Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Biblical Inspiration

  • 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 V

    In chapter 4 of Misquoting Jesus, The Quest for Origins: Methods and Discoveries (pp. 101-125), Ehrman moves to important but slightly less engaging material. This chapter is important in laying out the basic history of textual criticism, and how Biblical scholars began the move from the corrupt Textus Receptus to a better critical text.

    Many of the debates these scholars engaged in over the centuries are similar to debates that still continue today. Even though it is well established that there are numerous textual variants, people still try to create ad hoc arguments for why the text behind the KJV is the best text, or why one can somehow ignore all these variants.

    The key element of this chapter is the discussion of Westcott and Hort’s textual methodology and where it differs from modern practices. Westcott and Hort are unduly blamed for many elements of modern textual criticism. It is appropriate to grant them a substantial place in the history of textual criticism, and to give them credit where credit is due. They pulled together principles from the work of others, brought them to completion, and produced an excellent critical text.

    Their substantial work is often used in ad hominem attacks on the modern text, as though by proving Westcott and Hort to be unorthodox in some way, one could prove that modern eclectic texts such as UBSIV or NA27 are also of no value. First, of course, such an ad hominem attack is clearly unjustified especially when all the building blocks are available for study. Only someone without the ability to deal with the substantial evidence available would resort to an ad hominem attack under the circumstances.

    Second, while Westcott and Hort were pioneers in the science and art of textual criticism, their methods have been considerably refined and improved, so that saying a modern eclectic text is essentially like that of Westcott and Hort is inaccurate. Ehrman outlines the differences at the end of this chapter (123-125).

  • Podcasts on Inspiration

    On the Running Toward the Goal podcast, I am presenting a two part series on inspiration/revelation based on Psalm 19. Today’s post is the first one, and the second will be posted on Monday. Tomorrow’s Running Toward the Goal is by Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. and will focus on apologetics.

    Running Toward the Goal is posted each weekday morning.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus IV

    . . . in which I respond to chapter 3.

    This response will be brief. This chapter is excellent. If you’re a Bible student of any variety, buy Misquoting Jesus and make sure to read chapter 3. While I have read many of the things presented here before in more technical works, this chapter is an exceptional job of popular writing by a scholar. You will enjoy the stories, and you will understand the transmission of the Biblical text much better. You could only get this kind of information elsewhere in fairly technical works.

    The first and major part of the chapter deals with editions of the Greek New Testament and how scholarship moved from simply using whatever manuscripts were available to building a text based on the best manuscripts and creating references of the variants in various manuscripts. When I studied Textual Criticism at the undergraduate level, I was required to take several verses and work from available photocopies of manuscripts to create a critical text of that passage. That was a truly revealing experience for me. Ehrman will help you get some of that feel.

    After that, he presents a section on the types of errors found in various manuscripts, starting with inadvertent copying errors and continuing with intentional changes. The examples are brilliantly selected and clearly presented.

    Recall that one of the basic arguments that Ehrman has with some other textual scholars is that he tends to think that more errors are intentional than some do. This is a matter of degree. Ehrman is not way out of the field, and most errors are fairly easy to classify. This chapter will give you a good idea how scholars accomplish their work.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – Ia

    I wanted to follow up briefly on my first post on Misquoting Jesus to provide a quotation and make a couple more comments on inspiration. The quotation comes from page 13:

    It is a radical shift from reading the Bible as an inerrant blueprint for our faith, life, and future to seeing it as a very human book, with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live. . . .

    This is certainly a shift that often occurs when someone with a very strict view of Biblical inspiration is confronted with the facts of Biblical history. But there is a huge amount of spin that is possible in circumstances like this. Discussions of Biblical inspiration, for various reasons, tend to be dominated by extremes. Either one can trust everything in the Bible, or one can trust nothing. Either it is without error on everything, or it has no valid information at all. I’m not accusing Bart Ehrman of taking such extreme views, though he has made a very radical shift in his own appreciation of the Bible.

    I could quite easily say that the Bible is “a very human book, with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live.” Yet at the same time, I regard the Bible as inspired. It seems to me that both fundamentalists and skeptics have a similar assumption about what a divinely inspired book must contain. Both agree that it must contain accurate information and precise instructions. The debate between them is over whether the Bible provides any such thing. But why should we assume that God wanted to provide us with that particular type of guide?

    Christians place strong emphasis on 1 Timothy 3:16 and “God-breathed (theopneustos).” In fact, in any discussion I’m involved with on Biblical inerrancy someone is sure to quote that text in support of the doctrine of inerrancy. Once they have quoted this verse, which they seem to think I will never have read, they look hopefully at me, assuming they have made their point. When I fail to see support for inerrancy in the text, I can see that they conclude that I must surely be a very perverse man. (In this paragraph I use the term “inerrancy” in the very loose form in which it is normally used. The Chicago Statement is generally a bit more nuanced.)

    But where is the definition of what happens to a speech, a text, or any form of message when it is breathed by God. A partial analogy might be found in Genesis 2:7, when God breathes the breath of life into the first human. The result was that the person became a living person, but Genesis 3 very quickly suggests that the man did not become inerrant.

    I tend to take my clue on this from he remainder of 2 Timothy 3:16, which tells us that the scripture is useful for training, rebuke, correcting faults, and training in righteousness. The Bible can be all of those things without also being inerrant. In fact, we regularly manage to live our lives and learn new things while using resources that are not totally without error.

    Of course a more nuanced view of inerrancy is normally included in doctrinal statements. That version applies only to the autographs. Ehrman mentions this issue a few times. The following question comes from page 11:

    Even so, what is one to make of all these differences? If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture?

    While I agree with Elgin Hushbeck that we truly have substantially recovered the original text of the New Testament, I think that Ehrman’s question is relevant. Why must the autographs be inerrant, if we do not possess them?

    Let me illustrate. (I discuss this in greater detail in the tract What is the Word of God?.) God speaks to a prophet, the prophet verbalizes the message, a scribe copies the message at the prophet’s dictation, then other scribes copy that. Not all of these steps occur every time, but that is a good general view. Let’s assume that God speaks the message correctly. If the prophet errs in hearing the message, then we have a problem with inerrancy. If a scribe to whom the prophet is dictating the message errs in hearing or writing, we have a problem with inerrancy. But once the text has gotten to paper, papyrus, or parchment, there is no problem if the next copyist makes an error.

    Why? This certainly seems like the view of a textual society, where the written form is given priority. But no matter where the error is introduced, the result for us is the same–an error in the text as we possess it. And as most supporters of Biblical inerrancy would agree, we can get everything necessary from the Bible as we have it. So why worry about the state of autographs that we have never had?

    Thus I think textual criticism itself makes it pretty clear that one can deal with a text in which there are errors, and in which we have doubtful readings in those few cases where the evidence is not extremely strong.

  • God Delusion and The Bible

    The major complaint that I have about the treatment of the Bible in The God Delusion is that it is somewhat superficial. Particularly in the section on the Old Testament, Dawkins merely points out problems that we should recognize as real with scriptures. (For another approach see Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?.) I would say that someone who can read Judges 17-21 or Numbers 31 without serious concern has a problem with their moral compass.

    Passages such as those are a key reason why I do not look at the Bible using the “boy scout manual” metaphor. The Bible is almost completely unlike a boy scout manual or the instruction book for your car or an appliance. It is, instead the story of people experiencing God. (See my essay Inspiration, Inerrancy, and Authority.)

    I do not believe the inspiration of the Bible can be successfully argued outside the concept of the community. That doesn’t mean that there is nothing that can be said for or against. It simply means that acceptance of the Bible as a source of authority, and appropriate use of it must occur in a community of faith.

    One might expect that this would be an area in which I would spend the greatest portion of my time, since it is my specialty, but it would be hard for me to emphasize enough how un-earthshaking Dawkins’ arguments about the Bible actually are to me. They do bring up a serious point in terms of Christian education, however. There are many, many Christians who don’t know about these things and have never taken them into consideration in their own understanding of the Bible. They loudly proclaim that they keep every command in the Bible and do everything the Bible says, but very fortunately they don’t actually do that.

    Preachers and teachers who don’t want to deal with the difficult questions have a tendency to read only those portions of scripture that are easy to understand and will comfort the congregation. Some versions of the lectionary, for example, leave off the last two verses of Psalm 137 in reading because they will obviously disturb some members of the congregation, or don’t appear to fit with the rest of the reading. But one needs to face the fact that the did fit to the original author.

    I have blogged on this topic before: Slavery and the Bible, Biblical Decision Making, Slavery and the Bible Condensed, and The Danger of Unchanging Truth.

    One last thing, and this is addressed more to my fellow Christians, especially moderates and liberals, than to Dawkins or other atheists. It is not sufficient to tell someone that they should not take the Bible literally. There are many varieties of not taking the Bible literally. Take Numbers 31, for example. If you say not to take it literally, you might be suggesting that the story never happened, or that it did happen, but that Moses imagined God’s commands, or that the entire story was intended as an allegory (meaning what?), or perhaps that it’s historical but not normative. Again, I’ve blogged on this before here and here.

  • Hearing God’s Voice Redux

    When I was a teenager, I lived in Georgetown, Guyana with my parents who were missionaries. (My father was the Medical Director of Davis Memorial Hospital there, and my mother taught nursing off and on.) During that time I had an opportunity to go visit Kaieteur Falls. In those days one got to the park by flying in an aging DC-3 aircraft that was incredibly noisy We landed perhaps a mile away from the falls (I forget precisely how far–it’s been a couple of years since I was a teen!), the aircraft engines were shut off, but I continued to hear this roaring sound. I thought my ears were just ringing after the long noisy flight, but it turned out to be the sound of the falls in the distance. After some walking I came on a vantage point on the side of the gorge from which I could see the falls. It’s a shear 700 ft drop with additional distance fallen over the rocks. The river comes off of the savannah, and simply falls off a cliff. The sight is awesome. Coming upon it for the first time is a spiritual experience.

    I have tried to describe it a bit in the paragraph above, but I haven’t done that well. I have tried to describe it to others, but I can see in their eyes and hear in their voice that I have failed to truly catch the feeling of that first look at this spectacular falls. It is an experience that I treasure for myself, but that I always convey in a way that is substantially less than what I feel in telling it. I would love to return to Guyana and go see the falls again, experience that again. I suspect, however, that I would still fail to convey it to others.

    I have that same problem in discussing the study of the Bible. Why do I regularly read the Bible in the morning to start my day? Well, I can tell you that my day goes better when I do–and it does. I can tell you that I believe in such activity as a spritual discipline, and I do. I can make the abstract statement that I hear God’s voice in scripture–and I do. But as many times as I’ve talked about it, even to people who are Bible students, I find that rarely does the other person’s face light up, and their words express an understanding of that feeling of spending time with God in the Bible.

    After I had been away from the Lord and the church for 12 years after graduate school, I returned to Bible study. I’d remained acquainted with the scriptures, because I didn’t want to lose my Greek and Hebrew skills. But I had read, though not read the Bible. I went back to study by reading the gospel of Mark. Now I knew what the gospel of Mark said, but as I read it again, I found an excitement, an anxiety for the next chapter. I read the book slowly over the course of Lent. It was like seeing and hearing it all again, but refreshed, as though I had never heard it before. Again, this is an experience that seems to lose incredibly in the telling.

    I took a challenge once from my students in a class. I advocate reading a text multiple times for an overview and to fix the whole picture in your mind. They were finding the passage boring on the second or third pass through. I said I would take any passage, read it through multiple times, and tell them when I ceased to get something new out of it. The chosen passage was the Sermon on the Mount, and I read it 38 times in succession over the course of two weeks. There was some new line that I underlined, or some new marginal note on every reading. I think most serious Bible students will not find that at all remarkable. They’ll realize that on pass 38 I was still only scratching the surface. But there are others whose eyes glaze over when I relate that experience, and I know that yet again, I have failed to communicate what I feel.

    Then yesterday, I dropped by Adrian’s Blog, and found a link to this article by John Piper. Now those of you who have read this blog for some time will know that I have disagreed substantially with many of Adrian’s posts, and a few times John Piper’s name has come up in a negative light over some of the same issues. But as I read that article, the words jumped out at me, and I knew that the experience Piper was describing is essentially the same is mine, but described so much more effectively. That’s the experience of reading God’s word that I keep trying to describe, yet always fail.

    When I linked to the article, I had no idea that there would be the type of controversy that there seems to be over on Adrian’s blog. I wasn’t trying to make theological points or convert those who don’t believe the Bible is inspired. I was certainly not trying to put down anyone who hears God’s voice in other ways (such as on viewing a waterfall or in prayer) or who hear God speak on other subjects. Obviously I cannot in any way speak for John Piper, whose theological positions differ substantially from mine. But I didn’t read any of those negatives into either the article or Adrian’s post.

    There are those who should hear a correction in the article. I frequently encounter people who do not have the patience to seriously study the Bible, yet will take any amount of time and effort to get a “personal word from God.” They’ll travel to conferences, stand in line for hours, seek out “prophetic ministry services,” and buy large numbers of books, but they won’t get serious about the Bible. I don’t know why, though some tell me it’s a lack of time. It’s just too hard. I would hope that such people would hear John Piper’s article as a correction. It’s not that they should seek God’s voice in many different ways, but they need to seek it at the core as well.

    I can’t tell you how to grab hold of the experience, but I do suggest putting in time with the scriptures, taking the time to let the words sink in, and doing so prayerfully. Pray that your mind will be opened, and your will ready to obey what God will show you. I may not be able to fully convey the experience in words, but I will testify that it’s worth it.

  • ESV Endorsements

    I’ve written a considerable amount of negative stuff, not about the ESV itself, though I do have a few complaints, but about its supporters. Thus when a friend e-mailed me a new endorsement, I thought I’d take a look at why these endorsers regard the ESV so highly. The latest endorsement is ESV: the long-awaited Palmertree endorsement. The key thing about this endorsement is that, well, there is no key thing. It’s sort of an “I waited a long time and then got comfortable with it” kind of endorsement.

    He does, however, cite three other endorsements: John Piper, Philip Ryken, and Mark Driscoll. I’ve dealt with Mark Driscoll’s comments before (more recently here), though he has revised the material a bit, but the bottom line is still the same. After reading the other two, I have to say that they have added little, so I’m not going to go over them point by point.

    There are three elements in these endorsements of the ESV:

    1. Nostalgia
    2. Theological positions
    3. The allure of literal “accuracy”

    Nostalgia

    Nostalgia was something that drove the KJV only movment for years. Now many people who might earlier have been sort of gentle KJV advocates are realizing they need some modern version, and the ESV has proven the least shocking option. I actually have little problem with someone using a Bible for reasons of nostalgia. If you understand the ESV, and you enjoy it, go ahead and use it. The same thing goes for the KJV.

    Where I have a problem with nostalgia is in churches when its used for public reading and especially outreach. Too often church people regard something as obvious, clear, enjoyable, and downright cuddly and loveable, when most of the people who come through the door find it anything but. Consider your audience when choosing a Bible translation for use in the pews.

    Theological Positions

    First, I do not mean that one must not hold any theological positions, nor do I mean a position that holds the Bible to be inspired and accurate translation to be important. I have never run into anyone who doesn’t think the Bible should be translated accurately. Disagreements are about precisely what constitutes accuracy, and how one goes about achieving it.

    What I mean here, however, is selecting a Bible based on how well your favorite texts support your favorite theological positions. If you have carefully examined the source languages, and tested how the English expression would be understood, and you then regard the expression used as the best expression of the meaning (pause for breath!)–then that’s fine. But that’s not what I see argued. People simply announce that the Bible in question, especially the ESV, supports their conclusion. How about some linguistic arguments, assuming you endorsers are capable of presenting them.

    The Allure of Literal “Accuracy”

    I put accuracy in quotes because I think this is the great failing of this entire school of Bible translating. It’s an example of the one ended telephone cord approach to meaning. In communication, there is no “accuracy” except in terms of what the receiver actually receives. You may think “propitiation” is a wonderful word, which accurately conveys the meaning of the Greek word hilasterion, but if the hearer hears “blablabla” instead, no meaning is accurately conveyed.

    Of course, ESV advocates will announce that they can explain the word propitiation, and then the congregation will understand it. Well, so can the Bible translators, by translating hilasterion into something the readers understand in the first place. You complain that those using dynamic equivalence deny the readers the chance to decide for themselves. Well, all your process does is deny them the same choice by passing it on to their pastor, who has likely determined what “propitiation” means based on his church’s doctrinal statement.

    Accurate translation has to convey meaning accurately from the source language to the reader or hearer in the receptor language. I repeat what has become nearly a mantra for me: There is no accuracy in a vacuum. It’s only accurate communication if the hearer accurately hears it.

  • Comprehending Divine Inspiration

    I’ve been discussing translation in its relationship to inspiration over the last couple of days, and I just wanted to present a couple of thoughts on how we think about inspiration, especially in practical terms. By “thinking in practical terms” I mean the way in which we apply our understanding of inspiration in our application of what we learn from inspired writings. I had my attention directed to this issue when I discussed inspiration with a friend of mine who believes in inerrancy. We expressed considerable disagreement when we defined inspiration and discussed how it worked, but in the vast majority of controversial texts, we found that our interpretations were identical.

    This is the similar to the conclusion I have come to about translation, though I would say that one’s beliefs about inspiration are of almost no value as a predictor of that person’s translation philosophy, while they are a predictor to some extent of how one will carry out interpretation. They are, however, less accurate of a predictor than I would imagine had I not done a little informal testing.

    I think the problem here is with the way in which we talk about inspiration. We do so in an extremely God-centered (source centered) way. Now being God-centered is not a bad thing, but in this case it can be misleading. I would suggest that while our theories of inspiration center around God and what he can and does do, our processes and principles of interpretation generally center around us as human beings and what we can do. This shouldn’t be surprising, considering the amount of effort that must go into understanding any message, especially the message of scripture.

    No matter how accurately we believe God gave the message, in practical terms the issue is much more how accurately we can understand it. Let’s say that 2% of the message of the New Testament is lost by copyists. I think that number is fairly high, because that is closer to the percentage of the text that is in dispute. But even if that is the case, I suspect that if we compare interpretations, we will see that a much higher percentage must be lost by somebody in the process of interpretation.

    I think this extends to the great divide between types of revelation, even the big one between general and special revelation. The question is not in the accuracy of the content, but rather in what is to be conveyed, and how well we are capable of understanding it. I would presume God would write his character quite perfectly in nature (though we have the ever-present question of the fall), and yet that may be the hardest message to interpret. Some people prefer the immediate revelation of modern prophets or of dreams and visions. I too believe that God is as capable of speaking today as ever, and as likely to do so, but in that case we have the additional burden of deciding on the authenticity of the message, and we still need to interpret what we hear, especially if it is a vision or dream.

    This is one of the reasons I opposed the doctrine of inerrancy. It seems to be a way of guarding the barn door after the cattle have departed. Interpretation has gone in a thousand directions while some are arguing that the message was absolutely correct at the starting point. In addition, somehow it’s OK for us to lose part of the source in the process of copying–something acknowledged when inerrancy is postulated solely of the conveniently missing autographs–and yet if one supposes that instead something got altered on the way from God to the prophet, all revelation must immediately fall apart.

    Revelation is of value when I comprehend and apply it, and assertions of its validity apart from adding the line “and you can understand it” seem pointless to me. I think that is part of the point of the wisdom literature in the Bible. It’s God’s message, but you have to think about it and comprehend it. Who you are, and how you have exercised your mind will make a difference.

    No matter whether you are listening to a new idea, a message someone claims to have received directly from God, or the interpretation of a passage of scripture, your individual mind, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, is the final filter to separate sense from nonsense. Even the firmest believer in the detailed accuracy of the text of scripture will realize that many interpreations of that scripture are nonsense.

  • Translation and Inspiration

    In posting recently on translation I’ve noticed that many people connect one’s idea of inspiration with one’s approach to translation. The assumption seems to be that a person who believes in some form of verbal inspiration, especially verbal plenary inspiration, will necessarily favor a formal, word-by-word, or literal translaltion. Of these terms I prefer formal, in that the most literal translations do not manage a word-by-word equivalence, but rather account for the grammatical form and structure of the source language in the form and structure of the text in the receptor language as far as possible.

    My own involvement in these debates sometimes tends to foster that very viewpoint. I have a non-verbal view of inspiration, in that I believe God inspires messengers with messages through various experiences, which may include a verbally dictated component, rather than dictating words. In Ezekiel 1, for example, my understanding is that God presented Ezekiel with a vision and Ezekiel searched for the words with which to present what he had seen, accounting for the slightly confused nature of the text. Because of my view of inspiration, one might assume that I would support a theory of translation that is message based rather than individual word based.

    (more…)