Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Book: J. Louis Martyn, Galatians

    If you read this blog at all regularly you will have seen a number of posts that reference J. Louis Martyn’s commentary on Galatians in the Anchor Bible Series. I have just completed a study through Galatians, using the Greek text and Martyn’s commentary. It’s very hard to rate commentaries, because there are so many possibilities for use, and if you describe a commentary as “good” you have to specify “good for what?”

    In this case I’m going to put this in my top five. Those are: Leviticus (3 vols, Anchor Bible) by Jacob Milgrom, 1 Corinthians (NICNT) by Gordon Fee, Isaiah (OTL) by Brevard Childs, Exodus (OTL) by Brevard Childs, and now Galatians by J. Louis Martyn. Fee’s 1 Corinthians I regard as the best commentary I’ve found that is usable for a teacher/preacher who teaches non-scholars. Milgrom’s remains far and away the best scholar’s commentary that I’ve read. To place Martyn’s commentary in this group I would say that it is not as overwhelmingly thorough as Milgrom’s. To manage that it would have to carefully cite the history of interpretation starting with the church fathers and moving to the present. Martyn takes the history into account, but doesn’t
    give you everything. To match Fee’s commentary, there would have to be more direct application. Martyn provides plenty of fodder for devotional use, but I found that when I tried to find a quote, I either couldn’t find any at all, or what I found had to be translated for a lay audience. That will make this commentary less useful for a working pastor or Sunday School teacher.

    Having said all of that, the key benefit of Martyn’s work is simply that he provides a good cross section of his excellent insights on Pauline theology throughout, fitting Galatians into a pattern of Pauline thought, and suggesting avenues of interpretation that are creative, and very often quite convincing. If you can translate some of his thinking into comprehensible terms that can be used in a sermon, you’ll find them quite useful and profound.

    Some of the key themes include:

    • The Jerusalem of today (Gal. 4:25) is the Jerusalem church in that it either supports or does not suppress the circumcision mission to the gentiles
    • Closely connected to that, Martyn refers to the teachers not as Judaizers, but as a circumcision based gentile mission
    • Paul sees the death and resurrection of Jesus in apocalyptic terms, an invasion of this world that invalidates old categories and creates new ones
    • Galatians is earlier in the sequence of Paul’s letters than often thought

    With 577 pages of solid commentary, a study of Galatians with this book is not for the faint of heart, but it is worth the effort. If you then write sermons or lessons from it, you will get valuable training in explaining profound but difficult theological concepts to lay audiences. You may regard that as a penalty, but perhaps it is a benefit, a good spiritual discipline.

    Those who accept inerrancy, and even those like me who don’t, may find the historical approach a little difficult to manage. Martyn espouses the idea that Paul’s letters are better sources for Paul’s life than Acts, relegating Acts to a supporting role (I discuss that here). My impression is that with a little bit more attention much of the Acts material can be reconciled plausibly and should be. I would accept that the Jerusalem conference as reported in Acts and as understood by Paul may be somewhat different. Paul’s discussion of the topic of food offered to idols in 1 Corinthians certainly makes it appear so, but I think that a good historical outline can be taken both from Paul’s letters and from Acts, and that those outlines are not too far apart. The “spin” is a bit different, but the bones match.

    Obviously, I enjoyed my study of Galatians, and I wrote a number of notes, both here and on my wife’s devotional list, for which I’ve been writing quite a lot lately. Just to provide the flavor, here are links to the posts over the last few weeks that were inspired by Martyn’s commentary:

  • God Doesn’t Forgive?

    OK, this is shocking.

    Peter Kirk reports that:

    I interrupt my normal programme to bring you this shocking quote. Yes, the news is going round that Richard Cunningham, director of UCCF, said

          God never forgives – he punishes.

    Apparently he said this during a talk at the recent Word Alive conference, the same one which is separating from Spring Harvest.

    Go to Peter’s blog and read his discussion on this.

    This looks to me like an example of the problem we get into when we regard a metaphor as the actual core of the truth. Substitution, even penal substitution is a good metaphor, but it remains one metaphor. When you put it at the center of your doctrine of the atonement and then build everything else around that, oddities like this result.

    At the center of our doctrine of the atonement should be the amazing love of God who became human in order to redeem us, and made such a complete and thorough job of it that he died like one of us. Then you can build on why with various metaphors, but perhaps keep a better balance.

  • Moral Choices when Viewing

    When I saw the post Virtual Gomorrah: Temptation, Technique, and Technological Progress on the evangelical outpost, I expected to be annoyed by calls for censorship. And indeed there are a few words that tend to annoy my libertarian approach, such as these:

    . . . My basic position is that while they are desperately needed they are also hopelessly ineffective. I’ve come to believe, as Princeton Professor Robert George says, that “laws are likely to be least effective when they are needed most.” I’m still trying to decided how to say that is a way that doesn’t sound defeatist or pessimistic. . . .

    After that note from the introduction, however, the post is right on target, and worth reading. The question I think we need to ask ourselves is simply this: Do I have the will to live my convictions? For a Christian I would put it more precisely: Will I allow the Holy Spirit to keep guiding me into greater maturity?

    The success of pornography and violence in the public media, whether on television, video, games, or via the internet suggests that many people who claim to be disgusted by x-rated material really aren’t. When nobody is watching, they are quite ready to watch the things that they condemn. If that were not the case, e-mail inboxes would not be flooded with offerings of pornography. Those who sell this material know that if they scatter their ads far enough there are people who will pause before hitting that delete key and then they will get sucked in, one step at a time.

    I wrote about this a couple of years ago (pre-blog) in an essay titled Off-Switch Censorship. I think it’s still applicable now.

    We are far too anxious to get someone else to solve our problems of will. There is a simple but difficult solution. Learn to say no. Decide not only what you will watch but how much. This can apply to politics, war coverage, or entertainment. There are some things that are no good in any proportions, but there are also things that are good when used in balance, but are dangerous when used to excess.

    Consciously establish your own boundaries and then work hard to stick with them. If you have problems doing so, then get some help. Christian churches should provide opportunities for people to be accountable to one another. I’m not talking about big brother, in which the church tries to monitor your private life, nor am I talking about an intervention group for acknowledged addicts. I’m talking about a group of people who talk to one another about how their Christian walk is going.

    Let me give you an example from my own life. My morning starts with a short time of prayer, then there are certain morning activities, things that need to be done immediately. Then I have my time of Bible study and prayer that is somewhat longer. Now my wife knows by experience that my day goes much better if I have that second period of study and prayer. That’s my time with God that lets me hear from the Lord about my priorities for the day and generally feeds my soul.

    Unfortunately, I have a strong tendency to look at the list of things I really need to get done that day, and to decide I need to get started. After all, I’ve already had prayer time. I can rationalize this by noting that I will spend several hours working on a manuscript having to do with a Biblical or spiritual topic, so I am, after all, studying the Bible. Well, your mileage may vary, but for me there is a huge difference between relaxed, devotional study, and editing or writing a manuscript, however good that manuscript may be.

    As I said, my wife knows how this works, and she can identify when I’ve done my devotions and when I haven’t by my attitude through the rest of the day. Devotional dependency? Perhaps. 🙂 But the fact is that she gently holds me accountable on that point. When she notices the results, she’ll ask me, “Did you have your devotional time?’ Now your spouse is not likely to be an adequate source of accountability, though I think a spouse can help a great deal. But having someone just ask you can be a big help.

    I would suggest that laws against pornography and obscenity are not going to be generally successful. Like drug laws, we have the unfortunate tendency to measure their success by the number of people caught, not by the number who have access to the material. (I am opposed to censorship in any case. I just happen to believe in this case that censorship is also going to be ineffective.) That means that those of us who do not approve of such materials need to take responsibility for our own actions.

    One last thing–turn the switch off before the program you don’t want to watch even starts. Delete the e-mail before you gaze at the thumbnails and wonder. Once you’ve decided on the boundaries, enforce them on yourself with rigor.

  • War Failings: Clear and Attainable Objective

    There’s a good article on MSNBC.com titled: Fundamental failures led to current Iraq crisis. My arguments against the war have been primarily based no the first point:

    Lesson 1: Select an attainable objective
    While the Administration tried to build a case against Saddam on the basis of weapons of mass destruction, a principal motivation, ironically, was to take a short-cut to peace in the Middle East. Troubled by the theocracy in Iran and by Muslim revolutionaries who have sworn to destroy all of the regimes in the region, the Bush administration tried to inoculate the Middle East with democracy.

    The other points are excellent from a military point of view, but without an attainable objective, they would clearly be pointless. “Attainable” also has to be judged in the context of the available resources including political will. I think the actual objectives in Iraq fail these tests almost from start to finish.

    When we fight for an unattainable objective, the only result is dead people. If we fight, but don’t provide the means to obtain the objectives, again, the only result is dead people. In other words, sound strategy is critical.

  • Public Policy and Prophecy

    John has an interesting post over at Locusts and Honey titled The Bible, Politics, and Pseudoprophecy. Though there have clearly been some extended exchanges, I haven’t followed them closely, so I’m not 100% certain what John means by Pseudoprophecy, but I think he makes a number of good points. I’d like to comment a bit further.

    First, prophecy is a term that gets used in various contexts. The prophets of Old Testament times often spoke of social justice and challenged the authorities over that. As a result, voices that call for justice against the prevailing view in society are labeled “prophetic” and this activity is called “prophecy.”

    But while words do commonly get used in different contexts, if one tries to apply the definition appropriate to one context in a different one, one will simply get confused. There are many aspects of Biblical prophecy, and also of the type of ongoing prophecy that takes place in Charismatic and Pentecostal churches. One of those aspects is a call for social justice. But nobody in Biblical times would have accepted “a person who cries out for social justice” as a good definition of a prophet. A prophet was someone who spoke for God, and a prophecy was a message spoken for God, most commonly in words that were attributed to God. The key to the identity of a prophet was the “ne’um YHWH,” the message of YHWH, and not the content of the message.

    So not every person who calls for something good is speaking prophetically. They may well be speaking correctly, they may be giving an important message, but the critical element is whether they are giving a message that comes from God to apply to that situation.

    Now if we look at the public policy situation, we can ask just how the prophetic word applies to the particular political situation. There is where one can easily get into trouble. Jonathan comments that we should preach it if it is Biblical. But this doesn’t respond, in my view, to John’s original problem. The Bible doesn’t say that much about public policy directly. We can look at Israelite policy, but at a minimum we must admit that Israel’s circumstances were substantially different than ours, and thus we must look for the principles and apply them to our current situation.

    For example, if we look at Israel’s immigration policy (Leviticus 19:33-34), we also have to look at their welfare policy (Deuteronomy 24:17-22). We can only create a coherent replication of the intent of those two policies by seeing how they apply under our circumstances. (Note that I do not intend to present my two references as an exhaustive study of the particular policies, just as a general directional arrow.)

    When we try to apply these principles we get into much larger debates. We can generally agree that murder is bad, though we disagree on the definition. Is abortion murder? Is it murder if you kill someone who is robbing your house? Then we further get into differences of opinion on how best one prevents murder. Is the death penalty appropriate? In my experience both death penalty proponents and opponents claim to respect life. I honestly believe they both do. They just believe in different policies for accomplishing their goal.

    We all agree, I think, that Jesus wants us to care for the poor. Do we do that by supporting public welfare programs or through private efforts? Is it possibly some combination?

    In Ben Witherington’s post on gun control he asks:

    My question is— are their ethical teachings in the New Testament that have a bearing as to whether Christians, as private citizens, should be bearing arms?

    I would say that yes, there are ethical teachings. But do you notice the gap here? Witherington’s answer will be that we should not be bearing arms. But I can still see quite a difference between the ethical imperative for me, as a Christian, and the public policy issue. I personally do not own a gun. I am capable of firing one with substantially above average accuracy, but I would hardly be called a sharpshooter. But I don’t believe that my ability to make a decision to use a firearm in an emergency situation would be accurate enough to make me safe. So I’ve got a couple of reasons not to own a weapon. But is there an automatic link to public policy? I don’t see it. Personally, I think the idea that anyone can own any weapon is silly (not immoral, silly), and that substantial controls over the use of dangerous devices such as firearms is appropriate and necessary. But those who disagree with me–and in my area that’s a substantial number–do not do so because they think murder is good.

    It’s easy to agree on the idea that if it’s Biblical we’ll preach it. But the further one goes into public policy, the less clear it is just what is Biblical. I see a huge amount of proof texting in this whole area. If we can draw principles for Israelite policy, then surely we should support the death penalty, executed in a public and painful way. Yet most of us do not. But if we support one Biblical idea, how is it that we can oppose another? Actually, it’s very easy. There’s the context, the time, the place, and all other circumstances.

    I believe that Christian principles can inform public policy, and that as Christians we should be implementing those principles when we engage in public policy. What I don’t see is any way in which the Bible clearly sets the specific public policy position we need to take. Gun control, death penalty, pacifism, social welfare, and other issues must be argued on on a basis other than proof texts.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – Summary and Conclusion

    This is the conclusion of my multi-part series responding to Bart Ehrman’s book, Misquoting Jesus. Here are links to the earlier portions of this series:

    In chapter 7, The Social Worlds of the Text, Ehrman discusses how the social situation in the early church shaped changes that were made to the text. In particular he discusses the status of women, and mentions several instances of textual change that relate to it. Amongst these are Junia/Junias in Romans 16:7, and the prohibition for women teaching in 1 Corinthians 14:33-36.

    Next he discusses the relationship of Christians and Jews. Some alterations in the text make the Jews look bad. By the 2nd century, Christians were a separate religion, and often engaged in polemic against Judaism.

    Finally he discusses paganism and apologetic alterations to the text. He provides numerous illustrations in each case.

    One of his major points in this section is to show how the scribes were human beings whose world shaped the way in which they transmitted the text, and thus to some extent the text itself. When you hold a Bible in your hands, you hold the complex product of numerous people, each of whom have had a small part in shaping the text you will read.

    Conclusion

    It is in the conclusion that a differ significantly from Ehrman’s view. In technical terms, he is certainly expert, and he displays that expertise throughout the book. As a popularizer, he is clearly one of the best. I have not seen a clearer explanation of the basics of New Testament textual criticism for the non-scholar.

    The fundamental difference in our conclusions results not from the content, but from our starting points. I begin with the view that inspiration is something that happens to people, and that people express that inspiration in various forms, including text. While a person experiences God, individually or in community, the expression of that experience is distinctly human.

    Ehrman seems to accept the standard evangelical view of Biblical inspiration that assumes that God’s breathing of scripture is essentially the impartation of data to be expressed in words.

    How radical are the changes?

    If you see inspiration as involving the impartation of data to be accurately expressed in words, and expect those words themselves to be divine, then the alteration of such words must come as a shock. This is the experience expressed by Bart Ehrman in his conclusion. He sees the changes as radical and important because they alter the words, and to him the words are the vehicle of inspiration, or in the end of the lack of it.

    For me these changes are not nearly so radical, because I assume that the writers chose their own words, and in most cases their own facts. Thus alterations are interesting, but neither shocking nor dismaying. If one studies a broad enough basis of the text, one can get to who Matthew, Luke, John, or Paul really were, and to me that is the key to inspiration. God spoke to the community through these people in a special way and I want to get to know them.

    One quotation will illustrate this point:

    In particular, as I said at the outset, I began seeing the New Testament as a very human book. The New Testament as we actually have it, I knew, was the product of human hands, the hands of the scribes who transmitted it. Then I began to see that not just the scribal text but the original text itself was a very human book. This stood very much at odds with how I had regarded the text in my late teens as a newly minted “born-again” Christian, convinced that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God and that the biblical words themselves had come to us by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As I realized already in graduate school, even if God had inspired the original words, we don’t have the original words. So the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant to the Bible as we have it, since the words God reputedly inspired had been changed and, in some cases, lost. . . . (p. 211)

    I would like to point out one other thing, however, and that is that those who argue Biblical inerrancy, with or without verbal plenary inspiration, as it applies to the autographs do need to respond to the issue of the relevance of such inspiration. What is the importance of the inerrancy of a document we do not possess? If we can deal with 98% accuracy in the Bibles we actually have, why would the discovery that the autographs were also only 98% accurate suddenly be a devastating blow to the authority of the Bible?

    This is why it seems to me that the doctrine of inerrancy of the autographs is more a doctrine about God than about the accuracy or authority of God’s communication. What the doctrine says is that God is perfect. Certainly, I can agree with that. But that still seems irrelevant, because the issue is how well did human authors comprehend what God revealed to them?

    Dependence on Scholars

    On one last issue I think that Ehrman makes a particularly good point. I have heard many people express either the desire to be completely independent of Biblical scholarship or even the feeling that they are independent. Sometimes these are people who do not even read the source languages, much less work with the manuscripts to determine the text. When we consider context, the history and culture that stands behind the text, many more specialized fields come into play, and nobody is able to be proficient in all of those areas. All of us are dependent at some point on the scholarship of others.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus VII

    . . . in which, of course, I respond to chapter 6. I will post a directory to the whole series of responses, with the final entry, but in the meantime you will get the series by choosing category “Textual Criticism” in the right sidebar. There are other entries in that category, but all the most recent ones are in this series.

    In chapter 6, Theologically Motivated Alterations of the Text, Ehrman looks at some specific points of theology and the way in which scribes altered, or tried to alter the text in opposition to those viewpoints. In our surviving texts, he notes, we don’t have many non-orthodox alterations, because it was the orthodox who won the day, and their texts were the ones that were preserved.

    He discusses three theological points which engendered theologically motivated changes: Adoptionist christology (Adoptionism in Wikipedia), docetic christology (Docetism in Wikipedia), and separationist christology. Adoptionism holds that Jesus was not born the son of God but was adopted, docetic christology holds that Jesus merely appeared to be human and to suffer as a human, but in fact, it was all just an illusion, while separationism suggested that Jesus was completely separated from God when he died, i.e. his divinity did not suffer death with his humanity.

    In each case, these anti-orthodox positions resulted in changes. These alterations to the text did not change the theology in a major way, but in the likely view of the scribes who made the changes they prevented people from interpreting a passage in an unorthodox way.

    I would simply make two notes on this chapter. First, it’s easy to make too much of such changes. The defense, as I frequently like to say, is never to base theology on a single text, but rather on an overall message an author is trying to present. Second, the abundance of Greek manuscripts lets us get behind this type of changes.

    I do agree with Ehrman that these types of alterations should be of concern if one holds a verbal plenary view of inspiration. If the individual words are so critical, as opposed to the overall message, then how could God allow the inspired words to be replaced wholesale? It’s easy to say that the abundance of manuscripts means that we can get at the original texts with a high degree of accuracy, but what about all those believers who used the various flawed manuscripts? What about the English speaking church before the ERV? (Note that the ERV used the Westcott and Hort text, and thus corrected numerous inaccuracies in the KJV.)

    I am absolutely comfortable saying that one can access God’s message via scripture, but when that message is reduced to the word by word level, i.e. if every word is important, then the state of the manuscripts is problematic.

  • Embarrassed Again

    I knew when the news of the tragedy at Virginia Tech came out that there would be religious responses that would be obnoxious, and even some that would be downright despicable. It seems that with every tragedy there are uninvolved people available to place blame and to pontificate. I personally have no words that are worth saying to those who have lost a loved one in this tragedy, or for that matter to the Virginia Tech community. They’re going through something I have never experienced.

    I have, however, experienced tragedy, and I know how people use it for their own agendas. When our son died of cancer at age 17, and throughout the five year battle that preceded that event there were people who needed to question us. We were either grieving too much, in which case our faith was weak, or we weren’t grieving enough, and were thus in denial. We weren’t using the right treatment plan, out of the many dozens of non-traditional treatments suggested. Some thought that he would be healed if we just took him to the right church and had the right group pray for him. They couldn’t understand why we didn’t jump up and go where they suggested immediately.

    Then there were those who just looked at us pityingly. My wife and I have taught–and still teach–weekend seminars on prayer. How could we be teaching about prayer, and yet our own son was not healed. For some reason these folks didn’t check what we actually teach, or they would have found that we do not and have never made the claim that prayer should replace medical care, or that there is some certainty of healing through prayer. In fact, we behaved precisely as we teach. We sought the best medical care available, and we maintained a strong prayer life.

    Now the vast majority of our friends and neighbors were wonderful. I’m talking about a tiny minority who were nonetheless quite vocal. I learned how to ignore people. The point here is not what we or anyone else believe. The point is that everyone thinks they have the right to stick their philosophy and opinions into someone else’s decisions and grieving.

    With that in mind, I’m going to comment on a couple of “Christian” responses to the Virginia Tech tragedy. Now if the bereaved want to sound off in any way they wish, I’m not going to jump in, but these are responses from people outside. They make me embarrassed to be a Christian. I’m never embarrassed to be a follower of Jesus; just sometimes the name “Christian” gets so horribly besmirched by this type of comment.

    The first is a comment by Dinesh D’Souza:

    To no one’s surprise, Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way–molecules acting upon molecules.

    Now that paragraph is wrong in so many ways. I’ve recently responded to Dawkins’ book The God Delusion (see category “The God Delusion” on the sidebar), and while I have many disagreements with Dawkins, something that should surprise no one, I don’t see D’souza’s characterization as at all accurate. On the surface, yes. Dawkins is a materialist. But simply explaining everything as molecules acting on molecules, well, not so much. In addition, however much some Christians might like it to be so, Dawkins is not the sole atheist on the planet. Atheists work and hope, live and learn, love their families, make moral decisions, in short, they do the things that everyone else does. And there’s no evidence to suggest that they make worse neighbors.

    But it’s not the wrongness of all this that embarrasses me. It’s the insertion of this religious (or philosophical) goal. I haven’t read any such, but if an atheist writer used the tragedy to announce gleefully that this proved there is no God, I would find that offensive as well. Let the tragedy be what it is. Especially let’s not use it to demonize any group of people. I’d also like to call attention to this very moving response (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars).

    Then there’s Dr. Grady McMurtry, president of Creation Worldview Ministries, who believes that teaching evolution was the cause:

    . . . people should not be surprised when mass shootings occur, such as the one on the Blacksburg university campus on Monday. “And at Virginia Tech, what do we have?” he asks rhetorically. “We have a person who, unfortunately, thought that humans had no more value than cats and dogs — and unfortunately, I think, probably felt the same way about themselves.” (source HT: Pandagon)

    Probably felt that way about themselves? Does he think it’s appropriate to be gratuitously insulting at this point? I’ve discussed this issue before and am not going to revisit it now. All I’m interested in at the moment is the way the tragedy is being used to push agendas, and not in a kind way.

    The agenda we should be pushing–and yes, I have an agenda as does everyone–is simple love and respect. I’m a long ways away and there’s remarkably little I can do, but I can speak with respect of the people involved, no matter what their religion or lack thereof. I can see them as human beings seeking a way to deal with the tragedy that has struck their lives. I can refrain from pretending I possess a one stop answer to their problems.

    I think that’s what Jesus would do in these circumstances.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus VI

    . . . in which, quite logically, I discuss chapter 5. 🙂

    In Chapter 5, originals that matter, Ehrman first introduces the basics of textual criticism and tells us how textual decisions are made. This good overview, as he notes, will not prepare you to make textual decisions for yourself, but it will let you know how scholars function as they decide which variant to use in an eclectic text, and similarly which variant to translate in a Bible version.

    Ehrman then discusses three textual variants with theological significance and in each case he disagrees the the general consensus on the appropriate text. These texts are:

    • Mark 1:41
    • Luke 22:43-44
    • Hebrews 2:8-9

    I have surveyed modern versions on these with some interesting results. I’m going to survey just a few translations, and then give my own opinion on each one. Ehrman deals with the theological and interpretive issues quite well in his discussion on each of these. My interest in this section is whether the non-scholar has ready access to this information. Please note that where I list translations supporting each option, I am not being exhaustive. Each list is a subset of the subset of translations I am using for this quick comparison. In each case a subscript f indicates that the translation in question indicates the alternate choice in a footnote.

    Mark 1:41

    The issue here is whether Jesus “had compassion” on the leper or “was angry/indignant.” The evidence for this variant is presented in the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament, 4th Edition (UBSIV), which is a common starting point for Bible translations, though note that most English versions make their own specific textual decisions and do not follow a particular Greek edition. UBSIV places “compassion” in the text and gives it a “B” rating.

    The following translations support “compassion”: CEVf, ESV, KJV, NLTf, NRSVf, NETf, NKJV.

    The following support “angry”: TNIVf, REBf

    The best note here is in the NET. A strong case can be made for “angry” but the dominant reading in English translations is “compassion.”

    Luke 22:43-44

    Here the issue is the presence or absence of verses 43 and 44. Ehrman argues that the original text probably did not include those verses.

    Versions including 43-44: ESVf, NKJV, KJV, CEVf, NLTf, REBf, TNIVf

    Versions marking 43-44 in some way: NRSVf, NETf

    Versions excluding 43-44: None

    Again, the NET is to be congratulated on an excellent footnote. I would suggest that those who do not know Biblical languages but want to go deep into the text should access that version. It is available in an excellent online edition at NEXT Bible.

    Hebrews 2:8-9

    In this case the question is whether in verse nine it should say that Jesus tasted death “by the grace of God” or “apart from God.”

    Versions supporting “by the grace of God”: REBf, TNIV, NKJV, KJV, ESV, NRSVf, CEV, NLT, NET.

    No version supports “without God.” UBSIV rates “by the grace of God” as an A reading.

    In this last case, the NET does not include a footnote.

    Conclusions

    I would conclude two things from this. First, in most cases, one can access significant textual differences through various English versions. While the NET has the best notes for the first two examples, it has none for the last, which is only noted by the NRSV and the REB. This is a good argument for using multiple versions and reading the footnotes.

    In addition, if people paid more attention to the resources available to them things that Ehrman points out in his book would be much less shocking to them.

    Discussed in study notes (Learning Bible, Oxford Annotated, Oxford Study)

  • Christian Carnival CLXVIII

    . . . has been posted at Random Acts of Verbiage. A group of Christian bloggers have been pulling this all back together. Dory has been out of touch and she is in all our prayers. We are hoping she is just excessively busy.

    HT: Lingamish.