Rank-and-file Christians don’t ordinarily think of their ministers, pastors, priests, and lay friends as spinning the Bible. Yet, from the earliest days of the Church, clerics and laity alike placed their spin on God’s word. Today theological spin doctors continue to spin the New Testament to reach denominational objectives. How does this affect your understanding and spiritual relationship with God?

Why Spin the Word of God?

Spinning is a very old phenomenon. Ancient spin-masters, or spin doctors if you prefer, spun their yarns to explain events, to create history, and to boaster the reputations of their masters. Spin-masters served the pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of Rome, the royal families of Europe, and the despots of every century across the globe. They spun the events of their day to bring their publics into their world view. Today, spin doctors spin science, data, and fact to achieve political, economic, social, and theological ends.

It is in the very nature of a set of facts that enables them to be amenable to multiple interpretation or spun. A single set of facts can provide multiple meanings. A skilled spin-master argues facts to make his or her point plausible and convincing. As every other lawyer, I learned that skill set in law school and successfully utilized it in my law practice in representing my clients. The search for truth and meaning is not the real objective but rather the advancing of a cause, damage control, or winning.

In spinning, the objective is to get us to adopt the opinions the spin-masters want us to reach and to accept the reality they wish us to believe. The effective spin doctor spins the facts to bring us there. It is, of course, quite self-serving and results in an inaccurate understanding of the facts themselves.

Perhaps spinning is a phenomenon common to all humans. We are sometimes amused at how our small children and grandchildren, attempting to stay out of trouble, but remaining short of telling a lie, concoct stories to explain themselves out of a troublesome situation. Moreover, spinning is part of our daily relationships. We experience it in conversations with our friends and family.

We encounter it in the mass media advertising of our time. The pundits and the politicians bombard us with it incessantly. Thankfully, most Americans, armed with some critical thinking skills, seem to recognize this form of spin as just that and shrug it off. So, while we may doubt what politicians claim, remain skeptical of the contentions of the classic authors, question the heroics recorded in ancient monuments, and cautious of what our clergy say, we are often ignorant of the spin some attach to the Bible itself. You may not realize it but to some degree you have been shaped by it.

When folks attend America’s churches or synagogues, the clergy often present their own view of the word of God. The Bible, however, is a complete whole and consistent between its two testaments and in fact speaks for itself. The Bible, in a sense, is God’s instruction book for mankind. It is self-authenticating.

When it comes to our personal spiritual understanding and relationship with God, we are left then with a basic question. What exactly is the true nature and character of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, as the Word of God?

In theological circles, minimalists argue that the New Testament, rather than being God’s word, consists primarily of works by authors other than the apostles and represents various traditions about Jesus of Nazareth. As a result, they pick and choose what they want out of the New Testament and deconstruct the rest. Maximalists, who often take a literalist approach, argue that it is the infallible world of God and fasten on every word.

I would suggest, in the alternative, that the New Testament, or the Christian Scriptures, is the inspired work product of the apostles themselves undertaken to create a fixed set of authoritative apostolic writings pertaining to the New Covenant (2 Peter 3:16) as the Hebrew Scriptures were for the Old Covenant. The apostles’ idea of a compilation of inspired and authoritative apostolic writings likely arose from the model provided by the then-existing documents forming the recognized text of the Hebrew Scriptures.

In John’s Gospel lies evidence that the elderly apostle astutely confirmed the veracity of the Christian Scriptures. He established this point by developing material wherein he includes a quotation of Jesus, a parenthetical comment, concerning the nature of scripture. Breaking into Jesus’ answer to Jews who were threatening to stone him, the Apostle John recorded, “and the Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). He wrote it at a time when the first-century Christian reader understood “Scripture” to be the Hebrew Scriptures and the existing, yet still uncompleted, set of apostolic writings.

The Apostle Paul argues that the Bible, as an infallible rule of faith and practice, is the inspired Word of God (2 Timothy 3:16). The implication is that the Bible alone, consisting of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, and the Bible in its entirety is the Word of God written and therefore inerrant in the autographs. Thankfully, the New Testament continues to serve and to protect the people of God by ensuring that future generations will have an accurate account of “The Way” (Hebrews 13:7; 2 Peter 1:15; John 14:6).

Even though the apostles allowed themselves ways of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures foreign to us, God led them to create the wonderful compendium we call the New Testament. The New Testament portrays the apostles’ relationship with God as one of trust, faith, and divine guidance and there is no reason their writings should not so reflect. For we Christians, the ancient understanding the apostles attached to the Hebrew Scriptures we now consider fact and truth, well-proven as such over the last 19 centuries. It is not, however, ancient apostolic methods of exegesis that threatens our biblical understanding. What we have to fear is the centuries of spin by generations quite removed from the simple Christianity of the apostolic period lived out by people taught by Jesus Christ himself.

Editorial, Scribal, and Translator Spin

Based upon the premises and biases of their own societies, ancient scribes, translators, and editors unfortunately placed their spins on the New Testament. These have distorted, obfuscated, and detracted from the Gospel and continue to impede an objective understanding of the norms, values, and standards of the ancient Church and the apostles’ doctrine. Scores of these spins remain with us to this day. Is this significant? Often it is crucial to both Christian life and doctrine.

Consider the two most accepted critical texts of the New Testament, namely Eberhard Nestle’s Novum Testamentum Graece (Nestle 1993) and the United Bible Societies’ The Greek New Testament (Aland 1993). Both are commendable scholarly efforts to resolve ambiguity and to create the best possible critical Greek text from the hundreds of extant ancient Greek manuscripts and thousands of fragments. Nevertheless, exegesis always precedes translation, even in regard to the editing of these two widely accepted critical texts themselves, in something as simple as word, sentence, and paragraph breaks, let alone in capitalization and in the discernment of proper nouns. 

According to R. Omanson, writing in the Bible Review, “literally thousands of decisions are made by translators” relating to the original meaning of words in context as well as grammatical constructions and the segmentation and punctuation of the text (Omanson 1998:43). With regards to these issues, Omanson points out that: 

…the editors of these editions do not always agree on where breaks and punctuation marks should appear. And translators sometimes depart from the segmentation and punctuation found in these critical texts based on their own understanding of the New Testament writings. Their decisions can create real differences in meaning, as is shown by comparing several modern translations.

Omanson 1998:40.

Consider the simple difference punctuation can make in biblical understanding. Take, for example, the NASB rendering of Luke 23:43 based upon Eberhard Nestle’s Novum Testamentum Graece (21st edition):

And He said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.”

Luke 23:43 NASB

Compare this with the Fan Noli rendering based upon the approved text of the Church of Constantinople and the Church of Greece (the standard Byzantine text).

Jesus answered him: “Well, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradises.”

The subtle differences in translation reflect slight variations in the Greek manuscripts and the translators’ choice of Greek-English equivalents. You can see other renderings by comparing translations (see Renderings of Luke 23:43 below). Bible students normally compare translations of difficult verses to gain a keener sense of the meaning of the verse in English. This is not always sufficient, however, and students usually proceed to refer to a critical Greek text. The Greek texts upon which we generally rely are replete with punctuation, the segregation of each word from others, upper-case and lower-case letters, neatly arranged in paragraphs and chapters. In this editing and formatting spin arises based upon translators’ underlying theology, assumptions, presuppositions, and simple bias.

RENDERINGS OF LUKE 23:43

RSV	Young’s Literal Translation
And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”	and Jesus said to him, `Verily I say to thee, To-day with me thou shalt be in the paradise.’
NIV	Darby Translation
Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”	And Jesus said to him, Verily I say to thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise.
TEV	NRSV
Jesus said to him, “I promise you that today you will be in Paradise with me.”	He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
AV	Douay-Rheims Bible
And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.	And Jesus said to him: Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise.

The underlying assumption read into the Greek text (eisegeses) of Luke 23:43 is dualism. As Shirley C. Guthrie (1927-2004), former J.B. Green Professor of Systematic Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary, explains in his Christian Doctrine: Teachings of the Chistian Church “dualism is a heresy dear to the hearts of many American Christians-including some who consider themselves “orthodox” precisely in this heresy” (Gutherie 1968:158).

Jesus of Nazareth died on a Cross along with thieves. None of them went to Paradise on that Passover, Nisan 14 (Wed., April 25, 31 CE). Not Christ nor the thieves. They were all dead. Jesus, however, arose from the dead in a resurrection three days and three nights later about sunset on Saturday afternoon (April 28, 31 CE). The thief awaits the great white throne judgment (Revelation 20:11-15). For now, the dead know nothing. Their “spirit in man” or “human spirit” lies in God’s care until the resurrections, then they will be conscious and live again. If you carefully investigate this teaching in your Bible, you will find this to be biblically accurate and true. This explanation based on the Bible itself simply does not fit the narrative of those who have spun Christianity into an illusion.

The point is that in all the translations of Luke 23:43 listed by bibletools.com at https://www.biblestudytools.com/luke/23-43-compare.html not one translates the Greek text correctly due to this dualistic hermeneutic so ingrained in the Christian psyche. The doctrinally appropriate translation would read: “Jesus said to him, “I promise you today, you will be with me in Paradise.” That would be in the resurrection for the Great White Throne Judgment.

This one scripture is only one that has been translated to convey a teaching that has no biblical basis in fact. There are many more. This is one reason why so many people look at the contemporary Christian churches, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, as churchianity. So we need to dig deeper into this topic.

The apostles chose the koine Greek as the language by which they published their apostolic complement to the Hebrew Scriptures. The early koine Greek texts of the New Testament had no punctuation. Their letters were all capital letters, in long strings, known as majuscules. The authors’ intention of chapter and paragraph breaks are not always clear. Greek texts are not always duplicates of the originals free of scribal error and editing. As a result, unknown to many laities and clergy, a cloud of ambiguity is inherent in the material. For the most part, this ambiguity is not problematic but there are some subtle biblical texts where it is in issue.

More critical, however, is the altering of early New Testament texts to support Greco-Roman Christological doctrine by orthodox scribes of the second and third centuries (Ehrman 1993) and the later redaction of the Greek New Testament in the ninth century by dualistic Greco-Roman theologians when they adopted minuscules, added punctuation, and segregated words. Minuscules are the small or lower-case Greek letters, and the small Greek cursive script developed from the uncial. The final product, the underlying structure of the later critical texts, replete with orthodox doctrinal spin, represented the Greco-Roman Christian worldview of those engaged in these efforts. According to church historian Justo González, during the Renaissance came the slow realization that the Christianity which then existed was not what it had once been. He wrote:

The discovery of the extent to which mistakes had crept into ancient texts led to doubt as to the authenticity of some of the texts themselves. Since the manuscripts were not entirely trustworthy, was it not possible that some of the writings that supposedly were very old were in truth the product of a later age?

González 1984:368.

This recognition ignited a quest for original sources, textual research, and analysis of thousands of fragments from the Renaissance to our day. Even so, there remain numerous echoes of orthodox corruption and spin in the two main critical texts and in our English translations conveying a false sense of early Christianity, its customs, and belief system.

To be continued in the March2022 post.