD 1000 or AD 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 1000 years, the text was always the same?

That's, 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 to, 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 these, 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 100, 200 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 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.