[This is one in a series of mid-week Reflections published by Horley Baptist Church during September 2020]
Pontius Pilate commissioned a sign to be written in Aramaic, Greek and Latin. I remember my days learning Latin, the only subject in which I achieved an exam mark of 100%. But, one may ask (and we did), why would anyone bother to teach Latin to primary school pupils in the middle of the 20th century? After all, as we were in the habit of reminding each other,
Latin is a language as dead as dead can be,
first it killed the Romans and now it’s killing me!
It was argued that learning Latin helped people to learn other languages at a more fundamental level. Latin has a disciplined structure that illustrates how many other languages function (although English has so many exceptions that it is easier to assimilate rather than learn formally).
Mixing languages is a daily occurrence for me and I am well aware that parts of any conversation may well get lost in translation. However, apart from that limited liaison with Latin some 60 years ago, my acquaintance with classical languages is effectively nil. That means that, like most modern Bible readers, I need to rely on a translation. We accept that the Bible is God’s inspired word, but what about the translations? We trust that Bible translators are guided by the Holy Spirit, but they still come up with variations in the text.
A potentially controversial instance arises in Genesis 2 verse 2. The text says that God completed His work of creation variously, ‘on’, ‘in’ or ‘by’ the seventh day. The first two variants imply that the work wasn’t quite finished at the end of the sixth day and it over-ran a bit into the seventh. All the sources agree that the seventh day was primarily a day of rest but only the third variant ‘by’ implies that it was exclusively so.
How should we react when we encounter what seem like discrepancies in the Bible? One fundamental principle is that “Scripture interprets Scripture” – that is, there are other verses elsewhere that can shed some light on our quandary. Acts 17 tells us how the Jews in Berea reacted when they heard Paul preach – they “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true”.
Have you examined the Scriptures today?
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Contributed by Steve Humphreys; © the Author
