How to Study the Bible

What sort of man is this, who even the winds and the sea obey?” We know the answer!

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"What sort of man is this, who even the winds and the sea obey?"

We know the answer! He is Our Lord Jesus Christ. Wholly human; wholly divine. He is the savior of the world. He is the Messiah. He is what gives meaning to life.

We are going to look today at something that I find fascinating, and probably you will not find as fascinating, but it is translation. The Bible was not proclaimed in English. It wasn't proclaimed in Spanish, either.

It was proclaimed and written originally, the New Testament, was primarily in Greek. And translations make a very big difference.

One of the things that was very, was really insignificant in the readings today, the one that catches your attention, and this is a change that we recently had in translations of the Missal, and we have translations of the Bible. And in the responsorial psalm, the response is, "O Lord, your mercy is before my eyes."

And that was a significant change in the missal. If you listen to it carefully, and have a really good memory, for the most part, they dropped the word "O".

It would have been, "Lord, your mercy is before my eyes" instead, of "O Lord..." Because "O Lord" gave a connotation that the translators did not want.

One of the things that they also did that drives me crazy because of some of the translations I use, is they have a real tendency, and this was in the Missal, a real tendency to use singular where plural was appropriate.

One of the changes that you hear in the Lamb of God every Sunday, is, if you notice now, we use the word "...sins of the world" instead of "...the sin of the world."

Also, at one of the consecrations (the Precious Blood), the sacrifice is for "many" as opposed to "all".

There are theological reasons that these are being done. Many of them are not even just theological, they are political, or polemical or whatever. So what you have is a situation where translation from an ancient language... Greek, Aramaic... is a flexible thing. There is a range of translations, and a range of words that you can use. So you have in the Catholic Church, way back when, we have Paul and Peter going out to the world and preaching in Greek. We have the Gospels, for the most part, being written in Greek. The entire New Testament is being written in Greek.

So, you go out and start preaching to the world, and when you originally go into the Gentile world you go into a part, especially in what is now Turkey, that is very strongly Greek. As you go further out, you go into areas where Greek is the language of the smart people, the "intelligentsia" of the day. I am putting quotes around that. And everybody else, the common, the vulgar people like you and me, spoke Latin.

So what the great thing that St. Jerome did was he translated... he went back to the Greek, he also went back to the original Aramaic, he learned Hebrew… and he translated them into Latin.

It's called the Vulgate because it is for the vulgar people, that everybody can understand, you don't have to read it in Greek.

In English, well, first, they are now working on, or they have just come out with a new translation of the Spanish Bible in the Catholic Church, but until this point, or until it comes out very soon, they translate from the Vulgate.

And if you read in Spanish a parallel of what the English language translations are, sometimes it is kinda shocking, of what is omitted or how they are changed, but that's another point.

In the English language it came differently. It came, with people like Betty, Martin Luther, if you are going to believe what the Bible says, and we do, we believe what the Bible says, and you come with a theology that is different from the teachings of the Catholic Church, because what is chosen for the Bible had to be consistent with the teachings of the Church, one of the first things that you do is that if you don't accept certain teachings of the Church, you have to remove the stuff from the Bible.

That's where the letter from St. James went. That's where 2 Maccabees went.

When Martin Luther came along, he had his theology, the others adopted it, and said, "We gotta get rid of these books."

That's why the Catholic and the Protestant translations are different.

But it also is, when you translated, there is a purpose for your translation. We come to the world, each and every one of us has our own set of belief and prejudices. And so what you hope is that a translator will be objective and not bring their prejudices into the translation process.

That is basically a denial of reality. It's going to happen.

After the Vatican Council, they set up a group called the ICEL, International Committee for English in the Liturgy, which was responsible for the translations... here, for the Bibles, and for the Missals themselves.

And those people had an agenda. And they were proposing an agenda. One of the ones, the agendas that you can see is what I was talking about in the very beginning, is they left out the section of why God got mad at Sodom. What happened when the men went into Sodom and the men of the town came after them?

That is something that they did not want to have being published out for the faithful.

You also have a, and listen to this, we have it in the canticle of Zacharias, there was a very profound abuse of the word "our", because that's where it comes from, the singular "sin".

There was a propounding of a theological perspective of unity in the sense that, for example, the sins of the world are not the individual sins of each one of us, but it is a corporate sin. So in the canticle of Zacharias if you listen to it, I say it differently, you hear "the days of our life" [instead of lives].

There is a theological reason why they are doing that. It is Rahner (Karl), very brilliant theologian, who was basically brought before the Vatican because people were saying, "You're a heretic" and everything else. He said, "No, I'm not. Let me explain to you what I'm talking about."

The people who were really smart in the Vatican listened and said, "Okay. You're right. There's nothing wrong with what you're saying but it is too complicated for people to understand. They're going to get it wrong." And that's what happened with the ICEL.

It is a belief that it is in the corporate, "corporate" being the group of people, is where we find God. And it is this corporate experience that is where we experience God.

The danger is that when you say the corporate experience it then becomes the core. And many times in the Lectionary and in the Bible and in the missal, especially the old missal, this theology was being propounded.

What I'm saying, and I've said this to you many times, I am a great believer that if I can give a homily and one person thinks about what I said, that's a successful homily. That is it, right there.

Because if you think about your faith you come to a greater knowledge, and greater understanding. If you do the research, you look at it, try to figure out where it came from, what does it mean, you become a better Catholic.

And so one of the greatest places to do it is in the readings of the Lectionary that we have every day.

When you have something that you don't understand what is being said, research it.

One of the first things that you do, do you have one of those study Bibles, where you have all those footnotes down there? Read the footnotes. Many times you'll understand what is going on because the footnotes will explain it.

If you are looking at other translations of the Bible and want to figure out what those words mean, my strong recommendation is that you start with the preface of the Bible because it will explain to you what the biases are of the translators.

And with that bias in mind, then look at how they translate it differently.

I have a book at home that I got from a friend of mine when I was ordained, it has six separate columns from six different Bibles translating everything, and you can compare six different translations of the Bible just going across the page. They're all parallel. It is a wonderful experience. It is a way to think about it. If you are really interested… and this is the point of the whole homily… if you are really interested in trying to really understand your faith, read the Bible. But read it from: what is the perspective of the person who translated trying to put upon you?

God's mercy, that we had yesterday, and today the consequences of violated God's law, but what is omitted and what is important to both of those stories is what precipitated God to change his mind and to destroy Sodom after He said he wasn't going to.

That is very important to the understanding, and that, frankly, that is just not in our Lectionary.

June 2, 2019