On Lesson Four

I’ve just posted today’s marathon Lesson Four—see the tab “4: The Source” above. There are quite a few footnotes that weren’t brought up in class, so as the indefatigable servant of you Searchers of Truth & Righteousness, I’ve decided to post them here with active links:

The first footnote was just the attribution of the NIV internet copyright statement. BibleGateway isn’t a bad Bible research site, but it isn’t nearly as cool as Blue Letter Bible.

1. NIV Copyright notice taken from BibleGateway.com NIV information page

Footnote two was a short explanation of the questionable “translation methodology” of the NIV:

2. The NIV used a method of interpretation which they called “Dynamic Equivalence”, which basically means rendering the sense of the text rather than the “static” meaning of words. Ironically, the DE method results in a more “static” translation by reducing multiple possible interpretations of a word or phrase (such as “the sign of the Son of man in heaven”) to a single meaning (“the sign of the Son of Man in the sky”).

The third footnote was another short explanation of a comment I made, but this one was referring to scholars who disagreed with the idea that the Biblical Canon was decided at the Council of Nicea. I found the note on this Wikipedia page (scroll down to the section called “Canonization” for the quote, then click on the footnote for the reference):

3. New Testament scholar Lee Martin McDonald notes, “Although a number of Christians have thought that church councils determined what books were to be included in the biblical canons, a more accurate reflection of the matter is that the councils recognized or acknowledged those books that had already obtained prominence from usage among the various early Christian communities”. From: McDonald, Lee M.: The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995, p. 116

When I was mentioning that the Majority Text was another name for the Textus Receptus, I added footnote 4. Until the 1982, then 1991, the term Majority Text spelt S-A-F-E:

4. Beware: Two pairs of scholars, Hodges & Farstad and Pierpont & Robinson, in 1982 and 1991 respectively, came out with their own GNT’s and called them “Majority Texts”.

There is a 5th footnote, but I’d mentioned it in class and the link is active—go have a look at the bottom of Lesson Four…

I also checked out the birth & death dates of Pope Callistus. Looks like I need to brush up on my Papal history! Paul was right—it seems Callistus was an actual “head of the Church”-type Pope from AD 217 until his death in 222. They don’t know when he was born apparently. Here’s the Wikipedia page where I got the dates from.


Okay, all for now!

No, wait, one more thing--email me if you get this post and have trouble accessing the blog (the url is gntbiblestudy.blogspot.com [no "www" at the beginning])


God Bless,
Ἰακωβος