Logos Dei

One part about being a fundamentalist Christian has long confused me: Which text do you believe? I remember inviting an Orthodox Jew to speak to my students about his faith. He pulled out his Torah and said, “When I read this, I’m reading the actual words of God.” His point was that God spoke Hebrew and when he read God’s word he read it in the original. A fundamentalist Muslim will tell you the same thing about the Koran, if he’s literate in Arabic. Why God would speak Hebrew first and then Arabic is a matter I leave to the Jews and Muslims. But why God’s words are still His when they’re written in English is a problem that I can bring some of my own expertise to, limited as it is, because I’ve spoken English all my life.

When I was in a public speaking class in high school, one of my classmates gave a speech about the coming Armageddon predicted in Revelations; he used numerology to demonstrate that Henry Kissinger was the Anti-Christ. He did this by correlating English letters to numbers and performing some rudimentary arithmetic. Even then I thought this had to be a crock; English hadn’t even existed when Revelations was written. Morevoer, my classmate was doing his figuring using numerals that were originally Hindu, and got to him by way of Islam (ironic, I think). Of course, now I do think that Henry Kissinger could have been the Anti-Christ, at least until W and Cheney took over the positions of War-Criminal-in-Chief and Anti-Christ respectively.

It’s one of the great glories of this country that anyone can believe any sort of nonsense he wants, including that the Bible contains the literal words of God. A fair number of Americans not only believe this, but would like to have it acknowledged regularly in the public schools. Or at least they’d like to have their belief in this acknowledged ahead of anyone else’s beliefs.

You don’t have to be familiar with higher criticism to see that there are problems with this position. Anybody who’s ever translated text, or for that matter, ever used babelfish online, knows what a tricky process translation is. A language is the expression of a culture at a particular time and place. There are many differences between Hebrew and English. Translators are human and must make subjective choices based on the texts available to them, their condition, and who will be reading the result.

So my question for fundamentalists who read their Bibles in English or any other modern language isn’t whether doing so gets the scriptures wrong. My question is this: If you don’t read the Bible in its “original” form – and remember there are different versions of the original text – aren’t you putting your faith in the translators as much as in God? And if you are really trying to know God, wouldn’t it be sensible (and not really too much trouble) to learn Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek well enough to have an acquaintance with the texts your translation started with? And wouldn’t you want to make a careful review of the available texts? I’d like to hear what Fundamentalists have to say about this, preferably without recourse to “for God anything is possible.” How does a believing Christian choose the text that is truly inspired? And on whose authority does the truthfulness of the chosen text rely?