I’ve recently been seeing a great number of scriptures that are being placed in context.
“Avoiding the appearance of evil” turns out to be related to exiting or leaving the area when evil appears or approaches rather than meaning to avoid things that look similar to evil
Or “head” meaning “source” (like the head of the Nile, or headwaters) rather than “leader”.
It seems that a modern scripture study really ought to include updating and addressing the myriad places this occurs.
That is a natural part of “translated correctly.”
What examples are you aware of that you would like to see updated or explained in Sunday School?
Wheat & Tares 
“certain women” being taken as women who are certain and sure, rather than a particular group as intended
Thank you for this inquisitive post. It seems profoundly appropriate to begin this conversation with the lost interpretation of the word “Head”. To say that head means “Source” as opposed to “leader” underscores the inevitable problem that arises as language (words) lose their origin (source). As language is translated, interpreted and passed through dozens of iterations, it seems obvious that the same word is now so disconnected from its source that its application will also suffer. Terryl Givens book “All Things New” has become one of my favorites, as he endeavors to update our religious language by excavating is origin.
Obedience – the concept of obedience, like all our modern religious language, is trapped inside our primary metaphor of legalism. Our latter-day usage of obedience contains an inherent power struggle, it’s nested inside the need to maintain hierarchical power. The origin of the word points to the Jewish “Shema”, which, to this day, remains their daily pledge of allegiance to God. However, it’s not an honoring of authoritative power per se, but instead the commitment to the co-operative project of loving all things. The latin word is “Obedire”, which literally means to “listen to”. It’s a form of active listening or giving of attention. It has no sense of blindly following, but rather to hear, consider, and apply.
Stephen, I like seeing “head” as the source or as the point of origin, like the headwaters of the Nile, and Christ as the source or the point of origin for the church. Very appealing, particularly when we don’t want to see men as leaders of their wives. but I am not sure that it is a mistranslation that needs correction or updating. When the same Greek word is used twice in proximity, we usually want a common definition that fits both occurrences. “For the husband is the HEAD of the wife, even as Christ is the HEAD of the church” (Eph 5:23). Is the husband the source or the point of origin of the wife? And three times in close proximity: “But I would have you know, that the HEAD of every man is Christ; and the HEAD of the woman is the man; and the HEAD of Christ is God” (1 Cor 11:3). It doesn’t make much sense to read “the source of every man is Christ, and the source of the woman is the man, and the source of Christ is God.” While I don’t think that husbands should be tyrannical over their wives, just as Christ is not tyrannical over the church, I have a hard time wholly dismissing the “leader” connotation of head and replacing it with source or point of origin. Teaching that Paul meant source or point of origin, and not leadership, might be wresting (in its archaic meaning), and I don’t want to do that. I like this other meaning, because I am not sure in practical terms what it means for a man to be the head of the wife, but I can’t make this new sense work in the context where we find these words.
Anita, you’re right. The phrase “certain women” clearly means a specific group of women, or a group of women that included specified individuals among them. It only occurs in Luke 8:2 and 24:22 (and in 1 Macc 1:60, where it means exactly the same thing). It cannot grammatically mean women who were certain, sure, and steadfast in their faith. An almost exact parallel to Luke 8:2 and 24:22, with “certain women,” is John 5:5, except that it is singular: “And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years…” This man was not sure, steadfast, or certain about anything–that isn’t want certain means here. I can’t even imagine why anyone would want to teach that “certain” here means sure, steadfast, or confident in their faith. Grammatically, the “certain” in “certain women” is a pronoun, while it would have to be an adjective modifying women if it meant sure or steadfast. I apologize: I spent many hours in ninth grade English diagramming sentences, and I’ve learned that grammar and parts of speech are important to understand what was intended to be communicated. I’ve also studied some foreign languages, and I know that getting the part of speech right is critical to making sense.
Georgis – based on the Genesis account of creation, man is explicitly the source of the woman (i.e., she was created from his rib). Similarly, Christ can be considered the source of all men since “[he is] the vine and [we] are the branches,” “by him all things were created”, etc.
I’ll quote from a section from a fairly long discussion on the word used:
“Several early church fathers taught that the meaning of kephale in 1 Corinthians 11:3 means “origin” or “beginning” (or “source”). Some of these church fathers were writing at a time when kephale occasionally could mean “leader” or “a person in authority”. These church fathers also believed that men had a greater level of authority than women, yet they did not use 1 Corinthians 11:3 to support this belief.
Athanasius (296-373), Bishop of Alexandria, stated in “Anathema 26” of De Synodis:
For the Son is the Head, namely the beginning of all: and God is the Head, namely the beginning of Christ . . .
John Chrysostom (c. 349 – 407), Archbishop of Constantinople, was adamant that “head” does not mean “leader” in 1 Corinthians 11:3. He says that if we take “head” with the sense of governing, the passage won’t make sense and it will lead to false ideas about Jesus Christ, which is his primary concern. (Homily 26 on First Corinthians)[12]
Cyril (376-444), Archbishop of Alexandria, in De Recta Fide ad Pulcheriam et Eudociam wrote:
Therefore of our race he [Adam] became first head, which is source, and was of the earth and earthy. Since Christ was named the second Adam, he has been placed as head, which is source, of those who through Him have been formed anew unto Him unto immortality through sanctification in the Spirit. Therefore he himself our source, which is head, has appeared as a human being. Yet he, though God by nature, has himself a generating head, the heavenly Father, and he himself, though God according to his nature, yet being the Word, was begotten of him. Because head means source, he establishes the truth for those who are wavering in their mind that man is the head of woman, for she was taken out of him. Therefore as God according to his nature, the one Christ and Son and Lord has as his head the heavenly Father, having himself become our head because he is of the same stock according to the flesh.
(See Patrologia Graeca 76, pp.1336-1420.)
These three men, and others, were concerned that if kephale was understood as meaning “ruler” or “authority” in 1 Corinthians 11:3 it would lead to a distorted christology. Instead, they understood kephale as meaning “beginning” or “source”.”
https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/head-does-not-mean-leader-in-1-cor-11-3/
It is much longer than the short clip I’m quoting but it might help on the meaning of the word
Bryce and Stephen, thanks. I am trying to make sense of it, in its context. So immediately before “For the husband is the head (or source) of the wife, even as Christ is the head (or source) of the church” (Eph 5:23). we get this statement: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.” Do wives submit to their husbands because the husband is the source or point of origin of the wife? I need to think on that. All of this discussion follows the first verse in this chapter: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children,” and the verses in-between talk about how we follow (or obey) in different situations.
A river, like the Nile, doesn’t follow or obey its source or its point of origin. In fact, once the water starts to flow, I think that most geologists (which I am not) will agree that all that matters is the lay and contour of the land ahead of water, and the source is utterly irrelevant–the source does not compel or direct the water that issued from it, nor does the water obey in any sense the source from whence it came. I’m trying not to wrest the scriptures, as Peter warns us not to do, and I don’t want to redefine terms so that they are pleasing to my 21st century ears but make no sense in their first century context. I appreciate looking at the words–I’m sort of a word nerd–for new levels of understanding, and sometimes for redefinition. I appreciate the words quotes from the Church Fathers. I think that we overlook them, when frequently they can help us.
Let’s assume–just for a few minutes and just to make another, different teaching point that we also need to learn more about–that Paul probably did use head to mean leader, and not source or point of origin. If that assumption is correct, then it is up to us to determine what kind of leader, and by extension what kind of follower, we should be. and that should be intensely personal with each married couple. I don’t want to tell my neighbor man how to be the head of his wife, nor do I want to tell her how to follow her husband. I certainly don’t want anyone else telling my wife and me how to make our marriage work. My wife and I are trying to figure it out for ourselves, and our solution, whether good, bad, incomplete, imperfect, might not work for a lot of other people, so while I might share what worked if asked, I shouldn’t impose my solution on others as the only right solution. We do that too much in the church, but that’s a discussion for another post.
Todd: I so appreciated your comments and observations. My compliments.
I love this conversation. I would just add the insistence of many to focus on the King James Version makes understanding the meaning of the original language more difficult.
Todd, I am interested in your take on obedire in the Latin, meaning “to listen to.” I am aware of obaudio (obaudire in the present infinitive) as meaning to listen to, and of obeodio (obeodire in the present infinitive) as meaning to obey or to yield. Thus we have, in Acts 5:29, “oboedire [obedire in some versions] oportet Deo magis quam hominibus,” which the KJV gives as “We ought to obey God rather than men” and the ESV and NASB give as “We must obey God rather than men” and the NIV gives as “We must obey God rather than human beings.”
I see in one of my works that in Late Latin, which they define as the 3rd through 6th centuries, obaudio “to listen to” was an alternative form of oboedio “to obey.” I did not know that. It makes sense that the two words would be conflated because they were so close in sound, but also because listening has a meaning of obeying, or at least it used to. That meaning might be archaic in modern English.
Getting the sense of the Hebrew “shema” is interesting, and this does include “to listen to,” but when one listens to God, the expectation is that the hearer will then do, or obey. We see this in Acts 7:39, where speaking of Moses we read in the KJV “To whom our fathers would not obey, but thrust him from them, and in their hearts turned back again into Egypt.” The Vulgate gives it as “cui noluerunt oboedire [obedire in some versions] patres nostri sed reppulerunt et aversi sunt cordibus suis in Aegyptum.” I think that the KJV could have said “To whom our fathers would not listen, but thrust him from them…” and the meaning would have been the same. To obey (or not obey) God is semantically probably very, very close to listen (or not listen) to God; they are almost two sides of the same coin.
Listening is apparently not a very biblical activity. The word “listen” appears only once in the KJV, in Psalm 49:1, “Listen, O isles, unto me.” The words “hear” and “hearken” in their various forms appear very frequently. That word also includes, I think, a sense of obeying, and certainly a sense of understanding, as in “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear” (Luke 14:35).
When we listen to God, we obey Him, hopefully out of love rather than fear.
When we reject God and do not obey Him, we no longer listen to him.
We’re told over and over again that God hears the prayers of his people, and He wants His people both (a) to listen to and to obey him, and (b) to speak to Him in prayer. God invites two-way discussion, although the Lord always has the last word. In our modern usage of obey, there is absolutely no two-way discussion. The word is given by the leaders at many levels, and our task below is only to obey, to do, or to perform as instructed; there is no sense of prayer, feedback, discussion, interchange, or dialogue. We hear God and strive to obey, but He also hears us. When, how, and whether He answers us is His business, but we are assured that He listens to our prayers. That is comforting. From bishops on up, no one hears anyone below him. And if they do deign to listen, do they hear, or are they developing their answer while we speak, effectively not hearing while appearing to listen? I think that our leaders would benefit from a mechanism that allowed the thoughts of the people to flow up.
Rockwell, I agree that the KJV is sometimes challenging, but I am not prepared to replace it. I haven’t found anything that does justice all around as well as the KJV. No translation is perfect, so picking another one would make some things easier, but it might also cause problems. I use other translations frequently and willingly, but I haven’t found a translation that I’m willing to use to replace the KJV.
This is an interesting post. Sometimes words get baggage, and then we can no longer get to the real meaning of the word because of the other baggage, or our ship can’t sail through the water because of the growth of barnacles on our hulls.
One translation issue concerns the word “repent.” In the Greek, I understand that metanoeó means to change one’s mind or course of conduct. If that’s right, then repentance has to do primarily with action, and not with feeling. When Jesus and Paul and others called on people to repent, they called on them to change their actions now and in the future, not to have great remorse and guilt for their actions n the past. In English, in my go-to dictionary, the first definition of repent is “to turn from sin and dedicate oneself to the amendment of one’s life.” Notice this is action, not feeling. The second definition in my English dictionary is “to feel regret or contrition.” As I understand it, in Greek the word translated as repent had the first definition, but not the second. In English, the word repent has apparently always had both meanings since the word came to us from the French. If a person feels great sorrow for his past deeds but does not change them, then in Greek he would not have repented, no matter the quantity of tears, publicity of confession, or amount of restitution.
While remorse or regret for past deeds has its place, and while remorse can motivate change, I think that in the NT God and His servants simply sometimes call for people to change their actions and to trust in God to make it all right. His burden is supposed to be light, after all. I don’t think that they always called upon the people to have great, debilitating remorse and regret. Just stop what you’re doing wrong, trust God, and do right, and let’s press forward with Christ helping us as we trust in Him. That is how I see repentance, not weeping and a heavy burden of self-imposed guilt for our worthlessness. I think that we make repentance too hard, and we misdirect people in what they should do. I do not think that repentance must always include remorse and restitution and confession. Those concepts that have their place, but repentance is change of heart or action; it is present and future, not past; it is action, and not feeling. It is also liberating, and not enchaining.
I have a teenager. She rarely “does what I tell her to do” without a fuss, great emotion, and/or explanation [and it is exasperating in the finest tradition of teenage development everywhere]. And yet… I trust that she is “listening” because I have seen that same teenager relay the same message I “told her” to her sister with compassion and love. I have seen that sometimes, “she washes that dish” without prompting, remembers to “close the door” all the way at the correct volume, and doesn’t engage in fights when others want to. At the most random intervals, she says and acts in to create “Win-Win” situations (like I have spent almost a decade teaching through modeling and spelling out the step-by-step process we will use to do our best to create that scenario).
Robert Fulghum said, ““Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.”
I think that this a universal truth. I think that sometimes God isn’t worried that us, as Their children aren’t “listening to them” (aka “completing a proper performance/sequence of events”) and are looking for signs of connection to Them – any signal that us, as Their children are looking for ways to “become divine” and “be their best selves” around all the other children of God because we have been “watching God”.
Georgis, I love a good discussion, and you strike as someone I would likely really enjoy having a lively conversation.
I love this conversation, but I find it challenging to capture the depth in a concise paragraph. For me, your comments about Repentance are spot on and dovetail nicely into the same problems I see around how we discuss and teach obedience. Metanoia, as you referenced, has the meaning of “Changing one’s mind”, but the etymological deconstruction makes it sing even more beautifully. Meta, means more specifically “Beyond” or “Transcend”. So, Meta-Noia means to “Move beyond the mind”, to transcend the abstraction of thought, even remorse or guilt, that you reference, and move into heart and body (action).
My experience learning the gospel, by way of the LDS tradition, has been caught in a vicious directional conundrum. Our rhetoric tends to relate the story of our mortal journey, not so much as a developmental project, even though our theology supports that assertion, but instead as a summative test, where the project is performing certain tasks (i.e.. obedience, keeping covenants, repentance, etc) as a way to make myself acceptable enough to God, that he will reward me with his divine presence again. I am 50 years old now, and the past couple of years, this concept has really fallen apart for me. It seems completely backwards. Our story places God as the passenger and us as the driver of ship. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ (Good news) is not the way to get God to change his mind about mankind, but the way for us to change our minds about God. His mind doesn’t need changing. The “Good News” is that we can stop trying to keep a commandment that God never gave, namely, attempting to make yourself into a being that is perfectly lovable. God never commanded us to “Be Lovable”, only “To Love”, but the Christian story has twisted it into a canard and created a culture that is quite obsessed with self. This backwards way of using the Law, the Apostle Paul calls “Sin”.
Repentance, for me, is our religious word to describe how the secular world understands turning failures into success. In this way, repentance is a purely positive life practice, one that gives us a new way of relating to our past, where it becomes our teacher instead of our accuser. Repentance is where conscience meets courage, where there exists a capacity to be aware and couple that with the strength to act differently. The Latin root of courage is “Cor”, which means, to tell your story from the heart. When you match awareness with vulnerability, we step back into harmony with those we harmed, including ourselves.
There is a meme that has gone around that I find quite funny. Funny, ironic and eye opening. Sometimes paying attention to our critics can open our eyes to where our
beliefs have actually crossed into excess and become problematic.
Knock knock?
Whose there?
It’s Jesus, let me in…
Why?
I have to save you.
From what?
From what I’m going to do to you if you don’t let me in.
This paints a vivid picture of how often the Christian story, with all the best of intentions, has developed an order of operations problem, solving problems backwards and then wondering why we keep getting the wrong answer. This is precisely the message Jesus imparts during his mortal ministry to the reigning religious Pharisees.
Oh man, so many. Listening to Dan McClellan’s YouTube videos and podcast is absolutely fascinating yet also discouraging. (The Come Follow Me lessons are abysmal in comparison.)
If I was to pick a personal bugbear, it would be the word “helpmeet” as a noun. It’s not a noun, for crying out loud. Calling me a helpmeet to my husband is a terrible misreading of Genesis 2:18.
Margot, I too have heard “helpmeet” used as if it were a one sword noun. In fact, as you know, it is two words. “Help” or “helper” is a noun, but “meet” doesn’t stand alone with “help.” The syntactical unit is “meet for him” which means suitable for him [Adam].
Some people don’t like for women to be a helper to a man, but maybe that isn’t so bad. Using the same Hebrew word used in Genesis, David called God his help: “thou art my help and my deliverer; O LORD, make no tarrying” (Ps 70:5). maybe being a help isn’t all bad and subservient, if God is also a help.
God’s purpose is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man-made writ large in its universal sense which naturally includes both men and women. God helps in that endeavor, and wives can help their husbands, but this doesn’t make a biological male the center, for the man (traditionally) also labored for the salvation of his wife and children, and he also protected and provided for them. Woman is a not helper to man, subservient, with him having no responsibilities toward his wife. Instead, maybe she is a helper with God, and he is also a helper to her.
That is how my wife and I are trying to make sense of it. She helps me in all major and many minor decisions, as I generally do not act without consulting her. She is absolutely my closest advisor and confidante. I would never act against or without her, nor would she me. We help each other. No, she doesn’t do my laundry: I have done that myself for many years. By helper, I do not mean that she is my servant who cooks and cleans. She is my partner, and I am her partner, and we are trying to make life work together. I admit that there are some lousy husbands out there that women regret marrying, but that goes the other way, too. Marriage is hard, but we have strived for partnership, and we have been fortunate, even through some tough times.
Being a helper can’t be all bad, when God is also a helper. Being a helper should not mean being a slave or being subservient to. And no man should ever tell his wife that her role is to serve him. The word is misused that way too frequently in our culture.
I think this is my fourth or fifth post on this topic, so I have exceeded my allotment, and will bow out. Words matter, and words in our English Bibles come from Hebrew and Greek. I am not a scholar of either, but I have some tools that are helpful. I am grateful for those tools, in part, because they free me from being bound by pronouncements of learned men. That gives me liberty and freedom as I try to make sense of the scriptures, and I think that is a good thing.
In terms of context I think it would be helpful if scripture study classes started with the disclaimer that 1: We don’t know who specifically wrote each book of the Bible. 2: The scriptures are not historical documents. Almost none of the events actually happened the way they are described and most are allegorical. 3: each book is a product of the culture of the time and place in which it was written, take it with a grain of salt.
I had discounted the Bible after hearing John Lundwall talk about the evolution of spoken and written languages on Mormonish but that changed when I heard Dan Mclellan on Mormon Stories. I actually learned some things from the Jonah story when he put it in context and explained the scholarship behind it. Also his explanation of gender roles in the bible was profoundly meaningful to me and made it clear that we’ve evolved a lot for the better as a species. I appreciate the previous conversation on the translation of specific words but to me starting with the scholarship on when and why the books were written says so much more about them.
A few years ago I gave a talk in a stake conference where I was asked to speak about the verse “be thou perfect…” which IMO is a highly problematic and wrongly interpreted verse in a society/church where perfectionism is rampant and the cause of much unhappiness. But “perfect” is a faulty translation. A better, or more accurate, translation would be “to become whole” or “mature”. Which gives a much deeper and more thought provoking meaning to the rest of the text.
My whole talk was about this new meaning and the important connotations it holds for the way we view ourselves and our lives. A lot of people attending thanked me afterwards (mainly women) but I was never asked again to give a talk in a stake conference 🙂
In the context of the previous verses in Matt 5, be thou perfect is talking about loving our fellows as well as we can. In my humble opinion.
I heard somewhere that “be thou perfect” should be understood as something like if you have X, Y, and Z characteristics mentioned previously, you will be perfect, rather than as an imperative command to be perfect. Can any of you better informed people confirm or correct this idea?
Your food allergy
Adam Miller writes in his book, An Early Resurrection, “It’s true that Christ asks us to “be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). And, in the abstract, it’s fair to read this verse as encouragement to aim at being better in the future. But, in context, this doesn’t seem to me to be what Christ is after. In the verses that lead up to this commandment, Christ isn’t urging me toward the kind of future moral perfection that might come from never breaking the law, good a goal as this may be. Instead, he’s urging me in the strongest possible terms to practice, in the face of a painful and imperfect world, a certain kind of care.
How does God care for the world?
What does his care look like?
Jesus is clear. God causes his care to shine on the good and the evil. He sends his care like rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
Jesus was saying, you’re not a sinner because you don’t comply perfectly with the law, you are a sinner because you don’t care equally for those who do or don’t perfectly follow the rules.
God’s care is Whole, not broken into parts. It’s complete, not partial. This is what the Greek word for “perfection” (telios) means. To be perfect means to be “Whole” or “Complete”, and Jesus appears to have said exactly what he means, that God is perfect because his love is complete and whole.