No, I have not read Ehrman yet, though his books are high on my reading list. I’ve listened to him speak a few times and from what I understand him saying, studying the Bible and it’s variations did not lead him to agnosticism, it led him away from fundamentalism and literalism. He was still a Christian when he wrote “Misquoting Jesus”. It was the problem of evil/suffering that caused him to convert to agnosticism. He wrote about that in “God’s Problem”.

The literal method says that in order to be faithful to the Scriptures, one must seek to render a word-for-word translation. This basically means that for every Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic word in Scripture you should substitute one English word or as close to one word as you can while keeping the text intelligible. While the strength of this method is that you get a good representation of what the Scripture originally looked like, the weakness is that it can be choppy to read and hard to understand as you are not likely to interpret things like idioms that were unique to the original audience.

The paraphrase method says that you should seek to present the meaning/interpretation of Scripture and not concern yourself with literally rendering the original languages. While the strength of this method is ease of understanding, the weakness is that it is very open to the author’s own bias and interpretation.

The thought-for-thought method is basically a combination of these two methods. Some thought-for-thought translations lean closer to the literal side, others lean closer to the paraphrase.

I think that to rely on one translation alone, while very helpful, can also be somewhat limiting. I like Rodney’s idea of using multiple translations, perhaps one from each of the different translation methods.

The truth though, is that we can get so caught up in trying to parse out the road map that we forget it’s intention; to get us to the destination. Jesus seemed to say that the purpose of the Scripture was to point us to a relationship with God. Any other purpose that we super-impose on the Scripture is simply trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Things like textual criticism can be helpful, but can also be a distraction from the real intention of Scripture.

I agree brother! For me, this is part of getting outside of the prearranged boundaries of the institutional church. Since Church=people, the Church can gather in any place (or cyberspace as it were) and at any time.

As far as our worldly tendency towards being a “clanging cymbal”, I have come to believe that the greatest heresy for a believer is to walk outside of love.

John said:
I’m not saying divine providence needs to be read into everything but I think in a sense God has ordained everything here on earth otherwise you have a Creator who’s creation is uncontrollable.

In what sense can you believe that God has ordained everything here on earth without reading divine providence into everything?

Your idea is a good one. We may very well get to that one in the near future. I’m curious if you’ve read any of Bart Ehrman’s writings. He is a professor of religion (New Testament studies, maybe?) at UNC Chapel Hill, and has gone from being a devout evangelical Christian to a self-described agnostic. It is precisely the questions you have asked that played a large part in that change for him. I think this is why some of my Christian friends get nervous when I ask similar questions, because they assume that eventually, the only conclusion is agnosticism or skepticism.

I disagree, of course, because my faith in Jesus is as strong as ever, no matter how far down the rabbit hole I fall with these questions. The question for me is not whether or not I’m losing my faith, but rather an examination of that on which I base that faith.

Thanks for continuing to listen. You’re a good man, no matter what Scott Roche says about you

I don’t know that we really intended to convey that God couldn’t have “ordained 1000 yrs. of the RCC”. I’m just not sure it’s necessary to say that he did. However, just as one would never claim that those who held Israel in captivity were honoring God or following his decrees (in terms of their practices, beliefs, etc.), I think one can be frank about the things we did address in this podcast — namely that by the 4th century (if not earlier), there were things in place and being carried out in practice which were counter to the teachings of Jesus.

The test of “does it square with the teachings of Jesus” is one that I’m finding is more and more relevant to discussions such as this. Whether or not God “ordained” the RCC to do all that it did pre-Luther doesn’t really seem to matter. But do the events surrounding the Council of Nicaea demonstrate a gathering that was centered around the person of Jesus? I think not.

I’m also quite interested in an episode dedicated to the veritable plethora of Bible translations available. Where did they all come from? Why are they sometimes quite different? Considering the variations, how can Christians rely on any English translation? I’m also interested in which translations you prefer as Beyond the Boxers and why.

Thought #1) I love the fact that you mention at the end the “suggestion” that we as Christians don’t have enemies. I picked up the new Jars of Clay album last week and the one of the first cuts on the CD is a song entitled “Weapons”.

“Lay your weapons down
Lay your weapons down
There are no enemies in front of you

Hallelujah, we can finally see
How the bitterness was bruising on our skin
We didn’t notice that grace had run so thin
Till we’re falling apart and the cracks in our hearts let the truth sink in”

When I first heard the song, I could only think of the way the evangelical church has come to “demonize” anyone on the side of pro-choice, homosexual rights, socialistic thinking or any other hot topic political banter. We’re diluting the message of Christ so much, to the point of becoming irrelevant, or even worse, as Paul would call it in 1 Cor. 13 – “clanging cymbals”. In other words, we’ve become an annoyance to those whom we should be trying to reach through love.

Thought #2) I’m currently reading “Pagan Christianity?” by Frank Viola and it basically addresses some of what you are encouraging us to do here (knowing your heritage) by exposing the history of what we do in the name of “doing church”. Very fascinating so far.

I’m definitely one of those “naive” Christians as far as post-apostolic (there’s a debate for you) church history is concerned, though I’m trying to get caught up.