My limited understanding of the history of Hebrew and Greek scriptures in Judaism and Christianity is that all the Hebrew scriptures had been translated into Greek more than a century before Christ.  Additions were made in Greek that Christans call the Apocrypha.  Furthermore, it has been claimd that Judaism returned to exclusive use of Hebrew scripture to disnguish itself from the one messianic sect that remarkably persisted and spread among Greek-speaking peoples. //  Also the current empirical evidence relating left or right reading to left or right brainedness is mixed at best.  Indeed there is a recent study that finds that both Hebrew and English readers use both sides of the brain, whereas readers of Arabic are one-sided, implicating factors other than direction of writing.

Bowman  I hope someone in the Evangelical world can respond to your query about how to work with the Hebrew and Greek texts in reading the creation stories.

You remind me of an observation made by Jonathan Sacks in his book 'The great partnership'. (and what follows will be a highly simplified and probably clumsy summary). He notes that Ancient Hebrew, like most ancient languages, was written from right to left. It also contained no vowels or punctuation.  It is therefore a 'right brain language' because to understand the meaning of any one word, “you have to understand the total context in which it occurs.” Ancient Greek, by contrast was the first language ever to be written from left to right.  It is a left brain language. You derive meaning word by word, in small components. The total context is not regarded as neccessary.

Judaism and Christianity began as right brain religions, based on that Ancient Hebrew way of thinking. But early in its evolution, he says, Christianity turned 'left' as the scriptures were translated into Greek.  Sacks concludes that Christianity is a right brain religion translated into a left brain language. At its best then it may richly encompass these two ways of thinking: the metaphysical and the analytical. And until the Enlightenment they were valued together were part of the same thing. Scientific enlightenment led to the dominance of left brain, analytical - including theology.  The Christian tradition ever since has tended to lack and undervalue the perspective of the Hebrew right brain reading of Word and life.

Sacks is too careful a scholar to draw simplistic conclusions from this but I just want to say that it offers a way of illustrating what I experience in discussing the Creation texts (and others) on these threads. It is as if the same story is being read in two different languages that are unable to understand each other - and worse, that one assumes the other to plainly wrong. But it may be no more wrong than people hearing the same story in English and Japanese and then dismissing the Japanese simply because it is not plain English. Paul of course learned to be bilingual in this regard - a Hebrew of Hebrews but apostle to the Gentiles. It would be such a help to know how he found the differences in how these ancient stories were read and 'heard' in the multi-cultural world of the early church, and when, in his teaching and handling of, say, Genesis, the Greek or Hebrew mind is to the fore at any one point. Or is that just simplistic?  It means that in Paul's teaching Hebrew and Greek are presumably working together. But my long and grateful experience of the Evangelical expository readings of scripture does sound, in the terms of Sack's summary, heavily loaded towards to the analytic 'Greek' brain. And nothing wrong with that. But the Hebrew 'voice' is still original and is there to be heard too - in dialogue and even critique.

Phil-- Apart from the view of the episcopate,  23030 of 4976 could almost have been one of my own posts, particularly in its warmly irenic appreciation of your efforts.

In which post, please, have you applied your chain of analogies directly to the question of OWE?

On the MT/LXX differences, a lot might be said-- they appear to cut both ways in this discussion-- but at this point I am most curious to see whether one can see that St Paul is actually using the LXX interpretatively, (ie to make a point that could not have been made by retranslating Hebrew), and not simply alluding, without further interpretive intent, to a Greek translation everyone in the diaspora knew.

Bowman

I find it really helpful to take these disagreements a step at a time. Does your 12.18 a.m. post today mean that we agree to take the Hebrew text in my recent reference as the agreed text for this debate, please?

And, sorry to harp on, any comments on my points about 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Timothy 2 which seem to me to put the question of Adam’s gender beyond doubt, whether we read the Bible front to back or vice versa?

Phil Almond

One point I wonder if someone could clarify: do those who take a fairly literal interpretation of Genesis 1-2 assume that Adam was created with male reproductive organs? 

As in chapter 2:20

 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

 

But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

 

It almost seems as though Eve was an afterthought, so maybe Adam wasn't particularly male until the woman was created. One wonders what could have been found "suitable" among the various animals offered to Adam. 

I find it hard to read that story in anything other than a metaphorical way, which means I don't need to think about reproductive organs, but it seems they would have had no purpose before Eve arrived.

Dear Fulcrum,

It would be better to do as Bowman seems to be suggesting and change your statement of faith, rather than pretend that you accept the authority of scripture and then directly contradict it. Here's article 3 of the Basis of Faith of the Evangelical Alliance:

'[We believe in..] The divine inspiration and supreme authority of the Old and New Testament Scriptures, which are the written Word of God—fully trustworthy for faith and conduct.'

Don't say you are evangelicals if you don't believe this.

Andrew

Simon Morden

Contra your 27 January post I think it is entirely reasonable for Andrew Chapman to challenge Jody (and the rest of the Fulcrum Leadership Team), as I have done repeatedly, to explain what appears to be inconsistency between some of their posts and their commitment to the CEEC Basis of Faith, and, via that Basis, to the 39 Articles, and, via the Declaration of Assent for those ordained, to the 39 Articles and the Prayer Book. This is not about who are the ‘true evangelicals’. It is about what the various parties to our disagreements believe to be true.

Phil Almond

Blair--  In ascetic use, "diakritikos" is observing one's own "stream of consciousness" without getting "stuck" to thoughts, whilst appraising them in peace and freedom. Originally used of judging between spirits conceived as external personalities, the word was redeployed by Origen and Evagrius Ponticus in its eventual use as the mind's capability, by divine grace, for judging thoughts. Improving diakritikos weakens the hold of the eight evil thoughts (cf seven deadly sins), which is an early objective of the longer term goal of "healing the passions," sometimes called "therapeia."

NPP = New Perspective on Paul which was James Dunn's label for the tradition of pauline scholarship inspired by Krister Stendahl's lecture The Apostle Paul and the Instrospective Conscience of the West (1963) and E. P. Sanders's book Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977). I find it helpful to distinguish three phases of discussion of the core ideas, and add x.0 for each of them. NPP 1.0 comprises the seminal work of Krister Stendahl and E. P. Sanders, and the early work of James Dunn and Tom Wright (eg here). In NPP 2.0 the shock of the new brought both interest and controversy (eg here), as well as increasingly sharp differences among NPP scholars themselves (eg Wright here and here), culminating in Wright's debate with John Piper (Wright here and  here and  here. Piper here and here.) and Wright's watershed appearance (here and here) at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society for 2010. A mature study from this phase that is critical of the NPP that compares most major figures in the debate is here. Whilst scholarly debate does continue, since 2010 it has been better informed and in most quarters calmer than before. NPP 3.0 is my shorthand for the phase in which the insights of both the NPP's proponents and its critics are applied fruitfully by others to more pastoral and practical problems. The "New" Perspective on Paul is half a century old this year.

"...Irenic and constructive..."  Diakritikos is very practical.

* "Diakritkos" = discerning "through decision" < Greek, "that which separates or distinguishes" < diakrinein "to separate one from another" < dia "through, throughout," probably from the root of duo "two" with a base sense of "twice." + krinein "to separate, decide, judge."

See also my 1 October 2011 post where I correct some mistaken verse references in my 16 September 2011 post.

Bowman, why have you repeated your post, please?

In addition, 1 Corinthians 11 clearly is about and addressed to men of male gender and women of female gender- in Corinth. So when Paul says (verses 8 and 9) ‘For not is man of woman, but woman of man; for indeed not was created man because of the woman, but woman because of the man’, ‘man’ must be, in Paul’s thinking, of male gender, like the men in Corinth who received the letter. To argue that ‘man’ is a reference to an androgynous being in Genesis 2 does not fit at all with Paul’s line of thought.

Phil Almond