Episcopalians and the Bible

First, I want to talk to you briefly.

I could do this for hours and nobody would care, but I want to talk to you briefly about how we got the Bible.

Nick is going to talk to you briefly about how we got the English version of the Bible, and then we're going to conclude with ways in which Episcopalians, Christians at large, can be faithfully using the Bible.

Does that make sense?

So buckle your seat belts, because again, I'm naturally long-winded, so I'm going to try to compress.

A long, long, long time ago, fewer than 1% of people were literate.

So what we know is that the stories that we have in books like Genesis and Deuteronomy and Numbers were oral tradition to begin with.

These were stories that people heard and more than likely told around campfires.

They're exciting stories.

So quite honestly, the difference between Leviticus and Genesis, if you've ever read them, is that you don't want to read Leviticus.

Genesis is stories that have been passed down time over time over time, and they're meant to tell us really who are human beings and who is God, and how are we supposed to relate to one another and to God.

One way we can read stories is to say, ah, all the stories are trying to tell us literally how things came to be.

But the earliest sources will tell you, as will any good storyteller, you never tell the same story twice identically if you're a good storyteller.

It's all about context.

And a story doesn't have to be true to convey the truth.

Why do I say that?

Because Genesis chapter 1 talks about God creating the world in a completely different order, with a completely different vocabulary, with a completely different meaning than Genesis 2, which talks about God creating the world.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

They're not competing stories.

They're stories that are trying to convey a heavy truth that is so heavy that it can't be confined to one version.

Now, here I'm already telling you how Episcopalians use the Bible, but what's important is our predecessors in faith found both versions of the story so helpful they preserved them both.

They didn't say one's better than the other.

They said, we need both.

When do we think Scripture began to be written down?

Probably sometime around the reign of King Solomon.

Solomon was really the first king who was presiding over an already united kingdom.

David, his father, had united the kingdoms, but Solomon inherited that.

And Solomon invented, you can read this in the Bible itself, bureaucracy.

And so he employed lots and lots of scribes.

We actually have a ton of manuscripts.

Most of them are transactional, like nine bags of flax traded for a boat or a daughter.

Most ancient manuscripts are bank records.

But around the time of King Solomon, there was enough stability in the monarchy, in the kingdoms, to start to record the stories that were the most meaningful.

Curiously enough, the way and the kinds of stories that chose to be recorded evolved quite a bit.

So one of the things that's really interesting is in the United Kingdoms, and after Solomon dies, the kingdom split in half.

Well, really, they split into two twelfths and ten twelfths.

The top ten are called Israel, the bottom two are called Judah.

They have similar stories, but they use different names.

In the south, they call Jacob Israel.

In the north, they call Jacob Jacob.

In the South, they have a name for God that sounds like.

In the north, they have a name for God, Elohim.

The northern people end up getting wiped out.

The southerners use Elohim instead.

So there's this evolution in thought that's happening in the books themselves.

Any introduction to the Hebrew Bible class you take will tell you that Moses, if he wrote the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, he collected sources and wrote those down.

So Moses didn't make them up, he was the scribe.

And by the way, that's a pretty fair claim.

We didn't make up these stories, we wrote them down.

What's really interesting is by the 600s in BC, Hebrew was already a dead language.

So most of our scriptures originally are written in the Hebrew language, and Hebrew was like Sanskrit.

The only people who knew it were priests.

By the 600s, the language became Aramaic.

Now all of our oldest documents are written in Hebrew except for Daniel.

The book of Daniel is half written in Aramaic.

We have not found a Hebrew version that contains all of Daniel.

Again, it's a dead language by the time of that.

People had to make choices in the marketplace.

What stories are most formative?

What stories tell us who we're meant to be?

We have to make those choices now.

What's very, very fascinating about Scripture and its history is that some scriptures seem to disagree with others.

And in the tradition of Scripture, Bible doesn't mean one book, it means books plural.

So part of our tradition with the Bible is that there are compelling stories because truth is really hard to just pin down.

Truth is usually more robust than a single statement, and there's tension.

Just to give you an example, books like Ezra and Nehemiah say, non-Jewish people are bad.

Get rid of them.

So if you've married somebody from Egypt or Canaan and had children with them, put them away.

They will corrupt you.

And then there's books like Jonah, Joshua, and Ruth, in which the heroines and the heroes are Canaanite people.

Their faith is greater than the faith of the Hebrew people.

Which one's right?

Well, of course they're both right.

And that's part of the recognition.

When we have small children, we want to protect them from influences that they're too young to deal with.

So I would tell you, I don't want my child exposed to pornography when she's five.

In fact, that's child abuse, right?

So I will keep her away from that.

Hopefully, I want to prepare her for the day in which she will enter the global place where that exists and she'll know how to deal with it.

We don't live in quarantine forever.

So sometimes we need to step back so we can be ready to step forward.

And I want to tell you, I think the tension is there in the books.

What's really interesting that we're often unaware of is rabbis have always disagreed with the scriptures, disagreed with one another, come to the synagogue with the purpose of disagreeing, and agreed to come back next week.

This is the case.

It's really interesting.

Our scriptures, the oldest versions in the Hebrew Bible, appear to have been written in Hebrew, as they told you Daniel in Aramaic, which by the way tells you Daniel is much newer than the rest of the Bible.

There came a point when people weren't even understanding Aramaic anymore.

They were only speaking Greek because Alexander of Macedon conquered the known world at the time and said, Y'all are learning Greek.

So there came a point where people realized their scriptures were in a dead language that only the elite could read and understand.

It was not helpful to tell the stories in a dead language.

They needed a vernacular.

So they embarked on this huge project of translating the scriptures from Hebrew into Greek.

They took 70 rabbis, 70, brought them all to Alexandria, the most educated city in the world, and said, each one of you go to a locked cell and translate Hebrew to Greek.

And then we'll compare what you've done.

The story says, 70 rabbis agreed at every single point how to do this.

Which is a miracle because two Jewish people can never agree on anything.

So 70 people, by the way, the rabbis tell it that way.

I didn't make that up.

That's why it's called the Septuagint.

So when we read even the New Testament, Paul the Apostle never quotes Hebrew.

He only ever quotes the Greek scriptures.

Same with Matthew and with Mark and with Luke and with John.

They never quote Hebrew.

They always quote Greek.

What's really interesting that even the original authors figured out, and the people who are using these scriptures, and you know this, even if you took two years of Spanish, every time you translate a language, you necessarily interpret it.

So, and just to play this off, ancient Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew has 10,000 words total.

Biblical Greek has a hundred thousand words.

Hebrew is word poor, Greek is word rich.

Hebrew has artistic interpretation because verbs are often implied.

Tenses are sometimes implied and there's ambiguity.

Greek has more tenses than English does.

So how do you take this and make it that?

You have to interpret it.

People were very aware of this.

So I'm going to give you an example that may sound controversial.

The prophet Isaiah says, A virgin will give birth, and you'll call his name Emmanuel.

Well, virgin means something to us because of Greek.

Virgin is a sexual category.

In Hebrew, there's no word for that.

In Hebrew, the word means a young woman, which means under the age of 30.

So what the Greek folks did is they said, young is also a sexual category.

In Hebrew, not necessarily the case.

I'm not saying they're wrong.

I'm saying every interpret every translation is an interpretation.

That's happened from the beginning.

One of the things we also failed to recognize is that when our Jewish brothers and scriptures, uh sisters, read the scriptures, they don't just read the text.

There's actually four columns on a Jewish page.

There's the scripture, rabbinic commentary on the scripture, rabbinic commentary on the rabbinic commentary, and then something called Midrash, which is, boy, the scripture doesn't, there's like a blank here, and I wonder if it didn't happen like this.

So for example, maybe you've heard of this lady called Lilith.

Lilith was the first woman.

She wanted to dominate Adam.

That's not in the Bible.

That's on the Jewish page at the bottom.

It's called Midrash.

People made it up.

Now, was it inspired by God?

I'm not going to dicker with that, but it's made up.

The other interesting thing is rabbinic commentary never agrees with itself.

In fact, there's something really interesting about the Jewish use of scriptures.

If Rabbi Gamaliel says it means X, almost always they include Rabbi Akiva who said, not X, but Y.

So that there is on every page dissent.

Because truth with a capital T is too big to be pinned down in one story.

So what happened?

Our Jewish brothers and sisters gave us this heritage, and around the time of Jesus there were some different groups.

Some groups said, look, we're only reading the books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Some other groups said, okay, those are the most important.

But there's also these prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, etc., and they seem like they've got really good things to say.

So let's include those.

Secondary importance, but let's read those too.

And there's these books called the Psalms.

It was the hymnal of the priests.

Let's read those.

And what's interesting is if you're Jewish, Psalms are the least important part of the Bible to this day.

But if you're Christian, they're the most important part of the Hebrew Bible.

There was disagreement about which scriptures were inspired by God at the time of Jesus.

The fact that Jesus goes around quoting the prophets and the Psalms reveals to you he is a Pharisee and not a Sadducee.

Sadducees did not read anything but Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

At the time of Jesus, most people couldn't read.

If you wanted to be a bar mitzvah, a son of the commandment, at the time of Jesus, the rabbis pulled out from the first five books of the Bible 613 commands.

You had to memorize all those commands.

If you knew them all, then you could be a son of the commandment.

What about women?

They weren't allowed to study the Torah.

So you could be illiterate, but have memorized huge swaths of rules, and it's very likely then that Jesus, when he turned 13, knew all those things.

We don't think that the Jewish Bible got set until around the year 80 CE.

That's AD.

So that's 50 years after Jesus, before the Hebrew Bible's done.

We know for sure that our New Testament doesn't get fixed until 381, to give you an idea.

381.

Now there's earlier versions about what's in, what's out, but that the total final version we've got doesn't get set until 381.

And something happens in those 300 years.

People don't speak Greek anymore.

It becomes a dead language.

So what do they have to do?

Translate it into the lingua franca, the vernacular, which is Latin.

Really interesting thing happens.

Saint Jerome, really interesting guy, doesn't just consult Greek-speaking people.

He brings in rabbis.

He goes not just from Greek to Latin, he goes from Hebrew to Latin.

He did one of the most astonishing, inclusive activities done before, and he made some crazy mistakes.

So maybe you've seen the statue of Moses in Rome.

Michelangelo made it.

Moses has two horns coming out of his head, like the Greek god Pan.

That's because when Jerome translated the Bible into the vulgar language, that's why it's called the Vulgate, Latin was vulgar, not refined.

Moses goes up on top of the mountain, and when he comes down, he's been with God so long, his face is shining.

But in the Vulgate, he's grown horns.

And that's because Jerome didn't know what to do with that word.

It only shows up in Hebrew twice.

So hard to know if Michelangelo is mocking the Vulgate.

It's really hard to know.

Or he's saying, look, this is what we got.

The Vulgate becomes the normative version of the Bible for at least 1,200 years.

63, 1963.

Well, if you're running Catholic, but you know, for 1200 years later, we find people don't know how to read Latin.

So Martin Luther says this is no good.

He wasn't the first.

There were lots of people like Jan Huss and John Wycliffe and William Tyndale who say, look, this Latin business is wonderful, but nobody understands it.

Some people ask me today, what does that church hat mean?

And this is good to know historically.

That hat means I know how to read.

That's really all it means.

Because in the Middle Ages, lots of priests didn't know how to read.

And they got up to say the Mass and they didn't even know Latin.

So they winged it.

Or they made it up.

And they said things like, instead of hocus corpus mayum, this is the body of Jesus, they said things like, hocus pocus.

That's where it comes from.

Oh, magic words turn bread into flesh.

It could be some children misheard the priest, but it's equally likely the priest didn't even know what they were saying.

So that hat, it's called a beretta, means I know how to read and write.

And that's part of why we had the Reformation, to be honest with you, right?

So the Bible gets passed along.

Now there's another book.

Some of you know the Catholic Bible is different from the Protestant Bible because it includes books we call the Apocrypha.

Really interesting thing.

Until the Council of Trent, the books in the Apocrypha, which include one and two Maccabees, um Susanna?

No.

Is it Susanna?

The book of Tobitz.

Anyway, there's a bunch of books in the Apocrypha, had always been included with the Bible by Christians as an appendix.

When the Reformation happened, the Pope made this really interesting argument that said the Pope is more important than the Bible, and I'll prove it.

I'm making the Apocrypha scripture.

Happened at the end of the Council of Trent.

And that's why our Catholic brothers and sisters read the Apocrypha as part of the Bible, because of a unilateral action by the Pope.

Martin Luther is the one who translates the Bible into German so that German people can understand it.

And what's really interesting is in a lot of languages, but especially German, and this happens a little bit in English actually, the translation of the Bible sets the base level for the language.

So I will tell you, German has not changed since Martin Luther made the Bible.

And in that way, it's very, very antiquated.

Later you're going to hear about missionary movements where people believe it's really important for uh indigenous people to hear the words of scripture in their indigenous tongue.

And so missionaries who do this actually have preserved languages that otherwise would have gone away.

They invented scripts and grammar for language that had neither of those things.

Because it was so important to have the Bible in the vernacular.

Part of what's really interesting to know, maybe I'm a little bit all over the place.

I'm sorry, so feel free to say, uh, what about that other thing you were going to say?

Um I don't care about what you're saying, what about this?

Um part of what's really interesting to hear is that um the way we ended up with the Bible that we have, of course, we don't have any original documents.

Or if we did, we wouldn't even know it, because it's not like Isaiah wrote on the parchment, this is the original.

What happened is the stories that were written down were deemed most important, and when it was important enough, it got copied.

The way copying happened was in a few ways.

One is you can look and you can look.

You go back and forward, and in general, it takes a rabbi almost a year just to do the Hebrew Bible.

Now you know you can get tired and whatever, so they put checks in place, they count the letters at the end of every line, and then they come back and count.

So that's a safeguard.

But even as with English, some letters look remarkably similar.

So some of that's happened.

In the rabbinic tradition, just like in the monastic tradition, sometimes somebody reads a line and thinks, like they write a question in the margin, and then the next person reads that.

That copy and copies the question into the text.

So instead of originals, what we have are copies of copies of copies of copies of copies.

And you may say, well, geez, how do we have anything reliable?

Well, until very recently, nobody said what we have is inerrant.

We've only ever said what we have is inspired.

And I want you to consider the difference.

Inerrant means that there's zero mistakes, no comma is meant to be a semicolon.

Really at that level.

And I'm just going to tell you, it's not a defensible position.

It's not.

Because the Bible calls the king of Babylon Nebuchadnezzar.

But that's not his name.

His name is Nebuchadnezzar.

So the Bible's wrong.

It's wrong.

And you have to decide whether that means it's worthless or that doesn't matter, actually.

There was a king of Babylon, his name was kind of like Nebuchadnezzar something, right?

Sounds like a foreign word.

So we have to sort of pick.

What do we do with that?

If you're wondering how it is that scholars figure out which copies are better, it's a little bit with uncertainty.

Typically, what scholars do is they try to figure out which one's shorter.

The shorter tends to be the preferred because, as I told you, marginal notes can get put in.

Sometimes something sounds awkward, so we try to fix it.

So shorter, most awkward, most awkward is preferred as older.

Actually, those are the two major tests.

Maybe you're wondering how is it that the councils decided which books made it into the Bible?

One version is people prayed and the Holy Spirit told them.

And that's fine.

But there were other things like was it written by an apostle or not?

That was one critical criterion in deciding what made it into the New Testament.

How many people were using it?

So if only people in Egypt were reading a letter, it did not make it into the Bible.

Proof.

The gospel, according to Thomas, was a dead no, because people outside of Egypt weren't reading that.

It may be interesting for you, but it is in Scripture.

Did it accord with the rest of decided scripture?

Those were the one, two, three criterion used at the Council of Chalcedon in 381.

It may be interesting for you to know the book of James barely made it.

Barely.

The book of, called the Shepherd of Hermes almost made it.

And one of the main reasons it didn't make it is the Shepherd of Hermes was not an apostle.

And it wasn't used widely enough.

You may say, what is that?

You can find it online, read it.

I am grateful to God every day.

That book did not make it.

It is like leading Moulin Rouge, which is like the absinthe fairy, shows you all kinds of crazy things.

The book of one Enoch almost made it.

So much so that the book of Jude cuts and pastes a huge swath of the first book of Enoch.

I mean, word for word, letter for letter.

So part of it was inspired, part of it wasn't.

That's when we decided.

Now Martin Luther came up with this really interesting thing.

He said there's one scripture, and I'm standing on that, when he was tried to the Diet of Worms, and ultimately he was excommunicated, right?

The high inquisitor Johannes Tetzel said, Of course, there's one scripture, Martin, but how do you think we got that scripture?

The answer is tradition, which is really quite interesting, to be honest.

It's a very compelling argument.

That tells you a little bit about how we've got what we've got.

Now, Nick is getting ready to tell you a little bit about the King James Bible, but one last thing about King James.

King James made an authoritative translation in 1611, and King James did something like Jerome.

He didn't just, by the way, King James didn't do any work on this, right?

But he didn't just use Greek or Latin, he included Hebrew.

The major problem with the King James Version of the Bible is that the oldest manuscripts used in the King James Bible were from the 1300s.

That means the manuscript tradition was only 300 years old.

What happened when we found the Dead Sea Scrolls?

We found documents more than 1,500 years older than what King James had.

You'll be delighted to hear there wasn't a lot of variants in those documents.

Not a lot.

However, um there were some.

There was some.

And uh if you like the King James language but want to access the older manuscript tradition, good news.

There's something called the New King James Version, which uses the same style as King James, but with the Dead Sea manuscripts.

I don't know if that makes sense.

The oldest thing we found, to put this in perspective, is a fragment of the book of Isaiah written on a piece of silver.

It's very short, and uh it probably dates to around 400 BC.

That's the oldest thing we think we've found.

One other thing about the Bible, because I just I can't resist telling you this, our New Testament was written on vellum, which is a veal skin.

Incredibly expensive to abort a cow just for its skin.

Right?

So books really expensive.

All of it is written in capital letters with no spaces between words.

None.

Sandwiched up, because paper was so valuable, couldn't waste in.

Vowels are invented in the Hebrew language in the year 1000 AD.

In Hebrew, vowels are implied.

What's really interesting to know is that some words in Hebrew have the same three consonants.

It's always a three-consonant base.

They had the same three continents, but if you put different vowels, you get entirely different meanings.

So how did they know?

There's this verse in Hebrew, and maybe you know this is part of the kosher tradition, you cannot boil a kid in its mother's milk.

The word is chaliv, but if you pronounce the word chaliv, it's fat.

To be honest, every Hebrew scholar, Old Testament scholar, will tell you the word should be translated fat.

Because that makes the most sense.

When you find a bird's nest with eggs, you can have the eggs or you can have the bird, but you can't have both.

Because if you eat both, there will be no birds in the future.

So you can't wipe out two generations with a meal.

So you either have the kid or you have the mama go, but you don't eat both.

So why does Jewish tradition have this other word that's fat?

And that's because Jewish tradition says when Moses went up on top of the mountain, he got the written law and he got the oral law.

The oral law he whispered to his children and his children's children, and it tells you that word should be milk and not fat.

That means the oral Torah was passed down for 2,000 years before it got written down.

And it includes, again, why it's milk instead of fat, because God said so.

Oh, really?

Remember, Bible doesn't mean one book, it means books.

Plural.

And it may be helpful to know that the Christian Bible, the Old Testament particularly, is even arranged differently from the Jewish Bible.

In the Jewish Bible, the dead last book at the end is the book of Esther.

Jewish people aren't sure it belongs in the Bible because it never has God's name in it, not one time.

We put Esther sort of in the middle because we try to put things a little more chronologically.

So we have the same scriptures, but we use them a little differently.

I left down a whole lot of things.

But now Nick is going to tell you about the English Bible.

First, I apologize.

Last time I was uh a bit hasty and cut through a lot of things.

So I typed up my notes and made them some unreadable somebody's note understand my handwriting.

If you want a copy, feel free to pick it up here.

I'm going to add a couple of things to think to uh well uh to the things Mike said.

One thing that I like very much is there's a different difference between truth and fact.

And uh that is how a lot of people look at we don't have to have had two father with two sons, one of whom went out and wasted his living with prostitutes and so on, and came home and wrote about it.

That doesn't have to be factual, but it can be very, very profoundly true.

And that's what um uh I think one thing I think we need to know uh about some of these things.

Um other thing uh is quite Mike was quite correct.

The Bible didn't reach its final form until 360 something.

381, Council of Galcedon.

That's when they stamped it.

Okay.

The reference I had said uh it was uh uh uh the Easter letter of anyhow.

Um but it is known that there is a thing called a Muratonian canon, which uh we believe is dated somewhere about uh 170.

And that lists essentially all the books in the Bible.

Um it's got Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Acts, it's got the book of Revelation, so it's got all but uh I think it's six of the um six of the letters of Paul that we we normally get, letters of Joseph.

So um again, it didn't become official, but it was used in the Bible, as we know it was available.

And the standard Mike referred to, I think, um, was it was used by everyone, everywhere, at all times.

Um so going on, it's interesting that um, as Mike said, the Vulgate, and I got a couple of copies of different books, the Vulgate in Latin here is um in Latin.

No question about it, even the notes and the commentary are in Latin.

Um but as most of us don't speak Latin or read Latin much anymore.

Um I used to better than I do now.

Um but the word bulgate has the connotations and meanings of comments available to everyone.

Um and uh so people got to the point where they couldn't even read Latin.

One other thing I want to make clear is that not all Christian traditions use the same order for the book, or even uh and for example, in the this is the Hebrew Bible translated uh for Jewish people, and this is an Orthodox study Bible, and this has um shows you some of the different orders of the different Bibles.

Um I got into trouble once I was uh helping somebody and she was Roman Catholic, and I was reading the Psalms out of our book, and after about Psalm 35, the order is chewy.

I mean, they they actually jumped into a verse.

Um, so the question arose what are we gonna do when nobody understands a lot?

Um almost really.

I've got to get it down to my notes that my head is already covered, but that's okay.

Um first English Bible was written by uh Whitliff in 1382 AD.

And this was translated from the Volgic.

It exists only in manuscript because uh 1382 is long before the Bible, before the printing press was available.

Wickless was executed and burned.

His uh bones were burned and passed into the river.

So there were no record of him.

Um translating the Bible into English was dangerous, as William Tyndall found out in 1536.

Um first translated the scripture from the original Greek and Hebrew, and then it's more accurate, because it goes through one less translation than Wickless.

Um you find in Germany where the Bible was printed now and smuggled back into England in bales of covers worship or something of that sort.

Um before translating the Bible into English on October 6th, 1563, um William Tyndall was executed by orders of King Henry VIII.

In 1535, uh Coverdale was a translation of the Bible, uh, which was used with Kendall as a basis also for translations of the other later Bibles.

In 1539, um the uh bishops were not comfortable with these translations, and so uh the Great Bible, 1539, uh was first the first Bible authorized by Henry.

You will notice that it's only uh four years, three years after order the execution of uh friend Bill Tendak for doing exactly that.

Um the story is told that uh people after it was put in all the structures, people would uh go to churches on their mini um lunch breaks and listen to the Bible.

The shopkeepers and apprentices and the blacksmith and so on.

Uh it was that important to hear the Bible in their own language.

And this was the first opportunity they had they had to hear the Bible in their own language.

Again, remember, by this point, probably less than half the population could read.

Including the clergy.

That's really important to hear.

Less than half the clergy may have been literate.

Um the other thing that's interesting is that at this point, uh, and for another uh 14 years or so, the services in English churches were in Latin.

The readings from the scriptures were in English, but the actual service was in Latin until Kramer and Henry came out with the first English prayer book in 1549.

So um it must have been an interesting and maybe confusing time.

When people were going to hear the Bible, right?

As I understand, they were in church, because Bibles were very rare, and as Mike pointed out, they're expensive.

In fact, sometimes that uh Bible is called the changed Bible, because it had to be changed to it.

So um it's uh interesting experiences.

Um in 1560, a bunch of Purans and Anglicans in general fled to uh Switzerland, Geneva.

And because uh they didn't want to get burned at the state by Queen Mary, Lady Mary.

Um this is not a comfortable way to go if you think about it.

If you have nightmares, don't think about it.

Beheading is much nicer.

It's over a hurry.

Um but uh it's it was used often uh in these days because if you were beheaded, you didn't always have a lot of time to think about it.

But if you were burned at the stake, you would have a sense of the flames of hell that you would face if you didn't did not change your mind and started believing rightly.

And it's amazing that uh the stories are told of people going to the state saying because they were able to follow their Lord in his suffering and for the right question.

Anyhow, in Geneva, these Protestants, uh, with the help of some of the local Protestants like John Calvin wrote an English Bible, published an English Bible, it's called the Geneva Bible.

And this Bible is much more Protestant in its orientation, and it also had footnotes and side notes and so on that were very proxy.

And uh John Knox and other reformers were in there.

This is a version of Shakespeare's books.

And uh you're reading Shakespeare, he refers to the Bible or he quotes from the Bible.

Remember, most of Shakespeare's writing was done before 1611.

So uh the King James Version wasn't available.

The Geneva Bible was the first study Bible, so to speak, because it did have all those notes and footnotes and extensive commentaries and margins.

In 1568, the bishops were not happy with the popularity of the Geneva Bible.

It was a very popular Bible.

And so in 1568, the Bishop's Bible came out, and it was authorized for use in the church by Henry VIII.

And it wouldn't have been Henry VIII, it would have been Elizabeth.

Um it was um they also have some questions.

I'm trying to read my notes here, and I um I have to use because I got some problems with my hands, I can't type very well, so I have to use a speech to text.

For the Bible that works very well, but uh this model was perfect.

Um the uh bishop's libel was substantially revised in 1572, and this uh edition in 1572 was prescribed as the starting point, the basis for the King James version of King James I of England, who was also named King James VI of Scotland, he was King of Scotland before he became King of England.

Long story, big deal between Elizabeth and others.

But he got there and Elizabeth's death and succeeded it peacefully.

He was anxious that there would be uniformity, as Elizabeth was, but uniformly in order to the understanding of the Bible.

And so he got a bunch of scholars together and ordered the Bible translators from the both the original languages and using some previous translations.

It's worth reading a book called God's Secretary, which tells the story of the writing of the King James Burrito Bible.

And one of the fascinating things is, to me I agree, is that the thing writing the final draft they had a person up in front of a group of the authors and reading it aloud.

And they commented about his readability.

And that's one thing that the distinguishes that can be fruit is very readable.

And so especially reading it aloud.

Now you try that today.

And it's got a few anachronistic words and phrases, but it's still reading screen all the time.

This was the Bible that was the standard Bible for more than 300 years.

If you listen to Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King or Winston Churchill, you will hear in their speeches the cadences of the King James Version Bible.

And it was basically the Torah, it was the Bible that traveled west with the Council of the Wagons and so I was sitting in a hotel in China and found the King James Bible anyway in the desk beside the bedtime.

Which I found very interesting in a phenomenally atheistic state.

But it was spaghetti and sort of during the 1880s, American and British scholars came together to make a new language and the meaning of words changes.

And later in 1901, they issued an American version that was sounded better than American years.

And in 1952, scholars presented a new and more modern English version.

And in the late 1980s they got the revised, new revised standard version, which is what we now use in a service.

And it was issued using contemporary and non-sexist language.

And people asked whether we need new translations.

Well, in somewhere in 1675-1711, at the time that St.

Paul's Cathedral was built on the Sir Christopher Wren was an architect, and he took the ruling monarch.

And some of these details are a little easy, but the ruling monarch told Wren that the new building was amusing, awful, and artificial.

And Wren was not attended.

In fact, Wren thought happiness.

Awful meant awe-inspiring, and artificial meant artistic.

So the way the language ended in, and that's not very long, from basic 1700 today.

And our language has changed very significantly.

So today there are lots of translations.

There are almost innumerable translations.

And I'm not saying any of them are another thing that was interesting I found is that in the King James Version of the Bible, King James forbade the use of the word tyrant in that kind of way.

Not really, but he was ruled by divine right.

Let's put it that way.

In fact, it can be very useful to compare when you get to a confusing or difficult passage.

And one of the things I've got here is a New Testament with eight translations side by side.

And if you look at it, um by and large, they're fairly similar if you look at the meaning.

Yes?

This is where I want to hop in and say none of you in this room are equipped to decide whether a translation is right.

I'm not equipped to do that.

And I studied Greek at the postgraduate level for a couple of years.

People who have spent their whole life are not able to really say with 100% confidence which translation is right.

So this leads us into how Episcopalians use the Bible.

I think so, because we only have 10 minutes, so I want to make sure we cover that.

Well, obviously we use the Bible in uh our service.

I love one of the comments I heard from a somewhat confused lady who said, I love reading the Bible.

So much of it's out of the book of common prayer.

We need to read the Bible more, and there are lots of ways of doing it.

Um outside of simply listening to the lessons.

Many of them are online, and I apologize I didn't pack a prayer book because I thought one would be available.

But if you go to the back of the Book of Common Prayer, you can see two different lectionary uses.

One of them is the Sunday lectionary, which has got three years and covers a good side chunk of the Bible, and then the other is the daily lectionary that we use, and that covers an even larger section of the Bible.

Personally, I have difficulty reading the Bible straight through from Genesis and Revelations.

There are a lot of parts that you can get bogged down in.

But I think it's important one place is a forward day by day, the little book that comes out.

That has the daily daily lectionary that uses that.

And it has a little short commentary on it.

Um I find the references to the readings are fine.

The commentaries vary as far as I'm concerned.

Some of them are much better than others.

And so use it as you see fit.

I do recommend the comparing translations that I think it's useful to help understand one Bible or one passage.

Maybe it's not telling you what you wanted to hear.

And so try another translation.

Or even one of the paraphrases that all be useful to help understanding here.

And of course, that's what's primarily important.

Getting different viewpoints.

Somebody uh has remarked that there are four gospels.

Why?

Well, because each one of them gives us a different perspective on Jesus Christ.

And we need all four of them, at least, to begin to get a whole picture of it.

And that's why I think a number of translations is very useful.

I guess we can now throw it open for questions.

No, I want to talk more about this.

It's not just how do we use it, I think it's really how does the Bible meant to guide our spirituality that I think is really important.

So not just when, but how is really important.

And this I think is a really important bit, having grown up in a church that said we only use scripture.

The church I grew up in said scripture alone, and that's why I highlighted uh what Johannes Tetzel said.

The way we got scripture was with tradition.

And quite honestly, when I heard the Bible stories that I memorized huge passages of in English, not Greek.

We were sure we should rely on scripture, but we were learning a translation, not the original.

And by the way, that doesn't hold up.

In the Episcopal Church, we don't, I want to suggest we don't spend our time trying to decide which one's right.

We decide which one leads us into righteousness.

And this is the critical way that the Episcopal Church uses the Bible.

We don't use it as a club, right-wrong.

We use it as an illumination to how should we order our steps.

So in the Episcopal Church, we not only have Scripture, but we understand Scripture was given us by tradition, and we trust that God is still speaking through reason.

This is really, really important.

So if the scriptures appear to be clubbing other people, in the episcopal tradition, we put the club down.

How do we know which translation is right, my personal opinion?

The one that gives more life to the world at the least expense to anybody in the world.

So if we ever think that it's okay for righteousness to cost somebody something they didn't agree to, I think we're reading it wrong.

I don't know if that makes sense.

So when we read different translations, again, I'm not even equipped to say which one's better.

I can dicker with it, but again, people spent their whole life.

The people who translate it, I spent four years.

It would be nothing but arrogant of me to say their translation's wrong.

And by the way, when a new translation of the Bible comes out, what people do is they turn to Psalm 23 to see if the translation's any good.

And if it doesn't say, Yeah, that I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, it's not a good translation.

By the way, those are William Tyndale's words.

King James couldn't even change them because people grabbed onto them so tightly.

That's what Tyndale gave us.

These word pictures, these phrases that are beautiful.

But we still have to decide what the meaning is.

What's really interesting is when Paul quotes scripture, he doesn't say the Old Testament existed in order to tell you this thing or to predict this thing.

What Paul says is these events are resonating with these old stories.

Quite honestly, because I was given scriptural language, there's moments in my life through which I process the events through faith language.

It's my most inner formation, having grown up in an evangelical church, to measure resonate my life with biblical narratives.

This is how we use it.

However, if we end up doing that in a way that is taking life from us, I would tell you it's hermeneutically not okay.

So maybe you're wondering how is it that episcopal people can read passages like Romans 1 that says it's against nature for men to have sexual relationships with men and women to have sexual relationships with women?

How can you read that and say homosexuality is okay?

And the answer is reason.

I'm just gonna throw this out there.

You ever been to a dog park?

If you go to a dog park, you will see natural sexuality.

It's about domination.

And I would tell you, if we settle for sexuality as domination, we are not living into the marital covenant that God intends.

So if you want to have natural sexuality, I feel sorry for you.

I hope you have supernatural sexuality.

Because in the Protestant church, sex is for unity first and procreation's optional.

In the natural world, there is no unity in sexuality.

There's not even really reproduction, there's dominance.

We bring reason to the text and we say, look, what's reasonable and what's righteous.

Paul himself, in the middle of writing letters, says, Doesn't nature put men to shame to have long hair?

It's not natural for men to have long hair.

And then he says, I, Paul, say this, not the Lord.

I mean, this is a really interesting thing.

My opinion.

I'm glad you had your opinion.

I disagree.

Paul says, I don't permit a woman to speak in the assembly.

Well, that doesn't mean God doesn't, it just means Paul didn't.

This is really important.

And sometimes what we do is we take the Bible so literally, we forget to take it seriously.

And the way in which Paul took Scripture seriously was to have a conversation around it.

This is how we do it in the Episcopal Church.

What's important is we don't cut off conversations, we have them.

But if conversations are taking life away from other people, it starts to be important to say we're not going to do that anymore.

Even if it costs us communion, we're not going to have communion at the expense of other people.

I don't know if that makes sense.

And I want to suggest to you this is the way we ought to use different translations, not to say which one's right, which one guides us to righteousness.

Not to say, aha, this one has a better translation as if we know.

Really.

The question is, which one enlarges life for the most people?

The scriptures were the core language for all of the people who made the prayer book.

I mean, it was their primary way of understanding the world.

I don't think we can properly relate to the prayer book without understanding scripture.

And I'll tell you, as a low evangelical, I made it my super duty to pursue the best possible understanding of scripture because I think it really matters.

But it only matters if it guides us into deeper faith.

Because Paul says knowledge puffs up and love builds up, and that's how we use the scripture to build each other up.

A couple of additions.

One thing is I love is Robert Farr Kind.

He taught dogmatic theology at our seminary.

And he said he would ask his students to summarize the Bible.

What is the Bible for me?

And he says, no.

The Bible is very simple.

It's a love story.

You start in Genesis, the boy finds girl.

All through the histories, the boy loses girl.

By the time we get to the New Testament, the boy finds girl and brings her home to death.

And if you read Revelation 6:21, you see there's a lot of marital symbolism.

The New Jerusalem descends adorned as a bride.

And so it's a love story.

And we ought to be sure we read it that way, expressing God's love for us, and we should echo that love for the people.

Great add-on is the new Jerusalem's not in heaven, it's here on earth.

And that's right around Revelation 21.

So we're meant to make earth look like heaven, not try to get away from it.

And I think the scriptures exist to do that.

What we're going to hear this morning in the story, I sort of meant to preach this at 8 o'clock and I didn't, is that Satan uses the Bible and tries to get use it against Jesus.

And again, I would tell you, we still live into that.

When it costs somebody, we're using the Bible satanically.

Okay.

Hey, thanks for coming, and we'll see you next week when we talk about the prayer book.