The Text, the Whole Text, and the Context

[kerravonsen]

I was pondering bible-studies I had participated in, and I realised something. Many Christians just sit around in bible-studies and wait to be told what to think. How totally bizarre! What do they think bible-studies are for? A place where someone in authority (the leader) spoon-feeds them pre-digested doctrine, and then they have a cup of tea and a gossip?

Don't they want to find out for themselves? Do they think themselves incapable of finding out for themselves? Or not qualified? Or not authorised? Or is it just like too much hard work? It's a text. Read it. Think about what it says. Figure out what it means. Like we did in English at school.

What do they teach them at these schools?

Yeah, I know. They teach them to hate learning.

Thank God for fandom, where people analyse texts in minute detail, for fun.

Comments

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I was taught that Aramaic was the language that the ordinary people were speaking at the time, Greek was what the top people used.

Like only the top people speaking French in Norman Britain, the ordinary people continued with English.

Or is that not current thinking? There's been 50 years of gathering new evidence since then.

[kerravonsen]

I'm not sure what current thinking is, but I find the arguments that Koine (low) Greek was commonly spoken to be more convincing to me, even if it's an unpopular view. The Gospels were written in Greek, we know that. They weren't translated from Aramaic, they were actually written in Greek. If Greek was just used by the elite, then one would expect that Luke and maybe John would have been written in Greek and the other two written in Aramaic, but all four of them were written in Koine Greek. That indicates to me that all four Gospel writers were comfortable with Greek. And it makes sense that they were, because in the multi-lingual multicultural Roman Empire, you wouldn't just stick to your native language, you'd have to know Latin or Greek just to get along. Most people would be bilingual or more. (In history, monolingualism has been the exception rather than the rule, but we forget that, since native English speakers tend to be monolingual).

And I really need to go to sleep!

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

I agree the gospels were written in Greek, but I always thought that was so there was a text to take up to all those churches St Paul had founded.

I knew I'd read something recently, a modern book on the Arab conquests. It claimed that despite centuries of Greek rule, everyday use of Greek was an urban habit, the villages at the time of the arrival of the Arabs in the 7thC still spoke Aramaic, just as Coptic was still the language of Egypt.

[kerravonsen]

Ah well, neither of us actually knows the answer for sure...

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

That we probably can be sure of. :~)