Anglicans on Bible versions
In a forum Anglicans have been discussing which English versions they use most often. A new post was added to the discussion thread yesterday. Some of you might enjoy seeing which versions the Anglicans who have posted prefer. Those of you who are Anglicans might even want to register on that forum and join the discussion.
posted by Wayne Leman at 9:05 PM
3 Comments:
Very revealing. Yet I couldn't help notice the class distinctions of "clergy" and "laity". Ugh.
I'm not an Anglican, but I went for a look – and then took a wander around the forum. I was disturbed to see quite a few posts from someone promoting a form of universalism (everyone will be saved "in the end"). I mention it here because it seems to be largely based on (or justified from) a mistranslation (that I've met before) of the Greek normally rendered "eternal" or "everlasting" (as effectively meaning "age-long" instead). To me this demonstrates the common error of someone saying, "of course what the word really means is …", and then quoting its derivation (as if giving the word's "literal meaning").
To give an non-biblical example, while I may dislike the term "quad-bike", there's little point in my insisting that a quad-bike would have four pairs of wheels (instead of just four wheels). I guess that for many people the word "bike" has now lost the concept of "two-ness".
So in situations where a word is in danger of misinterpretation (as the rendering "eonian" [sic] was in the first example), perhaps it's best to avoid it. On arriving home yesterday I found a Jehovah's Witnesses leaflet on "the end of false religion" (yes please!). I hadn't realised (or remembered) that they believe that the soul dies when the body does. This idea apparently comes from confusion over the usage of Hebrew and Greek words sometimes rendered "soul". E.g. Ezekiel 18:4: "The soul that is sinning—it itself will die" (NWT). In this case I noted how "The soul who sins is the one who will die" (NIV) has become "The one …" in TNIV – in recognition that here "soul" = "person" (see e.g. NRSV) and isn't a reference to just the "immaterial part" of a human being.
I made a long comment here yesterday. Was it deliberately deleted?
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