THE MYTH OF "THE" BIBLE

© 2006 Orchid Land Publications

20061212, rev. 20061216

     When people speak of believing "the" Bible, it means nothing unless the hearer knows which mistranslation of the Bible is being spoken of.  It would be very naïve to fail to distinguish the original Greek Bible form (mis)translations of it that are NOT "the" Bible.  To see the force of what has just been said, consider the following correct translations of important verses of the Greek New Testament, made in accord with the Hellenistic paradigm that all speakers and writers of the Apostolic Age premised─with whatever translation you use:

√ Mat. 5:9  Blessed are the peace-makers [i.e. not war-markers].
√ Gen. l:26  Let’s make humanity according to our Image [Icon; human essence] and
    according to Assimilation [of human nature . . .  to the Energies of God’s Nature]
√  John 1:1,3  In the beginning was (the) Reason . . . and apart from Him was made not
    one thing that was made.
√ I Cor. 1:24  Christ. . . the Wisdom of God.  (This and the preceding do not call God the Son a
   "Word"; wisdom is practical reason)  Because Reason created all that is, the Fathers held that
   the cosmos is therefore logikós "intelligible," i.e. amenable to scientific analysis.
√ John 3:5  I say to you, if anyone is not born from water and the Spirit, one is unable to enter
   God’s Kingdom.
√ John 6:53-54 (etc.)  I say to you all, unless you eat the Body of humanity’s Son and drink His
   Blood, you do not have Life in you.
√ Philp. 2:12-13:  With fear and trembling, work out your own Salvation; for it is God  [Who is]
   energizing in you all both to will and to energize for the sake of [His] being well-pleased.√   
   Eph. 5:(31-)32. etc.  A person will leave father and mother and be glued to his wife . . . this
   is a great Sacrament (MYSTÉRION).
√ 2 Pet 1:4   . . . that through [the promises] you may become participants in the divine Nature
   [not, of course, the imparticipable divine Essence]

    Many would-be literalists do not accept the litearl sense of the passages just listed, as will be self-evident to those familiar with the matter.  Those who know the history of how Eastern learning reached the West at the end of the Dark Ages know that for Roman Catholics the emphasis was Aristotelean; this came from Latin translations of Islamic translations and interpretations of Greek in the twelfth century.  They will know that at the Renaissance in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth century the emphasis of the humanist Protestant Reformers was Platonic and Neo-Platonic:  a gnostic repudiation of the essential role of matter and time in religion.
     If you compare the fairly literal translations of the verses cited above with your favorite English translation, you will be able to discern how your favored translation slants the Greek in a non-ontic direction:  The Western paradigms will slant the sense in a volitional-juridical-moral direction. Thus, the ontic state of "being deprived from Grace" in Gen. 1:26 will become moral "sin." 

Ontic holiness will be the same as moral-volitional righteousness when the ontic category is excluded from one's scope.  See more of the same HERE.  This slant differs fundamentally from the Greek outlook of the Apostles who spoke Greek and wrote the New Testament. 

     That being the case, your translation is not "the" Bible if it differs paradigmatically in its import, being whatever has been filtered through an alien paradigm.  Note how the Reformers altered the position of nature and law:

     If one cannot distinguish a premise, assumption, or axiom─which is neither true nor false, though it fences in what can be true and what cannot be true for you─one is an ideologue with monocular mental vision.
    The cure lies in finding out what St. Paul's paradigm was:  Click HERE.  The difficulty lies in whether you can you escape your ideology for the sake of honesty? 

WHAT'S TO BE DONE?

     Borrow a Greek lexicon that shows where words occur─I recommend G. Abbott-Smith's;

─beginning with Paul's Epistles, find each of the 26 verses in your translation using work or an equivalent word, . . . recalling that work and energy are contraries in that work gets energized whereas energy energizes ;

─Change likeness to Assimilation in Gen. 1:24.

─Get help, if necessary, to find out what energy meant to Aristotle, who invented the term.  He treats it in his Physics and more at length in several places in his Metaphysics; a translation may be acceptable for this part of the translator or reader's approach to the material.

     What the foregoing steps accomplish is to make you aware of the paradigm difference between your translators view of reality and that of the Apostle Paul or any other writer in the Hellenistic Age.  (See also page R346 for another difference that permeates translations into the format of a very different mental and linguistic culture from those that St. Paul grew up in; for a more global account of paradigms, see page R265.)