"Brothers of the Lord". We've been through this and multiple other examples, FK. The implications of one's interpretation of that simple phrase are fundamental to the theology of the first 1500 years of Christianity.
I looked at the section you suggested in 11,485, thanks. That gave a few examples of Greek being better because there was no equivalent word in English. I see the same level of idea in whether Jesus had siblings, but in neither case do I see this as leading to one whole theology over another. Reformed theology survives fully in tact if the truth actually was that Jesus was an only child. Further, even if the subject is Mary, there are some points on which your theology and mine are closer together than yours is with the Catholics.
I still can't accept that only in Greek can Christianity be truly understood. Even if exact words can't be matched, I can't believe that ideas can't. Does Orthodoxy require fluency in Greek? That would surprise me. Plus, I know there is no such requirement for Catholics, and you consider them as part of the true Church. Do all of your major disagreements with the Catholics boil down to the Greek?
But I will say that Protestant translators did and do have their own positions to advance, usually in opposition to what they believed, generally incorrectly, was Romish spin.
There have been Protestant translations for as long as there have been Protestants. How can you make a wholesale charge that their positions went against their own beliefs? If you want to say that this or that translation was a work for hire to specs, that is fine, but they all couldn't have been like that. It appears you are making a general charge approaching intellectual fraud. :) I just don't buy it. I have heard from many Catholics that there are some "Catholic" translations which are good and some that are terrible. I would say the same thing about "Protestant" translations.
Like the Ethiopian Eunuch who needed a teacher?
That's not what I was talking about. The Eunuch needed help with a single difficult passage in the OT. So do I today, no big deal. Philip explained the new and easier to understand Gospel of Christ. My comments were about people today with access to both the OT and the NT. Teaching is certainly required for finer points, but the basics of faith are all right there within the four corners. I'm sure many great Christians never even learned the lesson from Isaiah that the Eunuch learned.
FK, I am jumping in on this because I hope I can clarify this. Your question is (or rather seems) perfectly justified, as least logically speaking.
Unfortunately, logic will not lead you to the correct answer. The reason for this is that English, as is true of most other languages, is not a liturgical language.
What does that mean? It mean that it is not structurally developed enough to express certain concepts, and tense, as a liturgical language can. Perhaps it can, but in a roundabout way that leads to awkward sentences and difficult reading.
Reading the NT from cover to cover will not lead to correct interpretation because it is read out of context. The Holy Tradition, which has maintained scriptural interpretation in the context of pertinent times and cultures when the New Testament was written (not forgetting the political realities as well!), inlcuding the attitudes and perceptions, colloquialisms and so on, avoids the pitfalls of interpreting the text through the lens of modernism, relativism and other isms that are current in our cultural and temporal consciousness.
Latin was the first liturgical language after Hebrew and Greek to be used. It is, in fact, derived from Greek. It is capable of forming sentence structures and tense as it is in Greek. And even though it was carefully and meticulously engineered from Greek for a word-by-word equivalency, the emergence of the filioque clause and Latin adherence to is prima facie evidence that Latin is at best an imitation of Greek.
Latin (and English especially) is completely incapable of conveying the same concept involved in the Greek term used for the procession of the Spirit (ekpouremai), which implies an origin. The Latin word procedere can mean originating or not originating from something. This small difference has been one of the factors that resulted in the unfortunate Schism in the 11th century and still exists.
Saint Augustine, whose Greek was not very good, is known to have made a major error in translating Genesis involving the Latin word simul, leading to the idea that "he who lives in eternity, created the world at once.
Brothers (Saints) Cyril and Methodius from Thessaloniki, Greece, lived among the many newly arrived Slavic inhabitants and learned Old Slavonic language.
Using their native Greek as the structure, they filled it in with a tailor-made Church Slavonic they developed for liturgical use (they intended it for the Moravian Slavs in what is now the Czech Republic, as at the end of the 9th century all Slavic tribes still spoke the same language without much differentiation).
Thus, although the Church Slavonic is distinctly South Slavic in origin, it was perfectly understood by all Slavic tribes at that time.
Church Slavonic (CS) was, like Latin, developed straight out of Greek with the same ability the Greek language has to form complex words and meanings. That also eliminated any need to borrow foreign words as is the case with English (which consists of numerous foreign words).
CS also has the same tense structures found in Greek, and such important differentiations as plural and singular 'you.' Thus when one reads a liturgical text in one of the languages sophisticated enough to be liturgical the tense and the singular/plural and other concepts are never lost.
In CS the concept of brothers/cousins is maintained by the similar cultural reality that exists to this day, as calling first cousins 'brothers' or 'sisters' is perfectly normal and has a very (genetically) protective function since one does not marry his 'siblings' (and first cousins are "blood" siblings by definition).
Such words as "rabbi" are translated into teacher, words such as Orthodox are exact equivalent of the Greek orthodo+doxa (pravo-slaviye), the right-praise, right-glory. The word 'catholic' is translated (sobornost) so that no one confuses it with "Roman Catholic," and the word to 'proceed' in the Creed is without confusion one that includes the origin AND conveys an eternal process (ishodyashchago), based on the tense used, so no confusion can result from it.
In fact, NT Greek and CS is a word-by-word correct-tense translation equivalency. But no one speak or ever spoke Church Slavonic. It is a liturgical language, which is still very much intelligible to Southern and Eastern Slavs whose languages have retained many of the CS words and concepts.
If Latin is once removed from Greek, English is twice removed. It often requires descriptive translations that still don't capture the original concept — take Theotokos (Bogoroditsa in CS). German is in the same category as English. German was a non-literary language until Luther's time, when it was born out of biblical German Luther created.
Thus, there is no doubt that reading something in the original is the only way to fully grasp it. Japanese is one of those languages, like Chinese, which uses "characters" or pictures to form audio-visual words. Thus the Japanese words for volcano (ka-zan) is a combination of the character fire and a character for mountain (i.e. fire-mountain). Not all words are that simple. Many include 'radicals' that are part of the whole small story in one character. Thus, in a kabuki theater you can have two actors with equivalent names (Japanese alphabet has 5,000 characters and only 150 pronunciations, so there are many same-sounding characters), but different meaning attached to them through different characters.
Thus, Japanese screen writers have an additional degree of freedom, or linguistic dimension, which the alphabet-based languages don't have: they can create two people with the same name, but only when you see their names written out in Chinese Characters (or kan-ji) can you not only tell who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, but you may be able to find out a lot more about them just based on the characters chosen!
Thus, it is obvious that such literary dimension cannot be translated into any European language and that the only way to capture the meaning and the drama of the literary piece is to read it in the original.
Judaism is also very specific in that respect. Judaism, in addition to words also has numerical meanings of the words, as Hebrew numbers are simply parts of the Hebrew script. naturally, once a Hebrew words is translated into koine Greek, for example, it loses the numerical value (which is often important!), even though ancient Greek also used alphabetic letters as numbers (a custom familiar in the west which still uses Latin numbering system, i.e. III, IV, VIII, etc.), because the letters do not have the same numerical value, quantity, and order in Greek as they do in Hebrew.
So, to put is simply: yes, the only complete way to understand Christianity is to be fluent in biblical Greek.
To fully understand the NT, which I would think would be something all Christians, not just the Orthodox, would aspire to, the answer quite simply is yes, as Kosta so very completely explained. I cannot add to his post save to say that in Greek we still use letters for some numerical designations such as Α', Β', Γ' Δ', 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th. :)