It is All in the Interpretation

  As I begin my course on the New Testament, the first lesson is covering several chapters in both textbooks explaining how the written Bible came to be and what happened with each new version, leading to multiple interpretations of the same texts.

Now as you might expect, the first way everything in the Bible was shared with others was by word of mouth, dances, or songs. There were very few who could write and even fewer that could read. The main problem with this interpretation was that words could be changed from one person to the next. Perhaps they didn’t exactly remember what that person in that other town said when they asked them to pass it on. Reminds me of the telephone game where a group sits in a circle and the leader whispers something in the ear of the person next to them, then they have to pass it on to the next until it comes back to the leader. More often than not, what was whispered to the leader when it gets back around, was not what they had said.

Once the words were being written down, copying of the words often led to missing words, or new words inserted, so that once the original was worn out and one of the copies was used, it might not be the correct interpretation of the original.

After a while, it was decided to start gathering certain books together, but who got to decide which books and which interpretations? The Pharisees and other leaders of the church did agree that the first five books in the Tanakh (Torah, Nev’im & Ketuvim) were the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and  Deuteronomy.) These were attributed to Moses as the author and included the Teachings/Laws. The next set is the Nev’im for the prophets and finally the Ketuvim for the writings, such as the Psalms and the Proverbs.

After Christianity began, the gospels and letters from Paul and other early leaders created a New Testament. The division between the Old Testament of things before Christ, and the New Testament of things after Him, created a larger division of the new Christians from the Jewish people. In addition, the New Testament often looked at old prophecies in a new way as predictions of the coming of the Christ that had already come and been raised from the dead, whereas the Tanakh kept them as stories from the past, or predictions of a Messiah that is still coming. So two different interpretations of the same words.

Soon, the early Christian church found themselves in the same position of needing to decide which books would be in the Bible and which would not. Even now there are some different styles of the Bible, but the standard is 66 books with 39 Old Testament and 27 New Testament.

In the early 1500s, the Reformation began with people believing that everyone should have access to the writings, not just the priests of the Roman Catholic Church. Martin Luther, John Calvin and others began writing and printing translations so that people with different languages would have written texts to refer to when questions came up. The new printing presses made the copying easier, with fewer mistakes from hand copying. However, if you have ever taken any language classes, you know that words don’t cross over directly word for word.  For example. In English, we say Please. In Spanish, it is Por Favor. In French, it is Si Vous Plait, or S’Il Plait. In German, it is Bitte.

Even in English, the Bibles has been transformed multiple times from the King James version, through the Revised Standard and on to the Living Bible, to any number of versions since. Each interpretation is trying to make the words easier for the current readers to understand, but you sometimes wonder just what has been lost since the words were spoken all those thousands of years ago.

Your sister in Christ,

Teresa Cooksey