.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

God Talk with T-roy

These are random points of view on various subjects of theology.

Name:
Location: Wichita Falls, Texas, United States

Sunday, April 10, 2005

DON'T PUT A QUESTION MARK WHERE GOD PUT A PERIOD?

This is a frustrating phrase for me! I know that people who say this are implying that one should not question "what God said" in the Bible. What is so frustrating, though, is that these are the people who want to take the Bible literally. What they don't realize is that interpretation of Scripture is NOT as easy as is implied by biblical literalists. Please, hear me out...

The Bible was originally written in primarily two languages, Hebrew and Greek (a portion of Daniel was also written in Aramaic). The interesting thing about the ancient versions of these two languages is that there was NO punctuation. Therefore, there are instances in which it is unclear whether the original author was intending to make certain sentences to be questions or statements! Similarly, there are passages in which it is unclear when one speaker in the text has quit speaking and another has started. This is especially a problem in Job and John. Since all of this is the case, we cannot literally say that God definitively put a question mark or a period on many statements (assuming God did "write" the Bible - which I do NOT believe)!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home