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The value of word studies

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When I mentioned Philippians 4:19, I mentioned having done a word study, my first word study focused on the Greek language.

What’s the value of a word study? Should it be how people study Scripture?

Well… my thought is that word studies are a useful tool, but that this tool should be one among many. You shouldn’t feel you have to rely on word studies to learn God’s Will.

In fact, I’ll go one further: if a word study is required to understand a passage, then you’re being informed incorrectly.

It’s one thing to do a word study and add to your enlightenment regarding a passage in the Bible – it’s another thing altogether to do a word study and use that as your sole source of enlightenment.

Different translations have their strengths and weaknesses, to be sure, but nearly every translation in general availability is clear enough to be used for evangelical purposes. (I’m not suggesting that books like the Book of Moron – I mean, Mormon – and other such works are canonical, mind. The Bible says that it’s not to be added to.)

By this I mean that if you’re reading the NIV, you’re not getting a fundamentally different gospel message than if you read the ESV or the KJV. There are certainly differences, primarily in the source texts used, and some use these differences to claim that one translation or another is a false Bible, but I find this spurious.

A minor side point about translations

The NIV, especially, gets blamed as a “devil’s Bible” because it’s “missing verses.” For example, Acts 8:37 is claimed to be “missing” in the NIV… and I find that it’s not quite accurate, for a few reasons.

Consider: the NIV translators acknowledge that it’s there, even if the translation doesn’t include the verse inline – because 8:38 is the same no matter what translation you use. So the verse gets a “placeholder” at the very least.

Also consider: I don’t have a single NIV that doesn’t contain the verse! Admittedly, the “main NIV” I have – not my “go-to Bible,” which is an NASV translation – has a footnote that includes the verse as a whole, and a footnote isn’t the same as an inline verse – but it’s still there.

What does this mean? Has the NIV taken away something from the Bible, or added it? Many are anti-NIV because it leaves verses out (of the inline text, I suppose) – but they’re not thinking of why.

I’m not an NIV apologist, per se (okay, maybe I am, since I’m defending it here) but the verses excluded from the mainline content are excluded because there’s some question about which source texts contained what. In general, from what I’ve seen, the older manuscripts contained less than the later manuscripts used to translate the King James Version, and the NIV uses those older manuscripts.

If the Bible is not to be added to, then, I’d suggest that the older manuscripts might even be more authoritative than the newer manuscripts.

The only shift is in conservative preservation of the value reportedly possessed by the KJV. If it’s your reference point as far as what verses contain what, then the Bibles that use older manuscripts would be invalid – because it uses verses added later (because they’re not present in the older manuscripts we have).

But if we’re picking on Bible translations, I’d say the later manuscripts have a weaker position than the older ones.

The key for me is this: does the NIV contain the gospel? Does it contain the gospel in such a way that the whole message is not changed?

The answers are yes, and yes: it contains the gospel, and it does not change the message. At no point does it say specifically something that counteracts the gospel, although there are points of emphasis the later manuscripts contain that can add clarity (Acts 8:37 being a good example of this.)

Back to word studies…

Word studies can provide insight into the further meaning contained in the original texts. For example, Philippians 4:19 uses the word “wealth” (or “riches,” depending on your translation), and I was wondering what it actually meant by the word outside of the context of the verse, so I did a quick word study into it.

The context of the verse doesn’t change through the word study; I didn’t find new meaning in the word study. I established further meaning and clarification of the word, and added just a tiny bit of Greek knowledge, but the word study didn’t do more than glorify God.

Word studies could instruct, I suppose. If you don’t understand a passage at all, a word study could give you the insight you need as a lever to expose for what something was meant.

But in my humble opinion, a word study should enhance, not serve as an underpinning of knowledge; relying on it for primary sources of knowledge yields an interpretation that the Bible is a mystery, that you have to have special knowledge and understanding (and interest) to read it, and that serves as a barrier between you and God.

Further, emphasizing word studies can serve as a barrier between others and God. For example, I rather enjoy word studies when I do them. (Well, when I do them with Hebrew – I dislike Greek!) But I try to be careful when referring to them when I talk to people, because I don’t want to send the impression that someone who’s not done a word study is “less prepared” than I am.

That’s not the case, after all – a believer has the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is no respecter of persons. My approach is not better than or more holy than yours, no matter what your approach is, or what my approach is.

And making it seem as if that’s not the case – e.g., that my way is better – is wrong, and harmful to others.

Shalom.

(Originally published on January 26, 2012.)

Something’s been bothering me from my word study

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Something about my word study on Philippians 4:19 has been bothering me for a few days.

I referred to the Greek word plouton (or more accurately, ploutos, πλοῦτος, both translated typically as “riches” or “wealth”), and made an association to Pluto and Ploutos, the Roman and Greek gods of wealth.

The cultural shift in the reference to Pluto as an association to a Greek word – has been a gadfly for me.

Was I incorrect in making the association at all? Wouldn’t Ploutos – the Greek reference, not the Roman – be the right reference to use?

Well, maybe… but probably not.

I think of two “ages” in culture from the Hellenistic era in Roman antiquity: a time when Greek culture ruled from Greece, and then the time when Greek culture ruled from Rome.

The Romans took Greek mythology and translated it, occasionally importing names directly but usually equating Greek gods to generally Roman equivalents. Therefore, Zeus became Jupiter, Hera became Juno, Heracles (the son of Zeus, named “Heracles” to mollify the endlessly jealous Hera) became Hercules, Odysseus became Ulysses, etc. etc. etc.

The Greek Hades became the Roman Pluto.

Pluto sounds roughly like ploutos does, and one aspect of Pluto was that he was the god of wealth in addition to the lord of the realm of death. (Mythological tradition around his exact role is horribly confused; generally it depends on what source you pull from and in which era, because his role and identity shifted quite remarkably over time.)

Why, though, would I think a sentence in Greek would have a reference to the Roman god of wealth?

Well… because it probably did. Paul was writing in a time that was not Greek, but definitely Roman; Greek was simply the lingua franca, the language of commerce and culture at the time.

Paul wouldn’t have cared about the names of the Greek gods when writing to a Roman audience (an audience under Roman authority) in Greek. He would have used references and associations that made sense for the time and audience. (Even the writer of the book of Hebrews used Greek, despite writing to a distinctly Hebraic audience.)

So my thought is this: while I still dislike the reference to Pluto, a Roman name for a Greek god, as an associated word to plouton, a purely Greek word referring to riches, the etymology of the name “Pluto” validates the reference – Pluto is a Romanization of the original Greek word, and therefore is less Roman than Greek in the first place.

My concerns over an invalid association are not as valid as I feared.

Incidentally, the study of Pluto is a fascinating exercise in and of itself. Apparently the Roman equivalent was Dis pater and Orcus, and Pluto was used because it was a positive reference to the god, as opposed to one that caused fear (as “Hades” did as well). The poor mythological guy – he never really seems to have been understood.

(Originally published January 31, 2012.)

Philippians 4:19: God will supply our needs…

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We had an interesting study in Sunday school, on the end of Philippians – 4:19 through 4:23.

The class focused on 4:19:

And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus. (NIV)

The teacher asserted that this verse was used to justify a “prosperity gospel,” in that people asserted that “all your needs” was the same as “all your wants.” I never really thought of this verse in terms of a prosperity gospel, so I was arriving at it with what I thought were neutral biases – and wanted to find out more about what the words being used were, since translations seem odd to me when they’re so easily misapplied.

First off, I’m definitely not a student of Greek – go figure – so I’m more or less trying to build an understanding out of nothing.

I zeroed in on the word “riches” – or “wealth,” as it was in my NT – as the focal word. What got me thinking was that “riches” and “wealth” were underspecific in terms of the verse, because wealth is such a simple concept compared to what we were talking about.

Yet the word used is plouton – which is accurately translated as “riches” or “wealth,” specifically worldly riches and wealth. “An abundance of worldly possessions” is one definition, even, and this fits with the usage in Greek and Roman myth, too, as the god Pluto (Hades in Greek) is a god of wealth along with the similarly-named Ploutos. (Apparently Ploutos was the god of wealth, but Hades – as a cthonic god, a god associated with things under the earth – became associated with wealth as well, as gold and other valuable minerals were found under the earth.)

Anyway, with “plouton” in mind, apparently there isn’t a key word as much as the entire phrase needs to be understood as a whole: ‘according to his riches in Christ Jesus’ is a concept that isn’t simply expressed. The evaluation I expressed was that “riches” was contextual, and what God values is not worldly riches, but those things He values (i.e., obedience), but the word study itself doesn’t expose that. The contextual study does, but not the word study.

As a corollary, the rendering of “the grace of the Lord Jesus be with your spirit” doesn’t show up well in the word study either – although, again, remember my understanding of Greek, which is beyond laughable and well into “moronic.”

The phrase ‘with your spirit’ is meta pantOn in the Greek (and one thing I do appreciate about Greek is that it’s generally read left-to-right.) pantOn is “all things,” so perhaps “with all things about you” would be a good rendering as well.

I don’t know.

I don’t usually enjoy zeroing in on word studies, because there’s a cultural transition that doesn’t get communicated well with them. You can’t just study words, you have to consider all of the context – which means “with your spirit” and “according to his riches” becomes a history lesson of Roman culture, Hebrew culture (esp. as applied to a diasporic Hebrew mindset), and regional history around Philippi.

That said, that doesn’t mean they’re not worthwhile – they just tend to yield an opened can of worms!

Wait, all that and no explanation of Phi 4:19?

Argh! Okay, here’s a quick rundown of what the verse actually means: it means that God does, in fact, supply all that is needed by the believer according to His will. The concern is in what “all that is needed” means.

The prosperity gospel focuses on what is wanted; “I need new shoes, I need to eat the finest foods, I need a large house, I need a nice car…” and none of those are needs. They’re not even physical needs, much less spiritual needs.

God fills those needs in accordance with His riches.

What does God consider wealth?

Well… wealth is created by a shortage of an item. Gold is rare, so it is a measure of wealth, for example, if you don’t mind a very simple example.

This may surprise you, but God doesn’t lack much gold. Or silver. Or livestock. Or land. Or anything else which we can measure in material goods.

What God desires more of is not livestock or land or precious metals, but fulfillment of His inestimable Will.

So fulfilling a need, in accordance with His wealth and not our pitiable measures of it, means that God fulfills our need to be able to fulfill our lives in Him.

This may mean we get food – perhaps fine food. It may mean we receive the ability to acquire shoes, or shelter, or cars. However, these things are secondary to His desire.

God works to the fulfillment of His will, through us. (We’re not necessary for this process, but God does as He will.) This is what this verse is telling us will be supplied, not material wealth.

Shalom.

(Originally published on January 24, 2012)