justice (2017/11/26)
My friend Adina Whitcomb joins me by recording on this week's extended episode to talk about the book of Esther. We're going to really get stuck into the story and the character of Esther, and allow her to challenge us from across the millennia to make our world a more Godly place now.
Read transcript
We are joined by Amos, the social justice prophet, who contends that #PoorLivesMatter with the most scathing and uncompromising messages in the prophetic canon. Plus, a brief look at how That Verse in 2 Timothy 3 teaches us how not to use it, and verses like it.
Join the discussion on Facebook, listen via iTunes or Stitcher, or find us in your usual podcatcher (courtesy of TuneIn). If you're enjoying the show, you could even leave a review, and share the podcast on social media!
Links
The Biblical Prophets vs. #AllLivesMatter, James McGrath.
Authorship of the Pastoral Letters, publisher's extract from Powell, Mark Alan (2009); Introducing the New Testament; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
Earlier this year I deleted a comment from this page that was made in bad faith. It was a shame, because there was an interesting question buried in the abusive rhetoric. It focused on the NET translation, and how one can rely on the translators' notes while still disagreeing with the translators' final choices. (See the NET Bible translation of 2 Timothy 3 [note 24], online: https://lumina.bible.org/bible/2+Timothy+3.)
ReplyDeleteI've decided to restore most of my reply to that question, as it helpfully clarifies my comments on the 2 Timothy passage in this episode.
As study Bibles go, the NET is without peer when it comes to text critical notes. When it comes to exegesis, though, it skews hard right into conservative Evangelicalism. In this case, the translators have a vested interest in preserving probably the only verse in all of scripture that can be made to comment on the inspiration of the whole Bible: even if it can't possibly have been intended that way.
Why? Because the Bible didn't exist at the time of Paul! If we accept Pauline authorship for Timothy, many of the books of the New Testament hadn't even been written yet (probably only Paul's letters and maybe Mark's gospel). The first versions of a 'New Testament canon' were at least 110 years away, and the Hebrew Bible canon was 140 years away. However, there were a whole lot of Jewish religious writings ("scripture") in regular use by one or more sects of Second Temple Judaism. Not all of these scriptures were widely considered to be inspired, and as a Pharisee, Paul's list of "inspired scripture" likely looked very similar to what later was canonised by the Rabbis in the third century. Paul's point to Timothy in the letter has been all about the need to teach and believe in sound doctrine: hence Timothy was to respect and utilise "all inspired scripture," not 'every writing kicking around claiming divine authority'.
My point in the short segment on the podcast was that ignoring the historical and narrative context of a verse in order to use it to prove an ideological point is not a good way to use scripture. Proof-texting is a bad habit, and as someone who grew up doing it I've been gradually trying to deprogram myself. Ultimately, the NET Bible translators made a decision about 2 Timothy 3:16 that included a specific theological and epistemological bias. Their post hoc rationalisation about parallelism in the verse is a bit weak IMO, and the alternative presented by the REB is certainly no less plausible.
As with most fully-inflected languages, meaning in classical Greek is dependent more on grammar than word order. The REB follows translators of the Revised Version (1881) in this verse.