Free Republic
Browse · Search
Religion
Topics · Post Article

To: annalex
Thanks for the links. I bookmarked them for future study. (By the way how do you post a link?)

no Bible version has an exclusive claim on the deposit of Christian Faith that we get from the Church, although some versions seem to exist only in order to destroy the faith, while others are quite good.

Are you saying that NO Bible version is greater then the (Catholic) church? When you say "destroy the faith", do you mean the faith in Jesus as savior or faith in the Catholic church?
396 posted on 09/16/2005 12:55:56 PM PDT by ScubieNuc
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 395 | View Replies ]


To: ScubieNuc
To post a link, you will be using so-called HTML tags. They are things in angle brackets. Once your post contains even one tag, the entire post will have to be in HTML format, so you habe to also use <p> to separate paragraphs. If you don't use HTML in your post.you can just type normally and the paragraphs come out.

To post a link find out the exact URL of the page. Better start with http://, for example, "http://www.blueletterbible.org". also think of how you want to name your link. For example, you may want to name it "Click Here". Now type this:

<a href=http://www.blueletterbible.org>Click Here</a>
Press Preview, and it will become
Click Here

***

We don't worship the Bible, nor the Church. We worship the Triune God, Who gave us the Church and the revelation of the Bible. The official Latin Rite Catholic version is St. Jerome's Vulgate, and the official Eastern Rite and Orthodox version is in Greek, closely related to the Alexandrine Septaguint. The Old Testament is known through its Maronite Hebrew edition, although it is not what Christ and Apostles knew, as it post-dates them. These are versions of great authority (admittedly, Latin was not used by the Apostles, but Jerome's translation was done in contact with the Hellenized Jews of Palestine whose language was close to the Greek of the Apostles; Jerome also had access to material now lost). Douay follows the Vulgate word-for-word and so is as close to the official Catholic version as one can get in English. But it often lacks in elegance.

The Church teaches that all written scripture has to be understood within the Apostolic Tradition, and the Church is the deposit of it. I don't know if that means the Church is "greater" or not. The readings at today's Latin Rite Mass are said in New Amercian Bible and are on occasion inaccurate in comparison with Douay. But they have certain flow and are easy to follow by ear. Also, for most part all the versions, including those we don't particularly like, say the same thing; the subtle and sometimes not so subtle mistranslations occur when the translator's theology influences his choices, so closer inspection is needed when the subject matter divides us from the Protestants: Mary, priesthood, Eucharist.

I do not make a distinction between Faith in Jesus and Faith in the Church. The Church is what informs my faith in Jesus, thanks to its apostolicity. I suppose, it is inaccurate to speak of "faith in the Church" because we do not pray to the Church or worship it, but we pray to and worship Jesus. When a translation is grossly inaccurate, it distorts our knowledge of what it attempts to describe, and so our faith suffers. For example, when the way in which the angel addresses Mary is translated as "most favored one", it trivializes the meaning of "keharetomene" by removing the connotation that Mary had been filled with grace even before the Angel appeared. "Most favored one" is not telling us anything we cannot deduce from the rest of the scripture. Of course, she was most favored, -- no other woman gave birth to Jesus. The translator could just as easily have omitted that phrase altogether. Also, grace is a technical term in Christianity as it is the opposite of sin. "Favor with God" is a weaker term, not necessarily opposite of all sin. Only from this verse we learn something about her condition since birth. This is how a sloppy translation leaves us uninformed, and weakens our faith. Look at all the energy people spend arguing about veneration of Mary and how often it comes from not reading from the same scripture and with the apostolic eye.

397 posted on 09/16/2005 1:47:43 PM PDT by annalex
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 396 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Religion
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson