Taking the Bible Seriously (Can We All Agree to Do That?)

Perhaps you’ve seen Jordan Harrell’s beautiful piece about Biblical Interpretation. It’s been posted on multiple social media sites. And it’s quite brilliant, especially in these days when it feels like the Bible is being weaponized more than ever.

I am an ordained, seminary-educated pastor in the PCUSA denomination. Many people do not recognize my ordination or authority based on their interpretation of the Bible. Many of us pick and choose verses to support what we already believe about everything from divorce to abortion to to spanking children.

I take the Bible seriously. Ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek were requirements for my ordination, with the expectation that I would use those languages to study specific words and phrases and contexts in the Bible from the oldest available sources.

(NOTE: No “original scrolls” of the Bible exist so when people say, “Let’s just look at the original scripture” perhaps they haven’t heard that the oldest scripture we have was discovered in 1947 in Qumran near the Dead Sea Scrolls and those scrolls were written sometime between 150 BCE to 70 CE.)

Also, those scrolls do not include the whole “Old Testament.” The oldest complete set of scrolls for the whole Hebrew scriptures found so far are The Leningrad Codex which was written in either 1008 or 1009 C.E.

There are many Christian traditions of believers who say they take the Bible seriously (Exhibit A: Congregations that call themselves “Bible Churches.”) and yet most of us use only one translation of scripture which – can we all admit – will be biased according to the theology of the translators. For example, a word in Hebrew or Greek might have multiple meanings in English but the translator has to pick one.

This makes a huge difference when the Hebrew word used to foresee the birth of the Messiah in Isaiah 7:14 is almah (עַלְמָה). This word can mean “young woman” or just “woman” or “virgin.” The person who jotted down the Gospels of Matthew and Luke translated Isaiah 7:14 to be “virgin.” Therefore we have centuries of veneration for the Blessed Virgin Mary when her virginity is based on the translation of a single word in Hebrew that could also be translated “woman.”

(Another Note: I happen to believe Mary was a virgin because God can do anything, but my faith is not dependent on Mary’s virginity.)

Okay – back to earth and taking the Bible seriously. I am a big fan of Jordan Harrell, a writer in Texas who also wrote The Deconstruction Diaries which you can read here. In her search for a deconstructed faith in Jesus, she tells this story.

In a nutshell, she had left a Church of Christ congregation and had joined a Southern Baptist congregation where they used the Awana Curriculum for teaching children. In the course of volunteering for Awana, Jordan includes this quote from one of the other Awana leaders:

“You have to be really careful about translations. I mean, some versions just totally disgust me with how many liberties they take with the Bible. It’s not even the Word of God by the time they get done with it. KJV is really the only one I trust.”

When people ask me what translation I use, I tell them that it depends. If I want an easy-to-understand version, I go with The Message which is actually not a translation although Eugene Peterson studied the Hebrew and Greek as he wrote it in conversational English. If I’m writing a sermon, I use my New Revised Version Study Bible and a Hebrew/Greek Interlinear Bible.

If I’m suggesting a translation for someone else, I suggest reading all of them. Don’t be afraid of the King James Version or the New Jerusalem Bible or the New Revised Version or the New American Standard Bible. Read them all. Look under and around and beneath all those translations and compare and contrast. And if you really want to do your research, you can learn how to read Hebrew and Greek words online.

This is a long way to get to my point: the Bible is not a weapon. I’m convinced that people who use it as a weapon don’t actually read it. They don’t take it seriously.

Someone I hope you will all check out and take seriously is Jordan Harrell. She speaks the Truth in love and she is still searching which I hope is true for each of us.