I’m not picking on anyone in particular here.
We talk about the Bible as “God’s Word.”
Chances are these days, if some brand of English is your native tongue, you received a really bad education. You aren’t entirely to blame for a certain level of ignorance because the entire Western Civilization has tried its damndest to prevent you from understanding reality. So you bring this messed up background to the Bible.
You see it is printed with English words on paper. Naturally, you assume it can be read like any other printed material. Maybe it’s fiction, fact, fable, or a mixture of things. There’s some obvious poetry of beauty and some very dry prose narrative, and everything in between. Some of it is really good literature, fine story telling.
Some of it is perplexing, but you figure you can understand most of it. I would agree that you could probably understand the parts that really matter for someone who isn’t familiar with the message of the book. If you happen to be well educated, chances are you’ll really screw it up and not have a clue, because you’ll be reading that fine education back into an alien document. Instead, you’ll be utterly convinced you really do understand it, perhaps better than a lot of folks who seem to take it more seriously than you do. Not much anyone can do to help you understand better if that’s the case.
The part about it being “God’s Word” is that He is able to use those words to touch people, though He clearly isn’t doing that for everyone who reads it. For those whom the book touches something inside them, the distinction God makes between one or another isn’t really explained, but it is normalized in a sense. We get used to it. We might imagine there are things we can do about that, or maybe we understand it’s really not our problem in the final analysis. Either way, for some of us this book is the voice of God.
Suppose your copy says “Holy Bible” and you notice there are lots of different versions that don’t say that. Please don’t be so dense as to think that label “Holy” makes it really all that different. It’s just advertising. Insofar as one English translation is holy, all are. No group of translators was somehow holier than others; they were all humans. Yes, there are some really bad translations into English, but not very many. The most popular translations tend to be close enough that you probably won’t notice that much difference in the actual content, just how it comes across in terms of the flavoring of English. So, for example, the New American Standard is obviously slanted toward American English, while the New English Bible is slanted toward British readers.
So when a British version says “corn”, an American says “grain.” Hint: Folks in the Ancient Near East never saw that stuff properly called “maize” that grows on fat grass stalks and forms multiple heads of grain covered in leafy husks and silky padding. All their grains grew on thin, short grassy stalks and formed single heads without much covering, stuff we might call wheat and barley for the most part.
Little stuff like that can trip you up in one sense, but for the most part, it’s not a big problem. You still might not understand why Abraham demanded his servant Eliezer place his hand under Abraham’s thigh to swear an oath. But it’s much worse than that. Maybe you’ll read the book of Revelation and wonder if John was on drugs. Or maybe you’ll encounter some Christians who interpret Revelation rather literally and act like they are on drugs.
Even if you studied this stuff for years and read lots of books by really fine Bible scholars, with all their differing interpretations, you could still not have a clue what John was writing about. That’s because the majority of the Bible scholars aren’t really that much smarter than you. They know more stuff, but it’s not better stuff. They still think with that crappy Western education.
Sure, we have to take the book seriously. But the words printed on paper are not magical. Quoting it word for word might be emotionally moving for some folks, but that’s not the same as the moving of the Holy Spirit. There’s nothing magical about any particular translation, not even if you quote it in the original languages. A classical Western education in translation still misses some of the most important elements in understanding the Bible. If you don’t understand the Hebrew culture of the people who wrote it, you have no idea what the book meant to them. Moreover, if you don’t understand how the Hebrew mind operated, you really are lost. If you don’t understand how thoroughly different the Hebrew mind worked in contrast to anyone raised under Western Civilization, you are in good company, but you are still utterly lost when reading the Bible.
Yes, you’ll understand the important part that Jesus died for your sins and that He will some day come back for you, whether you are dead or alive. You’ll understand that God intends to work in your life, but you won’t have a clue what to expect. Your entire mental frame of reference is attuned to such a huge package of lies, you can’t possibly imagine how utterly far you are from what the Bible is trying to say.
I’ll give you a hint: The revelation of God in the Bible isn’t simply the words as you read them English. There is nothing sacred about any translation because that isn’t what God used to publish His Word. Nor is there anything particularly sacred about the words in their original language, nor in the original copies, because we have no originals. What we have is a reasonable and functional approximation. But the revelation of God is not simply in the words in any language, but His revelation includes the peculiar intellectual assumptions of the people who wrote it. If you have no idea what makes an ancient Hebrew mind different from any Western mind, you are missing out on God’s revelation.
Without that Hebrew mindset, you do not have the Word of God.
That’s what A Course in Biblical Mysticism was all about.
