Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
by Eugene Peterson
Peterson is the Biblical scholar behind The Message, the popular informal paraphrase of the New Testament. Here are just a few highlights--
The Trinity
The following is my loose paraphrase from p. 26:
Trinity is an imaginative construct for enabling us to keep the diversity of the revelation coherent and whole…Our ancestors came up with this concept, “trinity,”…in order to maintain the sense of a single, personal voice, in the midst of all the voices. [in the scriptures]
Exact quote here: pp.26-27
“In essence, what they came up with was this: As we read these Scriptures, what we realize is that God has a stable and coherent identity: God is one. But God also reveals his self in various ways that at first don’t always seem to fit together. There are three obvious ways in which we see God working and revealing himself: the Father (the entire world of creation is in the forefront here), the Son (here we’re dealing with the mess of history invaded by Jesus Christ and his work of salvation), and the Spirit (the pulling of our lives into God’s life is the experienced element in this). It is always the same God, but the “person” or the “face” or “voice” by which we receive the revelation varies.
Karl Barth prefers “modes of being” to “persons” for describing the trinity.
Holy-Spirit words?
p. 143
[As translators began to take the Greek New Testament and put it into Latin during the early part of the 16th century]
The translators, of course, noticed that the Greek of Paul and Mark was quite different from the Greek of the classical Greek writers. The Geek of the New Testament sounded so barbarous in comparison that it had to be defended by the church.
The Greek New Testament has a vocabulary of about five thousand words, and about five hundred of those words were considered unique to the New Testament, never appearing in any extant secular Greek literature up to that point.
“Scholarly” explanations for the differences (most common people weren’t even aware of the problem and were therefore unconcerned) –
- the purists – said it was a special “Holy-Ghost language,” seeded with special words from the Holy Spirit
- Hebraists – said these words must be a translation of an original Hebrew text.
Hilarious!
Then – discovery of the trash heap in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt (April 1897). Scraps of paper writings in Greek showing the 500 words everywhere! The “holy ghost words” were just common Greek- street language Greek—now known as Koine Greek. Classical Greek was simply not the spoken Greek of the day but a literary language only used for formal writings. Scholars did not know this until this discovery!
Discoveries came from two places: Ugarit in Syria, and Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Common, everyday stuff in Koine Greek was found – grocery lists, etc.
[This is too funny.]
Peterson says this (that the Greek was common) certainly shouldn’t have surprised us:
p.146
“The difference that this has made to Bible translation and Bible reading is
hard to exaggerate. In retrospect it shouldn’t have been such a surprise that
this was the kind of language used in the Bible, for this is exactly the kind of
society that we know that Jesus embraced and loved, the world of children and
marginal men and women, the rough-talking working class, the world of the poor
and dispossessed and exploited. Still it was a surprise: our Bibles written not
in the educated and polished language of scholars, historians, philosophers, and
theologians but in the common language of fishermen and prostitutes, homemakers
and carpenters. Not entirely, to be sure. F. F. Bruce cautions against
exaggerating the extent to which the Greek vernacular is taken over wholesale
into the Greek New Testament. There are wide differences in style within the New
Testament, ranging from true literary works (Hebrews and First Peter) to the
vernacular conversation of ordinary people (the Gospels), with Paul coming
roughly halfway between. But now that it is all laid out before us, it makes
perfect sense. Of course the witnesses of God’s revelation to us would use the
language most accessible to us. (ends on p. 147)
About KJV and Tyndale
Peterson, quoting Nicolson in God’s Secretaries, pp. 211-212
The King J. Bible is not the English you would have heard at the dinner table of the common folk or even the upper class, that is, the English they’d have used at home.
Translators were trying “to make English godly.” Tyndale “produced a simple and plain man’s translation to be slapped in the face of the medieval church and its power-protective elite…[He was] looking for immediacy and clarity in scripture which would shake off the thick and heavy layers of medieval scholasticism and centuries of accumulated dust.”
Peterson says the translators of KJV “desecrated upward” and “skillfully shifted the roughness of Tyndale’s plowboy to the smooth speech of the royal court. Like putting “lace cuffs” on simple country garb.
Essentially ¾ of the KJV is Tyndale unchanged.
Incarnation and the Devil
“The devil is discarnate.”
The Devil cannot “incarnate” but he needs flesh to do his will. He relies on us. “He needs human flesh to do his work.”
p. 114: The Devil’s only way of getting into the world’s affairs is by using us as “carriers.” The Devil needs human flesh to do his work. Because the Devil is completely otherworldly, so unworldly he has no capacity for “on earth as it is in Hell” except as we flesh and blood people speak his lies and act out his illusions. [exact quote]
When you read and obey Scripture, the word is becoming incarnate again! The word is getting acted out in the flesh, embodied-- literally. And it is actually incarnate into Jesus, because we are His body walking around.
p. 114: “For every word of God revealed and read in the Bible is there to be conceived and born in us: Christ, the Word made flesh, made flesh in our flesh.”
www.theshorterword.com --website of author Laurie J. White
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