The reason two versions of the same Bible uses two different words is due to the nature of Greek syntax. The Greek tacks the verb onto the end of a word and it isn't always precise. I don't have my reference books handy but to give you an idea, the Greek could use one word that could be correctly interpreted as:
Jesus went [in the house]
Jesus went [by the house]
To make this more confusing, there are subtle differences in the various Greek manuscripts used as the basis for the translation. In these cases, a good translation will footnote the changes or the differences in the manuscripts. With a very few exceptions most people don't base their doctrine on these suspected text that I know of.
If you only have one person doing the translation you can understand how they may want to shade the text to their own preference using their favorite word or using the manuscript they like the most. Nowadays whenever a new translation is coming out you have international boards of various denominations including Catholics, who participate in the translation. They generally look at the context and map it against other parts of scriptures and other manuscripts. But in the end they come to some educated consensus.
Protestants believe it's the original documents that are the inspired writings of God-not the translations. I would argue this confusion is EXACTLY as God has intended and reminds me very much of the tower of Babel.
The second point you bring up is far more intriguing in my mind-the Jewish idea of righteousness. The Pharisees believed in a resurrection of the dead-not the Sadducees. Jesus told the Sadducees they were wrong and condemned the Pharisees for their legalism. So the Jewish idea of righteousness wasn't as far removed or different than you might think. It is clear in the scripture this idea of righteousness was transferred over to Christians.
What I do believe has changed is our concept of God. We no longer think like our Jewish-believing brethren but we think in the more Greek way. Our concept has become skewed.
"Protestants believe it's the original documents that are the inspired writings of God-not the translations. I would argue this confusion is EXACTLY as God has intended and reminds me very much of the tower of Babel."
While Orthodoxy has never made proclamation on these things, if you look at how we act and practice and worship, a quite different view comes out.
We believe that the Holy Spirit, through the Church, has maintained the Scriptures. Since we do not make a point of inerrancy of every word or phrase (there are obvious errors here and there -- but none of any importance), we are not disturbed by the fact that different manuscripts of the Scriptures differ one from another.
But, when you look at the Byzantine *text-type* that is universally used within the Orthodox world (except by those churches in North America that, in ignorance of this fact, use a version other than the KJV, NKJV, or 3rd MIllenium Bible for the NT), that text-type has remarkable consistency within it, and it had that remarkable consistency before the age of printing presses, let alone computers. The differences that are there are minor and change neither the historical accounts nor the spiritual meaning of the texts. Again, the Orthodox Church isn't fixated on the exact text word for word, since we have always had manuscripts of this or that text that vary slightly.
All other modern English translations are based on composite, patched together Greek texts that were concocted by German agnostics in the 19th century. The Greek texts that are used for most translations are Greek texts that were *never* used by any church at any time.
If you take the idea that only the original autographs are infallible, then you accept the idea that from the very earliest times, God did not preserve the Scriptures very well at all, and only in the 19th and 20th century were scholars able to do reconstructions that come close to the text of those autographs.
Unfortunately, we don't have ANY original autographs of the New Testament. But I would agree with the concept that we can take many ancient manuscripts and come up with a relatively accurate Scripture rendering. I guess this is not as big of a deal to Catholics (and Orthodox) because we don't believe in "Bible alone".
So the Jewish idea of righteousness wasn't as far removed or different than you might think. It is clear in the scripture this idea of righteousness was transferred over to Christians.
I agree. I find this a bit surprising that a Protestant would make this observation, as most I talk to believe in imputed righteousness, rather than a righteousness internal to us as a result of Christ's abiding presence in us.
Regards
That's an observation which for me as an Orthodox Christian I must say is quite foreign to my experience, especially as a Greek. The "Greek way" you are refering to is of course that of classical Greek philosophy. In the West, essentially on account of Medieval Scholasticism, Classical Greek philosophy does play something of a defining theological role. This is not true in Eastern Christianity and never has been. Orthodox Christianity has always seen itself, and lived, as the New Israel, in conscious contrast to the more Greek philiosophical way seen in the West as a result of the way the West does theology. This distinction is starkly demonstrated in the controversies between the Western monk Barlaam and +Gregory Palamas in the 14th century. Because the difference is so clear in these writings, I recommend them to all of you.
On a more mundane level, any Conservative or Orthodox Jewish theologian will tell you that Eastern Christianity, both in the way it experiences and approaches God and perhaps even more so in its praxis, is very, very Jewish. One rabbi, the former chief rabbi of Budapest, a true theologian and a man I know very well, having spent countless hours discussing matters with him, has observed to me that when he speaks with Orthodox Christian theologians about how one should "relate to" or "experience" or "approach" O WN, or when he attends a Divine Liturgy or other devotion, he feels he is in the company of other "Israelites".
The distinction you point up is a very important one and in part explains the distinction which stripes1776 mentioned about human nature and grace in the East and the West.
As Agrarian says in #3955, such differences are "minor and change neither the historical accounts nor the spiritual meaning of the texts."
They merely prove that literalistic inerrancy is a false notion held by some Protestant groups in the narrow sense, and the fact that the real value of the Bible is not as an inerrant source of astronomical knowledge or geography or zoology, but of God's inerrant message, and our spiritual awareness of Divine Economy, in the broadest sense.
Protestants believe it's the original documents that are the inspired writings of God-not the translations.
We have no way of knowing what is the original Scripture. The oldest complete copy of Old Testament is Septuagint (LXX), dating back 200 years B.C. The oldest Hebrew complete set of all books in our Old Testament (the Mesoretic Text, MT) dates back to 1,000 A.D.; earlier fragments, but not complete books, notwithstanding.
So the Jewish idea of righteousness wasn't as far removed or different than you might think
Jews do not see a need for man to be saved; nor do they believe that anyone can atone for another man's sins. They do believe that God gives everyone a chance to become good by choice.
They have a very poorly defined concept of heaven and hell, more in terms of proximity to God then separate entities, just as they do not see evil being outside of God's creation.
They do not see man justified by grace or even needing faith to be righteous. They simply believe that by being good (in a worldly sense) makes man "acceptable to God."
It is a commonly but nonetheless erroneously held belief that Sadducees did not believe in angels and afterlife. Some didn't. You must understand that the two sects mentioned in the New Testament, Sadducees, and Pharisees came into being about 200 BC and the former died out around 100 AD,; tha latter having been transformed into modern-day rabbinical Jews. Neither sect, and that includes the third group -- the Essenes, represents "the" Judaism.
Clearly, the Essenes held on to Scriptures that validate much of LXX, so no one is to say which of the "original" Scripture is to be used as the "original."
Christianity clearly introduced a new and as yet to them unknown variable into Jewish theologies -- salvation by grace, independent of our works; fulfillment of the Law through love, rather then by works alone. The idea that one must believe to be acceptable to God is as novel to the Jews today as it was back then.
It is really astonishing that Christianity uses Jewish Scripture as the basis for its theology, and yet differs so much from Judaism.
Thanks Harley, I didn't know that.