Hi there!  This blog is more or less a record of the Bible study that I have been doing. Quite some time ago, I read a book called When God Spoke Greek, which ended up sending me down quite the rabbithole. I ended up reading a lot about the formation of the Bible and early Christian history, and this in turn has led me to rethink how I had been reading and interpreting the Bible. 

What is it that I’ve actually rethought?

• I am much less confident that I actually know what the heck the Bible is talking about.
• It is now pretty obvious to me that a lot of the ways that I had interpreted Scripture were the result of stuff like “Catholic theology in the year 1000” and that there were other interpretations that were plausible and perhaps fit the text of Scripture a bit better.
• New Testament authors were very familiar with Hebrew Scripture and had large swathes of it memorized.  They quote it or allude to it all the ding dang time in the New Testament.   I, on the other hand, am much less familiar, and so a bunch of the meaning New Testament authors had intended their audience to get was just going right over my head!
• Whenever something is translated, there is an inevitable gap between the meaning of the original text and the meaning as translated (thus the phrase “lost in translation”). In the case of modern translation of the Bible, this gap is also influenced by the fact that it is translation by committee, and the ultimate word choice is influenced by the need to accommodate some of the established theology of many denominations who make up the committee. As much as possible, though, I would like to avoid that gap in meaning and understand what the text itself actually says. 

All this rethinking is part of my actual main project, which is to figure out what the Bible actually says about what it means to be Christian and how a Christian should live. For the most part this effort is for my own benefit, but I also recognize that other people care deeply about the Bible and might find this to be an interesting effort as well.  With that in mind I will try to keep posts relatively short and accessible, but I can’t promise that I will be wholly successful at that effort, because I have a weird brain which sometimes runs away from me.