What We Bring to the Text

Picture a Sunday morning in an ordinary church. Before the service the pastor shares the church breakfast with his people, bacon and all, and then the music fades and he walks up to the pulpit. No one in the pews would give it a thought. What a pastor eats, everyone assumes, has nothing to do with his leading worship.

Now place the same man, with the same plate in front of him, among a gathering of believers in the first century. In that world it was common sense that a man who ate pork did not stand up to read the Torah or to lead God’s people. He would never have reached the front.

The act is the same and the Bible is the same, yet the two reactions could hardly be more different. The reason begins not with pork but with a pair of glasses.

Glasses You Cannot Feel

Imagine that you have worn glasses with a strong and unusual prescription all your life. You first put them on so young that you no longer feel them on your nose, and to you the world simply looks the way it looks. The colors are a little off and the edges are a little bent, but that, as far as you know, is how the world is.

Then one day someone reaches over and lifts the glasses from your face, and you realize with a start that you have been seeing everything through a lens.

Most of us read the Bible in this way. Before we ever opened it, someone handed us a framework for what it means. By the time we read the text, the framework is already speaking. The glasses are already on.

A Verse Your Eyes Read and Your Mind Corrects

Here is one test case. Read it slowly:

Romans 3:31 Do we then nullify the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law) through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we uphold the nomos(law).

The words are plain. Faith does not nullify the nomos, the Torah. Faith upholds it. The Greek leaves no room for doubt.

Yet most people in the pews were taught, long before they ever read Romans, that the law has ended. So when their eyes reach “we uphold the nomos(law),” something happens in the mind. It quietly corrects the text. We uphold the law, it whispers, in the sense that the law shows us our sin, not in the sense that we keep it. The eyes read one thing, and the mind files it under another.

This is not a new problem. Yeshua saw the same thing in the religious leaders of His day:

Mark 7:8-9 "Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men — the washing of pitchers and cups and many other such things you do." He was also saying to them: "You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition.

A tradition received from people had become the lens through which they read the commandment of God, until the tradition quietly set the commandment aside.

When Translations Hide the Words

The glasses are not only in our heads. Sometimes they are printed into the Bible on our shelf.

Every translation is an act of interpretation; no translator can avoid it. But sometimes a choice made in translation cuts the threads that tie one passage to another.

Take one Greek word, anomia ἀνομία an-om-ee'-ah. In many English Bibles it becomes “lawlessness,” and in others “iniquity” or “wickedness.” To a modern ear the word “lawlessness” calls up a bank robber, a driver doing a hundred on the highway, or the Wild West: in short, bad behavior in general.

Look, however, at how the word is built. The “a” at the front means “without.” The “nomia” comes from nomos, law, which for a first-century Jewish writer meant the Torah. Anomia is not general misbehavior. It is a particular stance, that of living without God’s Torah and setting His instruction aside. That is why this book writes it as anomia, Torah-lessness.

When a translation stamps the vague word “lawlessness” over it, the reader hears “do not be a criminal,” when the text is saying “do not abandon the Torah.” And because one Greek word appears under several English words, the reader never notices that verses in different books are speaking of the same thing.

The same is true of other words. How many readers of “Christ is the end of the law” know that the word “end” is telos, which can mean an end but above all means the goal, the point at which something is aimed? In the YLV, Romans 10:4 reads “the telos τέλος tel'-os(goal, completion) of the nomos(law).” Whether a word is scattered or disguised, the result is the same: the conversation between the passages falls silent.

That is why, all through this book, the original word is printed beside the English. It is not there for decoration. It is the glasses coming off.

Twisted on the Rack

Peter knew this danger. Writing about Paul’s letters, he said:

2 Peter 3:16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters — there are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other graphai(written-scriptures).

The word “twist” is strebloo στρεβλόω streb-lo'-o, a word used for wrenching a body on the rack. Paul’s letters are hard in places, Peter says, and the ignorant and unstable wrench them, as they wrench the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

When we read through a lens that hides the original words, we can take part in that twisting without ever intending to.

What It Costs to Read

Inherited frameworks and veiled translations are not the only reasons we fail to read the Bible as it stands. Others are more uncomfortable. Some parts of Scripture are never read aloud at all, and when you ask why, the honest answer is that reading them costs something.