Joey Gibson’s Blog

In church this morning I was listening to the minister read from Romans, when all of a sudden I hear him say “… and Paul wanted to go to Spain.” Wha-huh? Maybe I just haven’t paid attention before, but I have never heard this. When I think about places in the Bible, most of them are in the Mediterranean area, the Middle East, or Northern Africa. Think about it: lots of things happen in Israel, Rome, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, etc. Spain is on the Mediterranean, but it’s a very long way from most of the regular “Bible places.” Take a look at this really good map of Paul’s journeys and you’ll see just how far West we know Paul made it: Rome. That’s just a little over half-way to Spain from Israel. Just sort of eyeballing a Google map of the region, it looks like about 2,000 miles by boat from Jerusalem to Barcelona which, at that time, would take a very long time to cross.

But sure enough, in Romans 15:24 - 28, Paul says 

I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while. At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings. When therefore I have completed this and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will leave for Spain by way of you.

I had never noticed that before. It is not known if Paul ever made it to Spain or not. The apocryphal book of I Clement makes reference to Paul “having reached the farthest bounds of the West,” which some scholars speculate could mean Spain, since that is certainly as far West as could have been known at that time. There is also speculation that not only did he make it, but he stayed there for nearly two years, before heading to Asia Minor. Of course, there’s no way of knowing for sure.

Why has this piqued my interest so? I think it’s because it was so unexpected. You sort of get into, not a rut, but a pattern of expectation when dealing with the Bible. At least, I do. So when something comes along to shake that pattern, it’s very interesting. The only problem now is that there’s really no more information to be had about Paul and Spain.

I don’t have any details, but I just got an email from my church saying we were robbed last night. What sort of person robs a church?

My first thought upon hearing this was “Man, I hope this guy rots in hell for this” but upon further consideration, that’s probably not the Christian thing, is it? Anger and revenge seem to feel so much better than forgiveness, and that’s one of the things I struggle with. I’m quick to anger and quick to condemn, but a “proper” Christian response would be to condemn the act but not the one who did it. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to separate the two as preachers make it sound.

As an Advent project this year, I decided to translate the two Nativity stories in the New Testament, Luke 2:1 - 20 and Matthew 1:18 - 2:12, from Greek into English. Yes, it’s been done a thousand times already, but I wanted some real translation practice. And since my Lenten translation project didn’t end so well, I decided not to mention this project, until it was well underway. As of today, I’ve translated Luke 2:1-16. At this rate, I should be finished before Christmas.

Yesterday I dealt with the whole ἐυδοκία vs. ἐυδοκίας issue in Luke 2:14, but today I ran across something interesting in Luke 2:16. The Greek for this verse is

καὶ ἦλθαν σπεύσαντες καὶ ἀνεῦραν τήν τε Μαριὰμ καὶ τὸν Ἰωσὴφ καὶ τὸ βρέφος κείμενον ἐν τῇ φάτνῃ

which is translated essentially the same in most translations. The ESV says

And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger.

while the KJV says

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

But the Greek word that is in bold, ἀνεῦραν, is the 3rd person aorist plural form of ἀνευρίσκω, which seems to mean a bit more than simply “found.”

The Greek New Testament from the United Bible Societies, version 4 has a lexicon that defines this word as

find (by searching)

Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament defines it as

to find out by search

and Mounce’s Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament defines it in the strongest terms

to find by dilligent search

I think it is interesting that this word seems to imply that some real effort had been applied before the finding, yet no translation makes a note of that. Maybe I’m reading more into this word than I should, but if you used one of these definitions, then it makes it sound like the shepherds had to expend a bit more energy than simply walking to Bethlehem and “finding” the holy family. I asked a friend what he thought and he suggested “discovered” instead of “found.” I think I like that; it conveys a bit more work on the part of the shepherds. But it still doesn’t really point out their efforts to find them. What do you think? Have I read too much into this word?

There are some “Christians” who give the rest of us a bad name. Some TV-preacher jack-ass called Bill Keller is one of them. He’s going off on Mitt Romney for being a member of a “cult” and being evil and having a forked tongue, a bifurcated tail and carrying a hay-fork. Yeah, he doesn’t like Mormons. I just love hearing so-called “Christians” joyously telling everyone who will listen how someone else is “going to hell.”

Bruce Metzger died on Tuesday. He was 93.

I first heard the name when I read Bart Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus last year. Metzger was a leading figure in the world of biblical textual criticism, and the general editor of the New Revised Standard version of the Bible. As it happens, I started reading the 4th edition of Metzger’s 1963 book The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration on Monday. So I was about 30 pages into it when he died. It’s funny how things work out sometimes.

I have no real affiliation with the man, but his book is fascinating. I saw one blog yesterday remark that this book should be considered the “standard work” on textual criticism. I have nothing to back that up, but the book certainly is interesting. I have only scratched the surface of textual criticism, but I feel compelled to dig deeper. It’s interesting (and strange, at the same time) seeing ancient variant readings of Biblical passages, and frequently reminds me that, as I said before, God did not write the Bible.

There’s a big discussion going on over at the Rapture-Ready Message Board concerning the current state of affairs in the Middle East. Lots and lots of people there are all a-flutter that “the Rapture” is nigh and they’re busily packing their spiritual suitcases in pregnant anticipation of “being raptured.” I got there through this Boing Boing post. Read through the posts; it’s pretty sad.

But the impending rapture is not what I’m on about. While reading some of those posts, I noticed one person’s signature line, which read:

The Bible is the only book whose Author is always present when you read it.

Sigh… People, God Himself did not write the Bible. The Bible is not a single book containing chapters with names like “Genesis,” “Exodus,” “Matthew” and “John.” It is, in fact, an anthology of many books written by many authors under many circumstances for many purposes. The authors of these books were not, as some seem to believe, taking dictation from God. They may have been inspired by God to write what they wrote, but He didn’t say “OK, Ezekial, write this down. ‘And lo…’.”

The Bible was written by human beings, who wrote for various reasons. Many years after all of these people were dead and gone, their writings were collected into a canon of works that were deemed important or useful for good Jewish and, later, Christian living. To hold up the Bible as something that God Himself wrote is missing the point.

Do I “believe” the Bible to be true. To that I give a qualified “yes.” I do not believe that every story in the Bible is historical fact. The bible contains history, allegory, myth, parable and, as such, it can not be completely true or completely false. I believe that the stories it contains are there to teach something and the point is to get to that “something.” As an aside, I am currently learning Greek so that I can try to read “the original Greek” manuscripts (of the New Testament) to get closer to the source. I put “the original Greek” in quotes because there is no such thing. The original manuscripts are long since lost. We have many copies, of various antiquity and various quality, that we can use, but “the originals” no longer exist. For an interesting read on this topic (textual criticism), check out Bart Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus. My Sunday school class just finished this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Anyway, my point is that one should not hold up the Bible as something to be worshiped or “believed” with blind faith. God gave us brains and the power of rational, logical thought for a reason. Don’t waste them.

17:42 Update: It appears that the folks at Rapture Ready have locked down their discussion boards. The link to the page I mentioned above now requires a username and password. You can still read some of the choice postings by following the Boing Boing link.

In my Sunday School class we are studying a book called The Other Gospels, which is a collection of Gnostic texts, discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. This week our text was The Dialogue of the Savior, and it was quite interesting. One thing that was really interesting is that there are some pages where there are more ellipses [...] than there are words, due to the state of the manuscripts when they were found. What’s also interesting, is that sometimes there are very obvious passages in the text that lead one to understand why these books were excluded from the canon, and were marked from destruction by the early orthodox church.

So what does this have to do with being prepared? Well, as I was reading the text last night, I was frustrated by the amount of text that was not there, again, caused by the state of the document when found. I ended up finding another English translation of the text, which had lacunas in different places from the other translation; in other words, in some places it was more “complete” than the one I had, and in others, it was less complete…. I ended up reading them in parallel; I would read a few sentences from the translation in the book, then read the same bits from the other translation, and then compare and contrast. It ended up taking me about two hours to get through the 8 pages, but I think reading it in this way was a better experience.

So what does that have to do with being prepared? Well, I’ll tell you. As we began our class this morning, our leader said that while he had read the text, he had not had time to do any preparation for class, because he had been at a conference all week. So I said “Well, not to usurp anything… but I brought in a whole bunch of research that I could share.” The class was happy with that, and I ended up leading for the whole hour. We didn’t finish, so we will be picking up where we left off next week.

These texts are really fascinating as they give a different view of the early church. Sometimes it’s easy to see why the orthodox church shunned these texts, but other times it’s not so easy. Regardless, it’s an interesting study.

Today’s scripture at church was James 3:1-12. The entire chapter is about how one’s tongue can’t be tamed and how it can be “full of deadly poison.” The part that his me was this:

¹⁰Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.
¹¹Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?
¹²Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs? so can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh.

In other words, “do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” I know that when I’m in my office, all by myself, and something is frustrating me, it’s not blessings that are proceeding out of my mouth. I can curse with the best of them, and on occasion I’ve said things that would make a sailor blush. Because of that, this passage resonated with me. I’ve made attempts before to “curb my language,” and did fine when things were going great, but reverted back to the “potty mouth” when things weren’t so great. James is telling me I need to have another go at it.

This chapter can also be taken as admonishing one against gossip. Our minister told a story about a woman who had spread a rumor around town and had hurt the person it was about. She asked her minister what she could do to make amends and he told her to go the market and buy a chicken. She was to bring it back to his house, plucking the feathers out along the way. When she made it to his house with the freshly plucked chicken, the minister told her to go back and gather up every feather she had dropped. A few hours later she returned with just a handful of feathers. She learned just how easy it is to let things drop, such as rumors, but how hard it is to clean up afterwards. We should all remember that.

I have two church stories tonight; one funny and one serious. The funny one happened this morning as we were leaving the 11:00 service. Our pastor is named Phil and he greets everyone in the narthex on their way out each Sunday. Today as we were approaching him, he had just taken his ministerial robe off and laid it on a nearby couch. One of his sons picked it up and put it on while he wasn’t looking. As we got up to him, my wonderful Thomas exclaimed: Mr. Phil! That person is wearing your dress!

The serious story is that we had a congregational meeting tonight to approve the construction of a 4 million dollar addition to the church. We desperately need this space as we are squashed on top of each other as it is. The plan, called the “Vision Plan”, will give us several new class rooms, a multi-purpose area (a gym) that can seat 900, a professional kitchen, several hundred new parking spaces a new ball field and a new playground for the youngsters. This truly is going to be a wonderful addition. We have secured approval from the city of Grayson, and are now awaiting approval from Gwinnett County. With any luck we should get the county approval in 4 - 6 weeks and can begin construction immediately thereafter. Construction should be complete within a year. The vote was 138 aye, 0 nay with 4 abstaining.

As I mentioned here we had to head out Saturday for a funeral. It was yesterday at 15:00 in Milledgeville. The service was nice, if a bit generic. But during that service I was struck with a vision that was so comforting and “real” that I’m not going to call it coincidence. I believe that God can and does speak directly to people, if only they are willing to listen. I think He spoke to me yesterday.

So the minister was speaking and he said “The God of Love was there when she was born, and that same God was there when she died.” It was at that precise moment that I saw, in my mind, Lena (my wife’s grandmother, who was 87) lying in her bed, asleep. Peaceful. Seated in a chair next to her was Jesus, the Christ himself, holding her hand and whispering sweet words in her ear. “Fear not. I am with you.” The vision then switched to my grandfather (who died last year and would have been 88 yesterday). It was the same scenario, but the rooms had changed. He was lying in his bed, asleep and peaceful. With Christ holding his hand and whispering to him.

Some people won’t believe me. Some will say it was just wishful thinking. I disagree with both.

Happy Easter to all of you! We had a glorious service this morning at Grayson United Methodist Church to celebrate the Resurrection of our Saviour and His triumph over the grave. Each of the four Gospels tells the Resurrection story, each slightly different from the others. The text here is from the Gospel of John, ch. 20, vv. 10-18, and it is one of my favorite texts in all of Scripture.

Then the disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

“Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher).

Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ”

Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.

What a wonderful thing to be able to tell, “I have seen the Lord!”

In case you’re wondering, my two other favorite scriptures are Mark 5:21 - 34 and Romans 8:38-39.