I once won a wrestling match 0-0. How can you win a match when no one scores any points? In this case, because we were tied at the end of an overtime period, the referee was forced to consult the criteria for a tie break. The first five criteria didn’t apply, so he was forced […]
Questions of Canon – Who Gets to Decide What’s in the Bible?
July 30, 2015 By
In the last few posts we’ve been dealing with text criticism (in general, for the OT, for the NT), the art and science of studying the biblical manuscript tradition to arrive at the most accurate possible text of scripture (from which all of our English translations are derived). This leads to great confidence in the […]
Translation of What? The Text of the New Testament
July 9, 2015 By
A survey of the Hebrew manuscript tradition behind our Old Testament does much to bolster our confidence in the accuracy and authority of the first two thirds of our Bible. But what about the twenty-seven books of the New Testament? What exactly stands behind our New Testament translations? The New Testament was written in Greek […]
Translation of What? Jots and Tittles
June 4, 2015 By
The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew (with a few chapters being written in Aramaic – a cognate language, like Italian to Spanish). But of course we don’t have the scroll upon which Baruch the scribe first wrote down Jeremiah’s words. That document long ago would have crumbled to dust. What we have for […]
Translation of What?
May 28, 2015 By
Most bible readers have never given much thought to how the book they (hopefully) read and revere came to be. They think not much about translation or the issues related to it, and they think even less about the texts that came to be translated. The time between the writing of a biblical text at […]
