Researching The Original Words

It is wonderful to know that people are listening to me and it's particularly awesome when someone is interested enough in what I have to say that the person sends a heartfelt comment. Thank you oh majestic Dionysian friend! The particular episode to which I refer is Episode #4 of This Week In Heresy and you can check it out at http://www.thisweekinheresy.com/ ... and hey! While you're there, please consider leaving $$$ in Gina's tip-jar at the site!

The question at-hand is this:

The listener expressed a desire to learn enough Greek to check primary sources without pursuing an advanced degree and knowing it all by-heart or by-rote. It's an excellent question and I'm happy to respond. This kind of question comes up a lot, and personally I think it is a common question because it gets to the core of the challenge we inevitably encounter in any community of faith that worships a deity or deities from an ancient timeframe. The very remoteness of the text as we encounter it now, relative to its original author, serves to stimulate our sense of wonder. People get easily amazed by the very idea that someone like me can read a different language, in a different alphabet, from a different culture, and purport to speak with authority on what the text is "really" saying.

Here's the secret: the only difference between me and any one of you is that I made a religious commitment to do this work and I have the training. Truth be told, there are no hidden magicks here. No divining rods. Just books. Yay books! (And web sites as well, but let's start with the books!)

Following is my answer to the question.

Warning: this answer is a long answer. LONG.

Step 0

Any attempt to connect from a modern or modern-ish English translation of any verse of the Christian New Testament starts with one prerequisite. Learn the Greek alphabet. This often intimidates people, but I promise you that it's not as hard as you might think initially. We carry a deep-seated general awareness of Greek letters and even the order of the Greek alphabet because it is amazingly similar to the Roman alphabet. And for that matter, the Greek alphabet has a familiar cadence in it that you will find in most Indo-European languages. It's also a similar flow as Arabic and Hebrew, believe it or not, and for those of you who don't know about the Cyrillic alphabet here's another treat: the Cyrillic alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet and shares almost all its letters. So if you look at Greek text and see things that look Russian or even generally Slavic to you, there's the reason why. You can teach yourself the Greek alphabet by simply going to Wikipedia and looking it up. I promise it isn't that hard, really: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet

Step 1

Find an English verse with a word that you want to check in the Greek.

Step 2

Find the exact verse in the Greek text. Here's the trick: find a Greek text that is "indexed to the Strong's Concordance of the Bible." All hail James Strong! All hail James Strong! Strong was a 19th-century scholar who indexed every single word of the Bible from the King James English. Literally, every single word. Every. Single Word. And he then tabulated every word based on its root form [the equivalent of the "infinitive form" for verbs in English or the "lexical form" of verbs in Greek], and published it all in a stunning volume called Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible but commonly referred to as Strong's Concordance or just Strong's for short. Also note that many Bibles are published with "interlinear" features, but my favorite one -- and the absolute best one I have ever seen -- is Jay Green's Larger Print Interlinear Hebrew Greek English Bible, Volume 4 of 4 Volumes (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1589604849).

Step 3

New Testament printings such as Jay Green's (above) with text indexed to Strong's have entries in the form Gnnnn or just nnnn where G is the Roman letter G and nnnn is a number from 1 to 4 digits in the integer range 1 to 5624. There are also a number of publications -- and web sites, naturally -- which will list all occurrences of a specific Strong's number in the entire New Testament. This provides you a neat way to look across the entire New Testament to see where a specific word or its derivatives appear. This is also a point where you see evidence of my assertion that there is no such thing as a value-free translation, because you will often find that the same Greek root-word is translated into the King James English with different English words in different places in the Bible. Such discrepancies reflect "editorial decisions" on the part of the translators at the dawn of the 17th Century CE; such decisions inherently reflect the translator's viewpoint and may or may not be "faithful" to the original text... reminder: review TWIH Episode 4 for my lengthy discussion on the perils of being "faithful" to the "original" text. And a little historical footnote: a major motivation of King James VI/I [Scotland/England] to commission the KJV was in response to sectarian protests by none other than a particular English band of Christians. They were known as the Puritans.

Step 4

Now that you know the root-word of your specific English word, you can look it up in a reference document. There are literally hundreds of such publications. The challenge here is that the most comprehensive ones are designed for reference-library-use only, so they tend to be multi-volume sets that are insanely expensive. A library such as the amazing consortial library at the Graduate Theological Union is an excellent place to do this research, but there are online sources as well and I will now walk you through an example of how to do this online. This online process can potentially save you HOURS of work, and in seminary I was only allowed to use such a shortcut after I had learned the traditional book-based way of doing the research. And now you know.

SAY WHAT? A HOW-TO EXAMPLE

Following is an example of how to study a word in the Bible in order to build a deeper understanding of its use.

Let's say that I encounter the word fate when reading Philipians 3:19 in the NIV translation of the Bible (point of reference: the New International Version is the most commonly read version of the Bible at this point; its goal was to create an English text that is more "approachable" to the modern reader than the KJV). Here's the verse in question.

Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things. 

-Philippians 3:19 NIV

Ok so the first issue I have is that the verse is in the NIV not the KJV. That's easy enough to fix. Following is the exact same verse from the KJV.

Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.

-Philippians 3:19 KJV

Well isn't that interesting. I can already see that this is going to be one of those times when English translations do not use the same word. [Full disclosure: I chose this verse as a setup to illustrate that point. I'm sneaky like that.]

Now I have the word in the KJV, and I can pivot across to a Strong's Concordance. All hail the Internet. One of the most useful web sites ever for this kind of work is a site owned by Tim Greenwood Ministries. They are based near Los Angeles. While I shall not address their theological biases in this post (no comment), I do credit them with ownership of the best site I have ever found to speed up this kind of work. Whether or not I agree with their theological stances, I -- and all of us who do this kind of work -- owe a profound debt of gratitude to them for the following resource:

http://www.tgm.org/bible.htm

The wonderful thing about this resource is that you can simply enter a Bible citation and jump into it. So, really, you could've skipped the pivot from NIV to KJV... but I took you through that step just to highlight the slippery nature of translation efforts. [See, I am sneaky like that.]

All you have to do now is type Philippians 3:19 into the left text box then click the Search icon right below it. And poof, guess what you will see? The web site will take you to a verse-by-verse account of Chapter 3 of Philippians and will focus in on the specific verse in question.

Now, look to the left of that verse and you'll see an icon with the word Tools in it. If you hover on the word Tools you'll see a contextual menu, but don't click there -- just click Tools and something awesome will appear: your chosen verse will appear in Greek with the Strong's numbering below it.

You are now looking at the "original" Greek text, and the Strong's coding for every single word appears below it. How cool is that? There are also other tabs for accessing online commentaries on the word/verse/chapter/book in question, but be warned: many of the linked commentaries carry strong ideological bias just like many translations do.

Find the second row, where the word end appears. Moving to the right you'll see G5056; further to the right you will see the Greek root word τέλος. You can click G5056 and it will take you to an interpretive treasure-trove. Of particular note when you click G5056 is the "outline" of Biblical usage. Just scanning over that outline quickly, you will see that the word τέλος doesn't sound nearly so nice as the word destiny did in the NIV, does it? Welcome to why being the Greek Geek can so easily become a political statement! Another neat thing on this web site, looking further down the G5056 entry, is the number of times some form of the Greek root-word appears in the KJV text as well as how it is translated. This can be critically important information when trying to reconcile discrepancies in Bible translations, or when arguing points of theology. There is even more there: you can click any of the highlighted English entries in the "KJV Translation Count" box and the site will show you every occurrence in a line-by-line list. This comes in particularly handy when I am writing a sermon; I will often say things like "the Greek word XXXX occurs nnnn times in the New Testament" and this is a quick way to get that number.

SOME IMPORTANT CLOSING WORDS

So that is the quick (quick?!?!) answer to a deceptively simple question from a listener. Note that I have left the heart of the listener's question -- what the original words meant to the original audience -- basically unaddressed in this post. There's the rub: in order to answer such a question we end up placing a lot of trust in commentary texts. This is why I strongly advocate the use of multiple commentaries. Never draw your own conclusion from only one commentary. Responsible scholarship demands that you review as many different "expert" voices as you possibly can. Only then should you form your own conclusion based on what moves in your spirit as you ponder all the available voices.