How’s That?

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

June 5, 2011

How’s That?

2 Timothy 3:16-17

For all scripture inspired of God is profitable to teach,

to reprove,

to chastise,

[for] to learn in rightwiseness,

that the man of God be perfect,

learned to all good work

[learned to all good works].

Wycliffe Bible, late 14th century

All scripture is given by inspiration of God,

and is profitable for doctrine,

for reproof,

for correction,

for instruction in righteousness:

That the man of God may be perfect,

thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

King James Version, 1611

All scripture is inspired by God

and is useful for teaching,

for reproof,

for correction,

and for training in righteousness,

so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient,

equipped for every good work.

New Revised Standard Version

Every part of Scripture is God-breathed

and useful one way or another—

showing us truth,

exposing our rebellion,

correcting our mistakes,

training us to live God's way.

Through the Word we are put together

and shaped up for the tasks God has for us.

Eugene Peterson, The Message

An archeologist walks into her office.

Books, manuscripts and scrolls

that span the centuries fill the room,

spilling over in bookshelves,

and covering tables along every wall.

On her cluttered desk is her newest find.

It looks so ordinary: a piece of paper.

A piece of yellowed paper with faded black ink markings.

It’s an ancient letter,

a letter written 400 years before,

written back in the year 2011;

Back then this particular type of letter

was called an “e-mail”.

She found the letter quite by accident

as she was paging through a book in the library

of the university where she teaches.

Few people browse the stacks of libraries anymore,

but she loves to look at all the books

printed on paper, bound in cloth,

smelling slightly musty, mildly inky.

She just happened to open a book at random,

a college textbook of some sort.

There in the pages of the book

she found the letter.

Perhaps a student had placed it in the book after reading it,

using it to mark a page as he or she worked on a paper,

and then forgetting all about it.

She was eager to decipher the markings,

eager to learn what the markings meant,

what the letter said.

The letter was in English,

which was not her native tongue,

so she began the arduous task of translating each word.

Happily, it was a short letter, about 30 words,

and within an hour she had all the words translated.

Now came the more difficult part:

What did the words mean?

The very first word baffled her.

Was it a person’s name?

It was in the line that looked like a greeting,

but it didn’t sound like a name she was familiar with.

D-U-D-E: “Dude”.

It sounded odd, and unfamiliar.

She’d come back to it later.

Next came what seemed to be a sentence:

“OMG amazing concert last night.”

OMG?

O-M-G.

Was it a word?

Was it the name of the performer at the concert?

Was the “o” long or short?

She knew her ancient English relatively well,

but just six words into the letter

and she already had two words she didn’t understand.

Then came the next sentence:

“So cool chillin’ with you after the show.”

Finally, a sentence that made sense,

a sentence where the words and the meaning were clear:

obviously, the letter writer and the recipient

had been very cold after the concert.

                 

There was nothing on the paper to tell her

where the letter was written,

but perhaps it had been written in place like Buffalo New York

which she understood used to get a lot of snow.

She then read the last sentence:

”I can’t believe I forgot my wallet.

That was so lame.

My bad.”

She wondered what or who

had the disability that resulted in lameness?

And what did a disability have to do with the wallet?

And “My bad” – My bad… what?

It sounded like an incomplete sentence,

as though words were missing that would have

completed the thought:

“My bad memory was the reason I forgot my wallet.”

That was all there was to the message in the letter.

But it ended in an odd way,

with what seemed to be a code.

First came the letter “C”,

followed by the letter “U”;

then came a semi-colon followed by a right parenthesis.

CU ;)                                            

What could those symbols mean?

Were they the marks of a fraternal organization,

which she understood were popular

on some college campuses back then?

Or were they marks of some sort of religious movement?

They might have even been signs

of some mysterious cult.

This letter would require more work

so she could figure out just what the writer

had been saying to his or her reader;

two people long lost to history,

one of them with the curious name, “Dude”.

Translating words from one language to another

is much more difficult than we might think!

Word usage, styles,

tense, sentence structure all complicate a translation.

Word usages change over time as well;

Words that were popular when I was in high school

now just elicit laughter:

“groovy”, “fab”, “outasight”.

Imagine having to translate words from languages

more than two thousand years old.

The books of the New Testament were written in Greek,

not modern Greek

but the language spoken and written 2,000 years ago.

The books of the Old Testament were written in Hebrew;

not contemporary Hebrew,

but the language written and spoken almost 3,000 years ago.

If you were to look at an ancient scroll

with Hebrew or Greek letters from a book

found in the Old or New Testament,

you’d see a string of letters:

No spaces, no punctuation:

no periods, commas,

question marks, quotation marks.

Nothing to tell us that these four letters make a word,

that these eight words make a sentence,

that these six sentences make a paragraph.

The chapters,

the paragraphs,

the verses –

all those things we now take for granted

when we read the Bible:

Translators have had to figure them out over the centuries.

They aren’t there in the original texts.

For that matter, we don’t even have the original texts.

We don’t have the original gospel of Matthew,

the original scroll of Jonah,

Paul’s original letter to the Romans.

What we have are copies of copies of copies.

And some copies don’t agree with other copies:

each copy was made by hand,

and some copyists may have chosen

to add or delete words or even sentences.

                                                     

As an example, there are three different endings to Mark’s gospel:

the original,

and then two subsequent attempts to provide a different ending,

one we now call “The Shorter Ending”,

and the other we call “The Longer Ending”.

This is why we have so many different variations of the Bible.

Each is an attempt to translate the words faithfully,

but there are significant differences among the many translations,

just as you heard in the four different versions of our lesson.  

This is why we need to keep an open mind and an open heart

as we read the Bible.

It is why we cannot read the Bible as the literal word of God;

It is why we read it instead as the inspired word,

relying on God’s Holy Spirit to help us understand.

It is why we are always learning

and why we must never stop learning.

In 1604 fifty scholars were appointed by King James the First

to come up with a new translation of the Bible,

a translation in the English language.

The fifty scholars worked diligently for seven years.
They often disagreed on just how to translate passages,

but they worked through their differences

and completed their work in 1611: the King James Bible.

It is a magnificent, lyrical, poetic, rhythmic.

But over the four centuries since

we’ve learned much about the languages of the Bible,

and so we continue our work translating the Bible.

More than seventy scholars worked on the New Revised Standard Version,

the Bible I read from the pulpit,

and the Bible we have in our pews.

But before long another group of scholars

will almost certainly gather to labor again

to take a fresh look at language,

at usages, at idioms,

and they’ll come up with yet another translation.

Each new translation is an effort to provide us

with more accurate and faithful texts

to help us understand more fully the word of God.

Each new translation helps us understand more fully

so we can follow more faithfully

the will of God.

Thanks be to God for the word of the Lord!

AMEN