Where Did the Devil Get the Name 'Lucifer'?

"How art thou fallen... O Lucifer"

Image: Public Domain

The devil has a lot of names in the Bible. Where did he get the name 'Lucifer' especially since it doesn't appear anywhere in most modern Bible translations? A Quora question.

Q: Who was the true Lucifer and why he was related to the devil if he don’t even appear in the Bible?


A: What a great question! The answer is really in two-parts.

First, we need to recognize that there isn't really any origin story for the Devil in the Bible. There is no place where the scriptures plainly say, "This is the story of the Devil." He's just there -- even in the Garden of Eden if we equate "the serpent" with him.

So, humans being the way we are, people all the way back to the 1st and 2nd centuries BCE searched the Hebrew scriptures for clues to his origin. One place they found that sounded like what they assumed the devil's origin would sound like ("Glorious, supernatural being? Check! Not created evil but became evil through pride? Check!") was in the Old Testament prophetic Book of Isaiah chapter 14, verses 12-32.

This may not be apparent to us today but here is how the ancient church father Origen (185-254 CE) explained it:

It is most clearly proved by these words that he who formerly was Lucifer and who “arose in the morning” has fallen from heaven. For if, as some suppose, he was a being of darkness, why is he said to have formerly been Lucifer or lightbearer? Or how could he “rise in the morning” who had in him no light at all?… So he was light once … when “his glory was turned into dust.” (On First Principles 1.5)

(NOTE: Isaiah actually wrote this prophetic poem to make fun of the King of Babylon, not to explain where Satan came from).

The first line of this passage is the important one for answering your question. In Hebrew this line begins אֵ֛יךְ נָפַ֥לְתָּ מִשָּׁמַ֖יִם הֵילֵ֣ל בֶּן־שָׁ֑חַר Ek Napalta misamayim helel ben sahar (sorry no diacritical marks), literally "How you are fallen from the sky helel, son of dawn." The Hebrew word helel means "shining one." Most scholars believe that this word helel refers to the morning star -- Venus.

The 2nd part of the answer is very brief. The early Christians didn't preach or (for the most part) write in Hebrew, but in Greek. In the Septuagint -- the popular Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures -- helel is translated by the word Eosphoros, meaning "Dawn-carrier." Somehow though that never caught on.

However when the church at Rome asked St. Jerome (347-420 CE) to revise the Old Latin translation, he translated helel as "Lucifer," which means pretty much the same thing as Eosphoros: "light-carrier."

Jerome's translation, the Vulgate, became the official translation of the church. So under the influence of the Vulgate and the widespread idea that Isaiah 14 told the story of where the devil came from, Lucifer became a name for Satan during the middle ages. And influenced by all that, when British translators set out to create an English version of the Bible (i.e., the King James Version) they took over the by now traditional name "Lucifer" in Isaiah 14.12: "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!”

Most modern Bibles translate helel as “shining one,” “Day Star,” “star of the morning” or something else more accurate.

Why Is the Bible Written?

An ancient scribe writing an ancient book

Image by Guillaume Blanchard

I had a comic book Bible when I was a kid and got a lot out of it, so I thought it was a worthwhile Quora question. 

Q: Why is the Bible written rather than drawn?

A: I kind of wish the biblical authors had added a few illustrations. Instead of his intricate description of his vision of God's throne with its wheels within wheels, it would be easier for me to grasp it with my impressionistic picture-book mind if Ezekiel just said, “And it looked like this,” and drew a picture. We know he could have done it too since a little later in his book he draws a picture of Jerusalem on a clay brick. 

 But the Bible for the most part is didactic literature, which doesn't lend itself well to artistic representation. Euclid may add diagrams to his works on geometry but one doesn't find Seneca or Marcus Aurelius drawing pictures to teach principles of Stoicism. Similarly, it is difficult to imagine the art St. Paul would need to create to accurately convey to the Ephesians that, “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” One would need a comic strip or graphic novel, I would think — a large one to convey even one of Paul's shorter epistles.

 It's also worth noting that most of the tales of Jesus and the Hebrew scriptures got their start as oral traditions. Think of an old man or woman at the campfire at night surrounded by a dozen villagers as they recite the rhythmic creation story or Ruth’s gripping tale. Or an apostle telling well-rehearsed stories of Jesus of Nazareth to a new crop of disciples in a Greek lecture hall. These would have been most naturally preserved later on in written form.

 That's not to say there couldn’t have been artistic representations among the Israelites. They were certainly capable of it. The historical books of the Bible preserve descriptions of large statues of cherubim (composite human-animal creatures depicted throughout the middle east) in the Jerusalem temple along with richly embroidered tapestries of plants and more cherubim. Seal impressions showing animals and decorations have been found by archaeologists. But as in other cultures, such as Assyria, Babylon, Rome, and Greece most devotional and mythological art, as well as some legal texts (e.g., Hammurabi’s code), were done as large public statues, reliefs, paintings, and mosaics where whatever messages they were intended to convey could reach a large audience. Books back then had a more limited reach.

 That’s as far as we know right now, of course. As with all of history, a discovery could be made tomorrow that upends everything.

Noah Questions

Two questions about Noah today. Maybe the floods, hurricanes, and boat rescues is reminding the denizens of Quora (where I usually answer these first) of the Biblical deluge.


Q: Where did the idea of Noah preaching to the people about the flooding come from? I can't seem to find any account of it in the book of Genesis.


A: For Christians this idea may have come from the New Testament book of 2nd Peter 2.5 where Noah is depicted as “a preacher of righteousness… when He [God] brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly.”

Peter and many 1st century Jews would have heard these stories from the midrashic commentaries of the rabbis that elaborated on the stories of the Hebrew scriptures.





Q: How did Noah transport the 87 species of human parasites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parasites_of_humans)


A: Inside the humans, I would suppose. Except for the parasites that also afflict animals; they might take a different route.

Of course that's presuming that the story of the Deluge is a strictly historical account, as we modern westerners tend to expect, rather than a story probably based on an actual event (Mesopotamia is known to have had some pretty bad floods) and intended to teach the lessons it teaches: monotheism (as opposed to the multitude of panicky gods who can’t even control their own flood in the old Mesopotamian stories), the incorrigible evil in the heart of man, that evil will be judged, that God requires obedience, that, in the end, God forgives and shows mercy, etc., etc.

Oh yeah, and the origin of wine and need to drink responsibly. Very important. ;)

What Became of the Churches Paul Wrote To

'Church of Mary' in Ephesus, site of the
Third Ecumenical Council in 431

Paul the apostle wrote his part of the New Testament in the form of letters to Christian groups in several cities or areas. Have you ever wondered what became of the churches on those places? Well, some people must (including me) because I received this question on Quora the other day...


Q: Were the churches Paul wrote letters to foundational to post-Biblical Christianity, for example, after Constantine?



A: Rome.

Rome is the most obvious foundational address Paul wrote to. The church father Irenaeus writing around AD 180 described the influence Rome had on post-biblical Christianity:

“For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its pre-eminent authority,that is, the faithful everywhere,inasmuch as the apostolical tradition has been preserved continuously by those [faithful men] who exist everywhere.”

Against Heresies, Book 3, chapters 3-4 Irenaeus

Paul’s other destinations had varying degrees of influence after the apostles were gone. Here is some information I’ve put together on them:

Corinth

The non-biblical (but quite orthodox) letter called 1 Clement was written to Corinth by a Roman church leader (probably before the last New Testament books were finished). This letter shows that the old issues of factionalism and quarreling which Paul had addressed continued among Corinthian Christians; referring to their letters from Paul, Clement rebukes some younger believers who have thrown off the leadership of the elders.

Eerdman’s Dictionary of the Bible, art. Corinth.

Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth around AD 170 wrote a letter preserved in the Church History of Eusebius to the bishop of Rome, Soter, defending the way churches in Achaea traditionally celebrated the feast later called easter, which then was a matter of debate in the church since Rome figured it differently.

Corinth was the capital of the province of Achaea and the bishop there oversaw the smaller churches in the province making him what Orthodox Christians call a metropolitan bishop. Corinth's bishops were present at many of the early church councils and so helped to formulate statements of what Christians do (and do not) believe that are still used to this day.

Metropolis of Corinth - Wikipedia

Galatia

There are actually two areas in modern day Turkey that were called "Galatia" in Paul's time, a north and a south, and no one is certain which one Paul wrote to. If Galatians was sent to north Galatia they would be in the area of Ankara and Pessinus while south Galatia would include Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe where Acts tells us he and Barnabas established churches.

If we go with the southern Galatia theory and look at what roles the cities mentioned in Acts played later on, we can say that Iconium played no important part in later church history, although the apocryphal but popular "Acts of Paul and Thecla" may have been written there "out of love for Paul." Acts of Paul and Thecla - Wikipedia

The church in Antioch was the capital of the province of Pisidia. Partially due to this the bishop there oversaw the smaller churches in the province. The names of many bishops of Pisidian Antioch are recorded and they attended several of the important church Councils.

Antioch of Pisidia - Wikipedia

Lystra did not play a major role in subsequent Christian history, though the foundation of a Byzantine church has been discovered at the site.

Eerdman’s Dictionary of the Bible, art. Lystra

Not much is recorded of Derbe's part in post-apostolic Christianity. The church continued there however and its bishops attended three important Councils: Constantinople (AD 381), Ephesus (AD 431), and Chalcedon (AD 451) Derbe (Diocese) - Wikipedia.

Ephesus

Ephesus is the traditional residence, in later life, of John the Apostle (Eusebius HE 3.1), who was thought to have lived into the reign of Trajan (98-117; Irenaeus Adv. haer. 3.3.4). According to tradition, he wrote his Gospel at Ephesus (HE 5.8.4), and was eventually buried there (3.39.5-6; 5.24.3). The Basilica of St. John was erected on the traditional site of his tomb during the reign of Justinian (527-565). Timothy is remembered as the first bishop of Ephesus (HE 3.4.5), a tradition probably based on 1 Tim. 1:3. Ephesus is also the site for Justin’s dialogue with Trypho the Jew (Dial. 2-8; Eusebius HE 4.18.6).

Eerdman’s Dictionary of the Bible, art. "Ephesus"

The city was destroyed by the Goths in 263, and although rebuilt, the city's importance as a commercial centre declined as the harbour was slowly silted up by the Küçükmenderes River. It was partially destroyed by an earthquake in 614 AD...

The Church of Mary near the harbour of Ephesus was the setting for the Third Ecumenical Council in 431, which resulted in the condemnation of Nestorius. A Second Council of Ephesus was held in 449, but its controversial acts were never approved by the Catholics. It came to be called the Robber Council of Ephesus or Robber Synod of Latrocinium by its opponents.

Wikipedia, art. Ephesus

Philippians

In the second century, Ignatius, bishop of Antioch of Syria, passed through Philippi on his way to Rome to face martyrdom. The Philippian church later sent a letter to Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, requesting his assistance in collecting Ignatius's letters. Polycarp responded favorably to their request in his only letter that has survived (see Pol. Phil. 13.2), though Irenaeus claims that he wrote several others (Irenaeus Haer. 5.33.4). Polycarp's letter (c. the mid-second century A.D.) is helpful in understanding the continuing witness of the church in Philippi in the second century, its concern for those in prison because of their faith and its hospitality. Like Paul, Polycarp also addressed the presbyters (bishops) and deacons (Pol. Phil. 5.2-3; 6.1; cf. Paul's Phil 1:1). In the post-Nicene era, the city became an important Christian center and had a metropolitan bishop.

Dictionary of New Testament Background, art. "Philippi"

Colossae

After a major earthquake in the Lycus Valley that destroyed Colossae and Laodicea (c. A.D. 60-64; Tacitus Ann. 14.27), Colossae was never fully rebuilt, and by the eighth century it was abandoned. The site has not yet been excavated.

Dictionary of New Testament Background, art. "Colossae"

Thessalonica

For centuries the city remained one of the chief strongholds of Christianity, and it won for itself the title of "the Orthodox City," not only by the tenacity and vigor of its resistance to the successive attacks of various barbarous races, but also by being largely responsible for their conversion to Christianity... It was also the scene in 390 AD of the famous massacre ordered by Theodosius the Great, for which St. Ambrose excluded that emperor for some months from the cathedral at Milan.

International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (2002 edition), art. "Thessalonica"

It still stands today. Thessaloniki - Wikipedia

Those Mysterious Dead Sea Scrolls

The War Scroll

Courtesy of Matson Photo Service 

Have you ever wondered what's really in those Scrolls? Yes, the Bible but what else? Yesterday someone asked me this on Quora. True, it's not "Christ and him crucified" but the Dead Sea Scrolls are still cool. They give us an idea of what was going on in the background while Jesus and his students trod the dusty pathways of Judea.

________________________

Q: What are the other books that were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls besides the books of the Old Testament?

A: Of the 944 scrolls found at Qumran, 211 are “biblical” and 733 are “nonbiblical.” This latter group contains all sorts of writings. For example books from the Pseudepigrapha were found such as Jubilees and 1 Enoch along with apocalyptic books related to Enoch, such as The Book of Giants (1Q23) and Melchizedek (11Q13). (FYI, the notations with a Q in them tell you what cave they were found in and the manuscript number. This is how scholars denominate the different scrolls and fragments. “Etc.” after a notation just means there are too many copies to list them all).

There are numerous songs and liturgies thanking God for his deliverances, while other psalms claiming to be authored by David and Solomon are for exorcising demons causing various ailments, such as a "fever demon" or a "chest-pain demon." The Psalms Scroll contains not just the biblical psalms but a number of others, some of which were already known from different sources while others were entirely new to us.

The community that produced the scrolls (we’re not as sure it was the Essenes nowadays) penned several scriptural commentaries using a particular type of interpretation called "pesher" so as to find themselves featured in the Hebrew scriptures. The Commentary on Habakkuk (1QpHab) is an example of this. They also wrote directly about themselves, producing procedures and regulations such as the Rule of the Community, The Halakhic Letter, and the Damascus Document. There are many copies of these, and Damascus Document was originallly found in the 19th century all the way up in Syria, long before additional copies were discovered among the scrolls.

They produced their own apocalyptic prophecies, the most famous of which is The War Scroll which details the final battle between "the Sons of Light" and "the Sons of darkness." Wisdom literature has been found, including Wiles of the Wicked Woman (4Q184), Mysteries (1Q27, etc), and Instruction (1Q26, etc.). A copy of Sirach (aka Ecclesiasticus), which has long been known through the apocrypha, was there. A set of beatitudes, rather different from Jesus', was discovered there too (4Q525).

This really just scrapes the surface but should give you an idea of what was found besides the biblical texts.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library has all the scrolls and intends to provide complete transcriptions and translations in the future.

Two excellent translations of the nonbiblical scrolls are The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated by Florentino Garcia Martinez, and The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation by M. Wise, M. Abegg, and E. Cook.

What We Need the Bible For

An N T Wright quote I like on the purpose and authority of the Bible in the Christian Movement.

We live under scripture because that is the way we live under the authority of God that has been vested in Jesus the Messiah, the Lord.

But what is God’s authority there for? Certainly not to give us a large amount of true but miscellaneous information. Solomon made lists of natural phenomena, but they didn’t get into the Bible. The Bible is not an early version of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Here is the central element: the point about God’s authority is that the whole Bible is about God establishing his kingdom on earth as in heaven, completing (in other words) the project begun but aborted in Genesis 1–3. This is the big story that we must learn how to tell. It isn’t just about how to get saved, with some cosmology bolted onto the side. This is an organic story about God and the world.

God’s authority is exercised not to give his people lots of true information, not even true information about how they get saved (though that comes en route). God’s authority, vested in Jesus the Messiah, is about God reclaiming his proper lordship over all creation. And the way God planned to rule over his creation from the start was through obedient humanity. The Bible’s witness to Jesus declares that he, the obedient Man, has done this. But the Bible is then the God-given equipment through which the followers of Jesus are themselves equipped to be obedient stewards, the royal priesthood, bringing that saving rule of God in Christ to the world.

Was Jesus a Poet?

Jesus reciting one of his most famous works, 
'Blessed are the Poor in Spirit'

Painting by Henrik Olrik

Another answer from my 'Quora ministry':


Q: Was Jesus a Poet ? If yes, how good was he ?



A: Yes, Jesus was most definitely a poet! He certainly had the eye and soul of a poet in weaving the wild flowers that God clothed so grandly and the sparrows ‘not one of [whom] will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care’ into his teaching.

But more to the point, in common with some other ancient teachers and the Israelite prophets, much of Jesus’ teaching is cast in poetic form. Scholars have found that when they reverse-translate Jesus’ sayings back to the original Aramaic (Jesus’ native tongue) they are almost all poetry. This made it easier for the crowds to remember. The scholar Henry Wansbrough says that in Matthew especially, “the rhythm of the sayings is beautifully balanced, often with a neat double opposition (‘grapes from thorns or figs from thistles’ in Matt. 7.16; ‘the harvest is rich but the laborers are few’ Matt. 9.37).” 

This statement by C. E. Schenk was made in the 1920s but is even more true today:

When one comes to the words of Jesus he discovers that in a very true sense His speech answers to the requirements for Hebrew poetry. Examples of synonymous, antithetic, synthetic and causal parallelism are the rule rather than the exception in the utterances of Jesus. For the synonymous form see Matthew 10:24; for the antithetic see Luke 6:41; for the synthetic and causal forms see Luke 9:23 and Matthew 6:7. Not alone are these forms of Hebrew poetry found in the words of Jesus, but also the more involved and sustained poetic utterances (Luke 7:31-32). 

How good was he? Well, 2000 years later people are still reciting his stuff...

The Most Important Meal of the Day

George Müller, quite possibly reading a Bible

Photo courtesy of georgemuller.org

One of my biggest heroes in the Christian movement is George Müller, the German emigrant minister of the 1800s who built orphan homes in Bristol, England. He rescued thousands of children from a homeless life on the streets, feeding them, clothing them, and providing them an education. All this he did without asking for a single farthing from anyone -- except for God, in prayer. In fact he made it clear that he was explicitly depending on God alone to fund his orphanages as an in-your-face 62+ year-long demonstration to the 19th century world that God still answers prayers.

Interestingly though, despite his reputation as a man of prayer, when George Müller got up in the morning the first thing he did was not to pray. It was to read the Bible. This, he said, was one of the secrets to a prayer life that moves mountains and rescues orphans from the street:  before we go before God in prayer, we must feed our souls. And one did this by "dining" on the words of God, (Gospel of Matthew 4.4).

Müller said that he meditated on scripture until he reached a state that he described as "being happy in the Lord." Once the action of scripture upon a person's heart had made them "happy in the Lord," then they were ready to go before the Lord in prayer. Then they were ready to move mountains.

[For much more information on George Müller, go here and here.]

Just a book?

The Bible does not purport to be just a wise and wonderful book; it purports to be revelation, a living, active entity through which the Holy Spirit of God speaks -- in the present tense. Just as Jesus of Nazareth was not only a wise and wonderful teacher but the unique revelation of the Living God.

The early Christian movement believed "[Moses] received life-giving words (literally, "living words") from God to give to us", (Acts of the Apostles 7.38 ERV). Jesus taught that King David wrote Psalms "by the Holy Spirit" (Gospel of Mark 12.35 - 37).

As the scholar J. N. D. Kelly wrote, "Whenever our Lord and His apostles quoted the Old Testament, it is plain that they regarded it as the word of God," (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p. 60). It was the same with the Apostle's writings, because Jesus' followers recognized that they carried the revelation that the Messiah had entrusted them with (p. 56). "The words that I have spoken to you," John records Jesus as saying,  "are spirit and are life," (Gospel of John 6.63).

For them -- and for any who allow themselves to be nourished by the Bible -- "God’s word is alive and working. It is sharper than the sharpest sword and cuts all the way into us. It cuts deep to the place where the soul and the spirit are joined. God’s word cuts to the center of our joints and our bones. It judges the thoughts and feelings in our hearts," (Letter to the Hebrews 4.12 ERV).

The word we must not speak

What I'm suggesting is that nice leather-bound book you have on your desk or the paperback version in your car is not just a book: It is something that intelligent 21st century people get vaguely uncomfortable with, something that some scholars devote their lives to showing it is not.

It's supernatural.

When George Müller cracked his Bible open in the morning, he was exposing himself to the creative power of God's own being, as God wants us to experience it. And so are we. Reading the Scriptures, as John Wesley used to say, is a "means of grace," a physical object (like the bread and wine of the Lord's supper) that God has chosen to use to connect you to him. And then anything can happen.

Modern people aren't supposed to think that way. We can explain all that miraculous stuff away with our current understandings, can't we? There's no need to go there, surely.

But as C. S. Lewis wrote, if you are a member of the Christian movement, "Like it or not, you belong to a supernatural religion."

Dinosaurs in the Bible

Is this your Bible?

Something I've been increasingly addicted to lately is answering questions on Quora. Quora is like Answer.com or Yahoo Answers (which I also was addicted to in its original manifestation in the early 2000s before Yahoo closed it down), but done much better.

I've been answering questions mainly about God, Christianity, general religious things, and a smattering of history and other topics for several months now, and I've decided to post some of the "better" ones (more coherent ones?) here.

This first answer I originally didn't put a lot into, but then I got a response today that let me write a bit on one of my favorite subjects: that God is a good writer.

I like to talk about that because many people have absorbed the idea that you should approach the Bible the way you'd approach an instruction manual. There are some instructions in there of course, but there is also poetry, adventure, gripping history, proverbs, philosophy, great speeches, personal letters, psychedelic visions, biography... in short, almost any type of literature you could name. It's not all one thing.

Reading any other book we automatically recognize these different types of literature and read them the way they are meant to be understood. We instinctively read poetry as poetry, for instance. But the Bible? No! -- it's all to be read as an operators manual! And that kind of blinds us to a lot of the meaning God is trying to get across.

This question, and particularly a comment someone made on my answer, touches on epic poetry, one of the greatest ever written. But it is possible, with enough determination and wearing the proper blinders, to read even that as a boring prose instruction manual.

Dinosaurs!

Here's the question: Why doesn't the Bible talk about dinosaurs and their extinction?

A: The Bible doesn’t mention dinosaurs, since it focuses on humans and dinosaurs died out long before. 

This is only a problem if you think God made the universe in 6 24-hour days. I have heard people holding that view say that creatures like Behemoth and Leviathan (only mentioned in the poetic books) were dinosaurs. Most scholars though think they are only poetic descriptions of hippos and crocodiles.

Then Claudia Baduy had this comment about my answer: The Word Behemoth and Leviathan both are in The book of Job and Job is considered a Wisdom book by all means. And with all respect hippopotamus or crocodiles don't have tails like a cedar.

Job 40:15-19 “Look at Behemoth, which I made along with you and which feeds on grass like an ox. What strength it has in its loins, what power in the muscles of its belly! Its tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of its thighs are close-knit. Its bones are tubes of bronze, its limbs like rods of iron. It ranks first among the works of God, yet its Maker can approach it with his sword." 

And here's my reply:  Claudia, you are certainly right: Job is classified as one of the wisdom books. I was referring to the fact Job is widely considered to be one of the greatest epic poems ever written. Other than the prose prologue and epilogue it is magnificent poetry through and through. 

That is what I was getting at when I said that most scholars consider Behemoth and Leviathan to be *poetic* descriptions of actual animals. After all, no dinosaur or any other animal has “bones [that] are tubes of bronze” either (Job 40.18). And only in fairy tales do you find animals whose “breath sets coals ablaze/and a flame shoots from its mouth” (Job 41.21). These are all poetic images in a great poem. 

As far as how a hippopotamus’ tail could poetically be like a cedar, there are several possibilities, believe it or not. I like the simplest one: that it’s like a cedar in that it sways like cedars do in the wind, as the verse itself says.

If there are any other comments, I will update this post with them.

The Bible This Year

Jerome Studies Scripture

Art by Lowgan

At the start of each year for the last few of them my wife and I begin using new Bible translations for our daily studies. We do this in hopes that the unfamiliar words will perhaps shake us loose from an unexamined assumption now and then. I also use the translation here as much as possible for the same reason.

Last year we both tried The Voice, a very interesting Bible that uses out-of-the-ordinary wording and page design to force you to think about what you're reading. If you want a translation that's as far from the King James Version as possible, that's the one for you.

The year before that I used the little-known Easy to Read Version (ERV), which became one of my all time favorites.  It can be tricky to extract the meaning from the Bible's foreign languages (hebrew and greek) and put it accurately into english, especially simple, commonplace english. But the ERV translators have a knack for doing just that and are so good at it that I kept finding myself smiling at how well they rendered this or that verse.

For 2016 I wanted to use the New Jerusalem Bible, a translation near and dear to my heart. In fact I actually am using it for my personal studies, but unfortunately it's one of the few Bibles BibleGateway -- to which I link all this blog's scriptures -- doesn't have. In fact nobody online does, with the sole exception of Catholic.org, but theirs is homely, drowning in ads, and very awkward to use.

So this year I finally chose the venerable Good News Bible to be the 2nd translation on Authentic Light. I've used the GNB off and on for years and owned several copies (that fell apart), but I've never really been enthused about it. However it has this one irritating habit: whenever I read a scripture and think, "You know, a better way to translate that verse would be..."  the Good News Bible frequently has already translated it that way. You may have noticed that I quoted it a couple of times on my Wednesday post.

Translating "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil," (Matthew 5.17) as "I have not come to do away with them, but to make their teachings come true" is just exactly right.

Plus it's the script of my all-time favorite Jesus film, The Gospel of John. You can really see what an effective version it is in that movie, with people acting it out.

So for this year, the Good News Bible it is.  Always backed up, as usual, by my primary version, the NET Bible.

God of the Pit

<< Read the first part of this series
On Tuesday I told you about a blunt, obscure sentence in the Bible's most pessimistic book that speaks to me like nothing else when I'm depressed. It helps somehow that the book Jesus taught from is quite open about the fact that life stinks and seems utterly meaningless sometimes.

'Job's Despair'
by William Blake

Actually, Scripture is full of depressed and depressing people, stories, and poems. The 42nd psalm (psalms are just poems and song-lyrics) is a real downer. In the Book of Job one man's utter depression over losing everything leads into one of the world's great epic poems about why people suffer. Even God shows up at the end but gives no real answer other than, "It's way, way over your head, but ultimately I'm in control."

This could be an intensely frustrating response, but oddly many people find it comforting. Abraham Lincoln for one is known to have read Job through several times during the Civil War and somehow it strengthened him. Sometimes you're way beyond the point where an explanation would help. But knowing you're not alone, that this is in some awful way 'normal,' that God fully acknowledges what you're going through and neither condemns it nor tries to pull you out of it with platitudes and happy-talk -- you may not be beyond that.

The Depressed God

One of the most mind-blowing things about the Christian Movement, if we can disengage our minds from two millennia of fairy tales and idealized pictures that have built up around it, is that we are worshiping a man who was tortured to death. The records tell us that Jesus did it willingly, the way you might willingly die to save your child. But they also tell us that he did not do it easily.

Mark's rough-n-ready, just-the-facts-ma'am gospel says that in the hours before his arrest he, "became very troubled and distressed. He said to [Peter, James, and John] “My soul is deeply grieved, even to the point of death." Then he proceeded to beg God not to make him do the thing preachers often say was the very reason Jesus was born -- die. The Saviour of the World did not walk evenly and impassibly to his cross. He was depressed and didn't really want to go. (What he did want to do right down to the end was to obey God, but that's another topic for another post).

Co-Sufferer

The thing about the Christian Movement, the thing about the Holy Scriptures, the thing about Jesus of Nazareth that gives me a ledge to hang onto when I'm deep down in "the hole," is their utter realism. They don't deny or demean anything I'm going through, they don't tell me to cheer up or grow up.

When I cry out, "'Futile! Futile! Absolutely futile! Everything is futile!'" (Ecclesiastes 1.2) I say it -- even when it seems for all the world that I'm alone -- to a God who's yelled something similar,  and can look me straight in the face and say, "Yeah, I know. I wrote that."

The Verse That Keeps Me Christian (It's probably not the one you think)

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Van Gogh's 'Sorrowing old man'
("At Eternity's Gate")

Sometimes you just feel like your whole life has been a waste. At least I do, and I can't imagine that I'm the only one. Sometimes it just impacts you that your life hasn't turned out at all the way you wanted, that all those hopes and dreams have come to nothing. Sometimes it seems that nobody really cares about you, that no one actually loves you, and when you look at yourself you really can't blame them. Sometimes you just reach bottom -- the bottom of bottom, and it really aches.

Now I hasten to point out that generally I'm a happy-go-lucky, easygoing guy. Ask anybody. But I have been right down in that dark hole. Maybe you have too. The worst part is that it's almost impossible to communicate what you're feeling to anyone else. Nobody seems to get it. You're in that hole by yourself.

Everybody, I would think, handles 'the hole' differently, hopefully in healthy ways (e.g., not drinking yourself into a stupor and deciding to live there). Being a follower of Jesus of Nazareth you'd think I should be able to pull out a magical Bible quote to sustain my soul. And I do have a verse... but it's probably not the one you think.

The Depressing Book

Back in the Old Testament there's a rather depressing little book called Ecclesiastes (or sometimes Qoheleth, after the title of the person who wrote it). It's one of those books that theologians -- Jewish and Christian alike -- have wondered what the ancients could have been thinking when they included it in Scripture. But there it is. Ecclesiastes is the kind of book that doesn't encourage you with the idea that one day you'll go to Heaven; it says, "Who knows?"

That's the book that helps me when I'm in the hole.  My 'magic Bible verse' is in the 2nd chapter:

This made me hate life. It was depressing to think that everything in this life is useless, like trying to catch the wind.

Ecclesiastes 2.17, (ERB).

Not exactly the 23rd Psalm. But this guy gets it, at least for me.  This is God saying, "Welcome to the hole. Yes, I even know about this place."

In my life I have found that what helps me in the depths is not all the encouragement in the Bible, but God's frank acknowledgement and full comprehension of the fact that at that point I hate life and it looks useless.

I have often thought that without a book as 'real' as Ecclesiastes in the Bible, I probably wouldn't trust it as much as I do. The Christian God isn't a fluffy bunny God who doesn't want to hear about certain parts of our little human lives because he'd rather ignore the hard stuff. He's not a Disneyland God; he's a battlefield God, a bad-side-of-town God.

Somehow this sharp little verse sums that up for me.

Does the Bible Teach Anything Clearly?

Photo courtesy Rushay (RUSH) Booysen

"Well, that's an odd title for a Christian blog," you may say to yourself.

Maybe, but a scholarly blog I ran across recently (thanks to Twitter) quotes Wayne Meeks, a famous biblical scholar, who believes we should stop using the phrase, "The Bible clearly teaches..."

So let us renounce the phrase, “the Bible clearly teaches” (says Dr. Meeks).  And every time we hear it let us immediately be on our guard... In our situation, when people say, “the Bible clearly teaches,” instead of, for example, “we can learn from the Bible if we stand within a certain community’s tradition,” or “we can find these ideas in Scripture if we construe Scripture in such-and-such a way”… when they do that, they are really masking the locus of the authority they are claiming.

Now, I have to agree with Dr. Meeks in one sense. Most of the times that Christianity has had egg on its face over the last 2000 years have been times when we weren't actually insisting on some scripture but on our own explanation of it. Handy example: the legendary conflict between Galileo and the Catholic Church. What the Church actually ended up defending was the greek scientist Ptolemy's idea of how the universe works -- not that "God the Father Almighty [is the] maker of heaven and earth," as the old creed says. Galileo himself believed that too, after all.

Teachers of Christianity always have to make sure that what we're defending is what the Bible itself says and not our explanation of what the Bible says.

That isn't my main point today but it would make a good topic, so I may post on it in the future.

Fuzziness

That doesn't seem to be Dr. Meeks' main point either. He appears to be saying that the Bible itself isn't clear, that you can't say the Bible clearly teaches anything because it clearly doesn't. To get anything worthwhile out of it at all you must "construe" it or draw its meaning from a "certain community's tradition."

But think about this: All of the things the Bible contains were written by people who knew what they meant at the time. And much of it was written to other people who also knew what they meant. And although we live at a 2 to 3 thousand year remove from their time, it is still entirely possible to recover what they meant. Historians and textual critics and archaeologists do it all the time and with all kinds of books -- not just the Bible.

Have you ever read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey?  You may not have gotten every cultural nuance but did you pick up the main points? Doesn't the Iliad clearly teach that Agamemnon and Achilles, both full of pride, quarrelled over the captured princess Briseis causing Achilles to leave the battle (trust me, it does).

What about Plato and Aristotle? Do we know pretty clearly what they taught? Yes. Why? Because we know a lot about them, their world, and can read their language. Sort of like any other book you read. Including the Bible.

If we read it intelligently, the Bible is quite clear on most things. True some passages are a bit obscure (nobody is sure what St. Paul is getting at here, for instance. Or here.). But it is not a fuzzy, obscure book, and there are a disturbingly large number of things that 'the Bible clearly says'.

Flawed

Judah Gives his Signet and Staff to Tamar

One of the main reasons I like the Bible is that it's such a real book. None of the characters in this book are lily-white, 2-D, cardboard cutouts; they're flawed, messed up people wrestling with life and with God, just like us. This morning I was reading the nasty little story found in the 38th chapter of Genesis, which reminded me of this fact like a 2 x 4 between the eyes.

I'll leave it to you to click on the link I just made in the last paragraph and read it for yourself, but I'd like to point a couple of things out.

Your Sister-in-Law?

First, the marry-your-sister-in-law-so-she-can-have-kids thing can be a bit puzzling (to say the least) to us sophisticated inhabitants of the 21st century AD. But this story takes place in the 21st century BC. It's a window into a time when the main business of life still was just surviving. At this point we'd made some progress but it was quite possible for, if not the entire human race then at least your part of it, to be entirely erased from history. All it took was a particularly bad famine, or a plague, or a family unable to leave any descendants behind when they died.

In that type of society, clinging in many cases to existence by their fingernails, the attitude of women to what constituted success was wildly different from today. 4000 years have gone under the bridge since then. Think yourself into their sandals. They were quite aware that the survival of their community depended on them. In this context, having a system set up to ensure you could produce more humans for your family even if your husband died made sense. Tamar, the heroine in this story did her level best to fulfill her duty to the species.

Pigheadedness

Second, her original husband, Er, and the replacement husband/brother-in-law Onan, were both
"particularly wretched human beings in the eyes of the Eternal One." And Onan especially, not because of what he's usually accused of, but because his pigheaded selfishness was keeping Tamar from carrying out her duty to the community despite her best efforts. And doing something like this must have been difficult on her part to say the least.

Both of these fellows were so reprehensible to God that he ended their lives. How evil is that?

So who gets blamed in all this? Tamar.

Judah, the very patriarch whose family Tamar is trying to save, decides Tamar must be the problem. She must be cursed or something because his sons keep dying. It couldn't have anything to do with them being particularly wretched guys, could it? So Judah refuses to let her have her rightful third chance, deciding instead to keep this "deadly woman" away from his 3rd son.

Tamar's Solution

Now take a look at Tamar's admittedly illegal but rather creative solution.  Point A, she is absolutely sure, no doubt due to the patriarch's reputation, that if you put a temple prostitute in Judah's path he will have sex with her, no questions asked.  This man, I must remind you, is the direct ancestor of the renowned King David and Jesus of Nazareth himself.

Point B, faced with an accusation of sexual misconduct by his daughter-in-law, Judah shows no sympathy for what he and his sons have put her through, and not a hint that he's even aware of his own hypocrisy as a man you can depend on to visit every woman he meets who does what Tamar is accused of.  Instead, he condemns her to a particularly horrible death, so bad in fact that you hardly see it anywhere else in the Bible: "Bring her out and expose her for what she is, and then let her be burned!"

But Point C, at least he didn't try to cover up the evidence Tamar produced. Maybe I'm cynical, but he could have done that. He was the patriarch after all; his word was law. But no, he finally comes clean: "She is more in the right than I am. I did not keep my word and give her in marriage to my son, Shelah."

A little bit of redemption for the very flawed Judah.  And Tamar was finally able to carry out her duty despite the rather incredible opposition she had to face.

Nobody came out smelling like a rose in this story. It's almost embarrassing to read. You keep asking, "What in the world's wrong with these people?"

And that, my friends, is why I love the Bible.

2015: Alive and Moving

"...sharper than a double-edged sword..."

Welcome to 2015 everybody. You may remember that I declared last year as one of "reading the Bible again for the first time," and used the Easy-to-Read Version (ERV) as much as possible in my posts. It turned out to be an outstanding translation that really conveyed a lot of what the Bible says without using a lot of religious slang. I plan to do a review of the ERV here soon and recommend it to anyone who wants a simple, refreshing Bible translation this under-girded by top quality scholarship.

My wife and I follow a Bible reading plan to keep us focused and we have also gotten in the habit of switching out the translations we use each year. The point is to hear the Bible in a way you haven't before and evaluate the differences you find. It's easy now in our push-button, high-tech 21st century world thanks to sites like the Biblegateway where most versions are available for free. In 2014 I used the Easy-to-Read Version, of course, and my wife chose the New American Bible, a Catholic translation.

For 2015 Rose asked me if I could recommend a translation that would "shake her loose from her King James mindset." And I couldn't think of any better than the feisty little rebel Bible called The Voice. It's a version that renders the words of scripture in the language of modern story telling, stubbornly refusing to use any traditional Christian jargon at all. It's also not afraid to add information to the text (in italics) that was plain to everybody when the Bible was written but utterly lost on us modern western readers 2000+ years later.

So I've decided that for me this will be another "year of reading the Bible for the first time," only this time using the Voice as my version of choice. Naturally I'll still turn to the NET or other trustworthy version (or just translate it myself if I have to) if the Voice goes off the rails. But I like the Voice because it's translators remember that the Word of God is not just a book of comforting, familiar platitudes...

The word of God, you see, is alive and moving; sharper than a double-edged sword; piercing the divide between soul and spirit, joints and marrow; able to judge the thoughts and will of the heart.

Letter to the Hebrews 4.12, the Voice

Living Words

(This is a modified version of a post I wrote a few years ago.)

A sacrament is a material object or action that God has chosen, in his complete freedom, to use as a conduit for his grace. The Christian movement has revolved around sacraments from its start. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions teach 7 sacraments -- baptism, confirmation (called "chrismation" in Orthodox churches), communion, holy orders, penance, anointing of the sick, and marriage. Meanwhile, most Protestants only observe the two specifically set up by Jesus of Nazareth, baptism and communion. Down through the ages innumerable followers of Jesus have attested to the mystical power resident in these simple things.

But you may have another sacrament sitting on your bookshelf. The Bible has always worked like a sacrament in the Community of Jesus -- a physical book that God uses to convey his free, unearned, transforming power and kindness to his wayward children.

Instruction Book?

Here in the western world there is a tendency, based on thinking that goes back to the Enlightenment, to see the universe mechanically. We assume that everything operates like an impersonal machine and if we can just understand the mechanism we can make it work. All we need is an instruction book.

It is popular, particularly in Western Protestantism, to think of the Bible as a kind of super instruction book. All we need to do is memorize the important dates and grasp the formulas, and we'll be able to make our religion "work." And of course, there definitely is quite a bit of wise advice and uplifting insight in Scripture. But the Bible does not purport to be just a wise and wonderful book; it purports to be revelation, a living entity through which the Holy Spirit of God speaks -- in the present tense. Just as Jesus of Nazareth was not just a wise and wonderful teacher but the unique revelation of the Living God.

Jesus taught that King David wrote his Psalms "by the Holy Spirit" (Gospel of Mark chapter 12, verses 35 - 37), and that Israel's holy books were filled with, "things written about himself in all the scriptures, starting with Moses and going through all the Prophets," (Gospel of Luke chapter 24, verses 27 and 44 - 47 ERV).

The early Christian movement believed "[Moses] received life-giving words (literally, "living words") from God to give to us", (Acts of the Apostles chapter 7, verse 38 ERV). For them -- and for us -- "God’s word is alive and working. It is sharper than the sharpest sword and cuts all the way into us. It cuts deep to the place where the soul and the spirit are joined. God’s word cuts to the center of our joints and our bones. It judges the thoughts and feelings in our hearts." (Letter to the Hebrews chapter 4, verse 12 ERV).

As the scholar J. N. D. Kelly wrote, "Whenever our Lord and His apostles quoted the Old Testament, it is plain that they regarded it as the word of God," (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p. 60). It was the same with the Apostle's writings by the time the last one died, because the Jesus followers recognized that they carried the revelation that the Messiah had entrusted them with (p. 56).

Not a Normal Book

What I'm suggesting is that nice leather-bound book you have on your desk or in your car is not just a book: It is something that intelligent 21st century people get vaguely uncomfortable with, something that some scholars devote their lives to showing it is not.

It's supernatural.

When we crack our Bibles open we are exposing ourselves to the creative power of God's own being, as God wants us to experience it. Reading the Scriptures, as John Wesley used to say, is a "means of grace," a sacrament that connects us with God. And then anything can happen.

Modern people aren't supposed to think that way. We can explain all that miraculous stuff away with our current understandings, can't we? There's no need to go there, surely.

But as C. S. Lewis wrote, "Like it or not, you belong to a supernatural religion."

Life After Death, Part 2

The gateway to Sheol

(The first two sections of this series are Life After Death, Part 1 and A Revelation About Revelation. In Life After Death, Part 2 I want to briefly cover what the God of Israel revealed about death before Jesus came.)

In the Garden of Eden God reveals the icy fact that doing wrong leads to death. The revelation that there is something after death is made only a few chapters farther into the story of mankind. Interestingly, this piece of information is spoken of (by the ancient patriarch Jacob) as though it is common knowledge, something that's been known for a while.

You may remember the story: Jacob's children were jealous of his favorite son Joseph, so they sold him to slave traders and ripped up Joseph's famous "coat of many colors," soaking it in goat blood. Jacob was given that as evidence that "a wild animal has devoured him! Joseph is surely torn to pieces!"

That is the situation when Jacob says this, for the first time in the Bible, about a place called Sheol:

He refused to be consoled. And he said, “No, I shall go down to my son to Sheol, mourning.” And his father wept for him.

(Book of Genesis 37.35 New Revised Standard Version)

For the Hebrews, Sheol was the place you go when you die. As they interacted with their God over the years, they gradually learned some details about this place, although giving a grand tour of Sheol never seemed to be high on God's to-do list.

What Sheol is not

It's important to know that there are two ways that Sheol is mistranslated in some Bibles. One is to render it as "hell." The old King James Version tells us for instance that the guests of Folly, "knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell," (Book of Proverbs 9.18 KJV). But Sheol, as we'll see, was nothing like the dreadful fiery place that "hell" conjures up in our minds today.

Another incorrect translation of Sheol is "the grave." This one is understandable because sometimes the Scriptures will say something like, "Your pride is brought down to Sheol, and the sound of your harps; maggots are your bed beneath you, and worms are your covering," (Book of Isaiah 14.11). But even in the first place it's mentioned, Sheol can't mean just a grave. At this point in the story, Jacob believes his beloved son Joseph is torn to shreds in the wilderness, unburied and his bones scattered. Yet he is sure, despite this, that Joseph is in Sheol, where Jacob will eventually join him: "I shall go down to my son, to Sheol."

A grave is to Sheol what the front door is to a house. Graves are "the gates of Sheol," which you can be "summoned to go through," (Isaiah 38.10, LEB).

Dark, dusty, silent

Photo by Kecko

What it was like

Sheol was conceived of as being underground (Book of Amos 9.2, Book of Ezekiel 31.16) or under the sea, as deep as you could possibly go (Book of Deuteronomy 32.22, Book of Jonah 2.2, 6). This was because Sheol was as far as you could be from Heaven, where God is (Book of Job 11.8, Book of Psalms 139.8).

You existed in Sheol as a repha, which was very similar to what we would call a "ghost" -- a disembodied spirit (Job 26.5, Psalms 88.10, Isaiah 14.9, etc.). Modern Bibles translate this word as "shades" or "phantoms." On at least one occasion a necromancer was apparently able to bring Samuel the Prophet's repha up from Sheol at the request of the Israelite King Saul, (1st Book of Samuel 28.8-19).

At first people thought of Sheol as dark (Job 17.13), dusty (Job 17.16), a quiet place (Psalms 115.17 and 31.17) where not a lot happens (Book of Ecclesiastes 9.10), and you were pretty much cut off from God (Psalms 6.5, Isaiah 38.18). But they realized fairly soon that nobody is ever cut off from God: "Sheol and Destruction are open to the LORD, how much more the hearts of the children of men!" (Book of Proverbs 15.11).

As time went on the later prophets revealed that Sheol wasn't quite the quiet, do-nothing place the Israelites had assumed. Both Isaiah (Isaiah 14.3 - 20) and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 32.21 - 32) describe a louder and more active Sheol, with Kings welcoming other Kings to the underworld and whatnot.

Years ago some scholars would brush all this off as just "poetic descriptions of the grave," and even now the occasional preacher will claim that that's all Sheol is. But honestly, there are 65 mentions of Sheol in the scriptures, and many more passages using synonyms. Taken together, there is no way it can just refer to the local cemetery. As John Cooper says in his book Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, a standard work on the scriptural view of the afterlife:

In fact, there is virtual consensus that the Israelites did believe in some sort of ethereal existence after death in a place called Sheol... As far as I know, the general description is undisputed among Old Testament scholars.

(Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Duelism - Monism Debate, pp. 52 - 53)

One for all?

The interesting thing is that in the Old Testament everybody goes to the same place. Job actually rhapsodizes about it. Nowhere does the Old Testament mention different destinations for the good and the bad. We are told that Sheol has "chambers" (Proverbs 7.27) but no clue what they're for. But as we get down to the Book of Daniel, and the subject of resurrection comes to the fore, we do get a hint that the life you lived matters in the afterlife:

At that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever, 

(Daniel 12.2 - 3).

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In the next installment of this series we'll get into what Jesus himself taught about life after death and before resurrection, and how it all ties together with what we talked about today.