Hmmm. Having read about this at Abnormal Interests (Is a Better Score Better or Worse?) I decided to take it. I got 100%, though actually I’d give the test only about 80%. Does this qualify me to be an unbeliever? 🙂
Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses – you know it all! You are fantastic!
It is very important not to assume what a bill will actually accomplished based on its title. Titles are generally designed to put a positive spin on the contents of the bill in the hopes that people will not read further or seriously consider the consequences of what is actually proposed.
A new bill in Colorado has precisely that problem. There are a number of issues in terms of implementation, but I want to look at one particular line:
NOT BE REQUIRED TO TEACH A TOPIC THAT VIOLATES HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND NOT BE DISCIPLINED FOR REFUSING TO TEACH THE TOPIC;
Matt Young at The Panda’s Thumb comments:
Realistically, what subject besides evolution will spur a great many parents, teachers, or students to opt out of a lesson? Enough, that is, to interest the legislature? None. I find it very hard to believe, then, that this bill is not a cover for undermining evolution in favor of a narrow religious agenda.
Perhaps my past experience with very narrow religious groups gives me some perspective on the possibilities here, but sex education comes to mind immediately. But more importantly I know people who regard numerous works of classical literature as evil, and who could well claim it was a violation of their conscience to have to teach those. In effect, the bill hands over the curriculum to the individual conscience of teachers.
I would suggest that a better plan is for those who feel they cannot handle the public school curriculum to go either the private or home school route. I don’t mean to be nasty here, or to suggest that the public should have no involvement in curriculum decisions. I believe parents and the public should be very much involved. But a public school teacher needs to teach the curriculum provided. Free speech rights do not mean that every individual has the right to modify the curriculum. It’s a public process. The teacher’s free speech is not impaired by this, in my view, simply because the government fails to provide a platform.
The public schools exist as infrastructure, to produce citizens educated to a certain level. An individual teacher cannot be permitted to distrupt that process because he or she cannot conscientiously teach some subject matter that is required. The proper response is to find a job that he or she can conscientiously do.
While I’m at it, I would suggest to Christian parents that the best time for your children to get their first exposure to ideas you find objectionable is while they are still at home. At that point you can respond with your own beliefs on the matter. Your Sunday School classes can teach on it, and your youth leaders can provide instruction as well. The child then gets a choice. If the sex education class doesn’t cover abstinence in the way you’d like, you can provide that instruction. If you disapprove of evolution, arrange to have your beliefs taught through the auspices of your church, or in your home. Parental involvement is tremendously important. Use it!
I hope people will consider these issues and a number of other troubling points of this bill, especially if, as predicted, similar bills are introduced in other states.
. . . has been posted. There’s a link to one of mine and there are also links to many very substantive posts which is what I go to this particular carnival to find. As I have time after this weekend of the John Webb Winter Golf Tournament, I will try to link to some specific posts both here and at the Pacesetters Bible School blog as it seems appropriate.
No, I’m not sick. I’ll be accompanying my stepson, John Webb, to Sacred Heart Hospital where he will take a number of his baseball colleagues to visit the children’s wing. They’ll sign pictures and baseballs, visit and have fun with the children, and try to brighten their day. This has been a tradition of the John Webb Winter Golf Tournament. Tomorrow we’ll all be at Osceola Gulf Course here in Pensacola to raise money for the child services program at the hospital.
A friend referred me to this page in which there are numerous really bad KJV only arguments–what other type are there?–but there was one I wanted to note in particular, because it is an argument that is often used in weaker form, but is here carried to its logical (and silly) conclusion.
First let me note that while the author of the article waxes enthusiastic on the semantic range of “epi” in Greek, he fails to discuss the semantic range of “in” and “on” in English, which, according to my Webster’s IIIrd International actually overlapped in Jacobean times. I didn’t make a particularly thorough study of that. Perhaps someone with an OED handy will comment. He should also have done further research on the semantic range of “charagma” though he probably didn’t because he really bases his conclusions on the following argument:
The modern Greek student is little more than a babe compared to these men who learned the language long before the dumbing down of education took its toll on today’s academy. They spoke the language, were able to write prose in it, and were entrenched in it. There are a few universities with classics departments like Bryn Mawr and Berkley in modern times that have standards of Greek scholarship that are truly outstanding, but few truly well-rounded students of the language are produced on the whole, and none on the level of the great scholars of the 17th century. . . .
The normal form of this argument goes like this: My expert is smarter than you, therefore my argument is true. I see this quite regularly. Some young earth creationist finds someone with a PhD who supports their argument and then asks me who am I to argue the Dr. X, PhD? For someone like me who is not a scientist, the simple answer is, “I see your PhD and raise you several hundred PhDs.” Or something like that. (I don’t play poker–don’t bother to correct the form!) More than one person can play the “expert” game. Quite often, one will find that the person citing the expert hasn’t even understood what the expert said.
In this case, however, we have taken a step further. Bible translators in the 17th century knew more Greek than anyone today, thus any translation they produce must be better than one produced by modern translators.
If this were a valid argument, all cases of disagreement would be settled by simply referencing the one person with the best credentials. Argument over. Of course, we don’t do that, because even the person with the best credentials can make mistakes. New people get their reputations by overturning the tried and true theories of previous generations of experts.
But even if the folks in the 17th century were head and shoulders above all modern academics in the area of Biblical languages, would that mean their translation was the best? Even if they conversed and wrote in Greek themselves (though Latin was more common), they did not converse in Koine Greek, and thus are no more native speakers of that language than I am. I do agree that there is a considerable problem with the education of pastors in Biblical languages. The increase in the number of people who are trained to some extent has resulted in a crowd of people who are supposedly expert enough to have an opinion, but who really know very little. I’ve often commented that when you hear the phrase “what the Greek/Hebrew here really means is . . .” you’re about to be misinformed. But none of that means that the 17th century scholars should be given the final word.
They also lacked a few things:
The idea that the 17th century had the final say on this subject is simply ludicrous. The translators of the KJV may have been excellent scholars, and I believe they were. They may have done the best they could with the resources at hand and the conditions under which they had to work. I believe they did so. But there were many things they simply could not know because they had not been discovered yet. They were so far from the time at which the source texts were written that they gained no benefit from proximity of time, as we might suppose the early church fathers had, but they also came before much of the textual evidence we have today had been discovered. The situation only becomes bleaker in terms of the Hebrew scriptures.
I’m not certain this is the silliest KJV only argument, but it certainly is an excellent candidate!
The REB is one of my favorite versions, and indeed for personal reading is my favorite. Nonetheless it has one feature that often makes me mildly uncomfortable, its tendency to move texts around with a minimum of textual evidence. Even in cases in which I find the balance of internal evidence favorable to such a move, doing so without any manuscript evidence at all makes me a bit uncomfortable as part of a translation.
A good example of this is found in Isaiah 38, in which the REB moves verses 21 and 22 from the end of the chapter and places them prior to verse 8, reading 1-7, 21, 22, 8-20. Now before you have an excessively negative reaction, there are some reasons for this move.
But I still have a problem for this one. The REB note is cryptic: “Cp. 2 Kgs. 20:1-11” and the added note in my Oxford Study Bible doesn’t help that much more: “The Revised English Bible has moved these verses from the end of hte chapter to their more logical place in the narrative.” But there are two questions, first whether one can impose a logic on the text without evidence of disruption, and second whether the new order is, in fact, any more logical. As the chapter appears in all manuscripts, We have the sicknesses, the report of a short prayer, the promise of healing, a longer prayer of thanksgiving that retells the story, then the act of healing. Especially if one regards the longer prayer as an addition from a different source, I could easily see how a compiler would produce the existing order. It makes good enough sense, though having something written after his healing appear in the text before the healing may offend our sense of chronology. One should note, however, that included in the prayer is the narrative of what happened and of Hezekiah’s prayer itself.
Even further, we need to consider issues of composition, and ask the question of how the chapter came together as it is. The narrative in 2 Kings 20:1-11 is more complete (except for the thanksgiving prayer), and well ordered. I don’t think that only on the basis of looking at the two texts we can be certain of the order of composition. It looks to me offhand as though both were brought together from the same source material for different purposes. Obviously this entry is not a study of the composition history (I would recommend Childs, Isaiah, pp. 282-283 for a brief discussion, noting that Childs also sees 21-22 as logically following verse 7.) Nonetheless, I would suggest that the purpose of composition of this chapter is different from that of Kings, and there is a good possibility that the redactor wished to have the chapter end on the note of “going up to the house of the Lord” just before discussing the visit of Merodach-baladan.
In any case, unless one can posit a scribal error, such questions go back to source and redaction criticism, rather than textual criticism. There doesn’t seem to be any basis for suggesting a simple scribal error. Even if one believes that a later redactor inserted verses 21-22 at the end of the chapter, one would still have to deal with whatever logic caused that redactor to place the text where it is. Further, if one cannot see the logic in terms of this chapter, even better logic would be produced by bracketing it as unoriginal.
All of those options would be acceptable in a commentary or a scholarly study. In a translation, I’m concerned with this type of change based on the level of evidence available.
Fellow philophronos blogger Laura is pretty annoyed with William Arkin for what he wrote about the troops in The Troops Also Need to Support the American People. She has demonstrated that here and defended it further here.
Now anyone who has read both our blogs is aware that we disagree dramatically on the Iraq war. My initial thought was that Laura was going overboard at a fairly reasonable point–civilian control. But then I read Arkin’s blog entry. Starting with the title, he manages to obscure the one good point with a hail of contemptuous language.
Oh, by the way, I do consider “scumbag” excessive. But that’s just me. I might have gone with “condescending obnoxious elitist” or something like that.
What bothers me is that this is the very sort of attitude and writing that is not support for the troops. They are doing precisely what they are supposed to do. They are carrying out the will of the civilian leadership in Iraq. It’s not up to them to figure out whether their activities are popular. Those of us who oppose the war can do so, and we are doing so, by the legitimate means of the ballot box. That portion of the American people who are in uniform in Iraq don’t have control over that, and shouldn’t, one way or the other.
Support for the troops involves respecting what they do. It doesn’t mean excusing those who do wrong, but it also doesn’t mean blaming everyone in uniform for the faults of a few, nor does it mean blaming people in uniform for the faults of their civilian leadership.
On the other hand, it should be clear that one can oppose the war and support the troops. I was one of the troops in more than one conflict in which I disagreed with the civilian leadership. As a person in uniform, I carried out my orders. It’s as simple as that. But I will not, as a civilian, simply accept whatever military leaders happen to want to do. The Iraq war is a bad choice badly executed. But it has been executed by excellent volunteer troops who deserve our thanks.
There’s a story today in the Pensacola News Journal about my step-son John Webb and the John Webb Winter Golf Tournament. Great stuff, though I must note that John has signed with the Chicago Cubs this year, so will be wearing much more blue than red!
Preparing for the tournament has kept me fairly brief in all my postings this week, a side effect some will certainly appreciate!
The latest Christian Carnival has been posted at Thoughts of a Gyrovague. Go read, enjoy, and learn!
The first ever Christian Reconciation Blog Carnival is up and running at Heart, Mind, Soul, and Strength. Check it out!
