Last year as part of my lead in for the sessions on: Opening the Book of Faith , I wrote a presentation about A Brief History of Bible Translations. One of the first things I talked about was the problem of Dynamic versus Functional translation, basically do you want a word for word translation or one which captures the spirit of the passage. Each has its virtues and shortcomings. I next talked about the problems of lexical elaboration or why some cultures have multiple words to describe an object or concept, the classic example is the different words that Eskimo culture has for snow.
Our Pastors have talked in their sermons about the single word in English, which we translate as love is actually three different words in Greek, Eros , philos and agape. We are also aware of the concept of TIME in Greek being represented by two separate words, kyros and chronos , meaning God's time and time measured by man. Since the SPCA, PETA and the Michael Vick haters do not want me to continue flogging a dead horse. Let me write about some other words from the Greek that translators have wrestled with.
The first one comes to us thanks the King James and his Authorized Translation of the Holy Bible. This is the dear Bible many of us grew up with, and it has an interesting history. For those of you curious about that history, I highly recommend God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible , by Adam Nicolson. If a camel is a race horse designed by a committee then you will appreceiate the problems of the KJV after reading Nicolson. But I digress ! The first word I want to talk about is Church. A word dear to you who are reading this posting. After all, we are members of a church and we attend a church. and all this comes from a single word, kirk being used to describe the assembled gathering, in Greek ecclesia.
Saint Paul talks about 'being one body in Christ' (Romans 12:5) and 'being baptised into one body' (I Cor 12:13). The word he uses to describe the early gatherings of Christians is ecclesia, and it meant the gathering of people, not the building. This is simply because the early groups met in other member's homes. There was no special building for worship, churches did not come into being for several hundred years and those were primarily pagan temples which were converted for worship when Christianity became the religion of the land, after Constantine.
What bothers me is that we tend to have greater concern for the building than for the gathering within the building. There are all manner of issues which distract us from our relationship with both God and the members of the 'Body of Christ'. All to often, when there is a division, we tend to take sides. We want God to be on our side rather than to on God's side of a discussion. Again we see the flat learning curve for Christians, Paul found himself writing to the various ecclesia that he founded where there were arguments about who had the most important spiritual gifts or was it allowable to eat food from a pagan Temple. Today we get caught up in such important aguments as: should we have carpet in the entire worship area, what style of worship is better or who should visit the sick in the hospital. I feel that we should not get caught up in the WWJD mentality, but should gather together in the ecclesia to pray and discuss the matter. But then that is just one man's opinion.
Peace,
Clyde
No comments:
Post a Comment