Building a Passion for Jesus on the Word of God

Originally posted on Febuary 08,2006

Building a Passion for Jesus on the Word of God

The Bible was not originally written in English.

In the epistle to the Romans, Paul of Tarsus wrote from Corinth to the Christians in Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, saying that, ‘They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises’ (Rom9:4).

The Bible that we have can be divided into 2 parts: the Old Testament was written in Hebrew & Aramaic; the New Testament was written in Greek.This reflected the cultural, historic & linguistic lineage of the faith.

Therefore, whenever we do serious studies of the Bible, we should bear this in mind, and go back to as close as to the original source if possible. Even though the original manuscripts are not available today, there are a few dependable versions of Bible in the original languages and many software (eg e-sword) which are easy to use.

The problem with working with translations is that, often times the words in Greek or Hebrew do not have an exact expression in other languages, be it in English or Chinese or any other modern languages. Then the translators will usually work out a fuller expression of the sentence according to their interpretation.

In short, we may be reading tinted interpretation (and perhaps misinterpretation shaded by the particular beliefs of the translators) and lose sight of the intended meaning of the Word of God. It may be shocking to come to this realization.

Often times, we have loads of preconceived notions of the ‘Biblical truth’ handed down from centuries of church traditions that we do not even bother to investigate to see if they are truly what the Bible says. And our faith ends up "faith in Church Traditions" rather than "faith in God."

So let us dig together in our pursuit to understand the Bible also in its original form, so that we can understand the Word of God more accurately and to know God based on His Words and not church traditions.