I know, I’m way late on this. But, here you go. A Christian Bible scholar and devout theist believes she’s found a mistranslation in the Bible, and it’s a whopper.
Van Wolde, aged 54, will present her thesis at the Radboud University, in The Netherlands, during a conference. This is the same institution where she teaches, The Telegraph reports. She says that the accurate translation does not imply that the Earth started with God. The beginning of the book of Genesis is merely the introduction in a narration, she reveals. “It meant to say that God did create humans and animals, but not the Earth itself,” the expert explains. Christian scholars currently teach that God created everything around us, including the stars and the planet. This no longer seems to be the case, according to the new translation.
“Something was wrong with the verb. God was the subject (God created), followed by two or more objects. Why did God not create just one thing or animal, but always more?” “There was already water. There were sea monsters. God did create some things, but not the Heaven and Earth. The usual idea of creating-out-of-nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is a big misunderstanding,” the expert says.
Will that end creationism? Considering there’s a movement overlapping creationism called “conservatives”, and they’re in the process of rewriting the Bible themselves over at Conservapedia, I have my doubts. In fact, I fully expect some armchair scholars that were breast-fed by Ken Ham, to show up and debate against this being a valid retranslation.
Did I really just say “breast-fed by Ken Ham”? Oh my. I’m going to go pour Dran-o in my eyes to get that image out.
I approve because it’s hilarious.
This scholar has translated the original, inspired-by-God Hebrew, to mean something other than what everyone thought it meant. And she had to call it a narration because that’s the only way it makes sense now.
Be careful with reasoning like that: It’s doomed to failure. Remember, there are Christians who do not take the Bible literally. I suppose you’re saying that those who do not aren’t true Christians then, right?
The scholar you are talking about does not take Genesis literally. The scholar believes that Genesis is the beginning of narration rather than Creation. Christians certainly don’t take this seriously.
This whole story has been really puzzling to me, since this is the kind of thing you learn in first year Biblical Hebrew. Well, it was 2 decades ago when I took it, but I can’t imagine anything changing.
From teh JPS translation of Genesis:
1When God began to create a heaven and earth—2the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water—3God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
http://www.jewishpub.org/
You can clearly see that the earth (a watery void with a clear surface) is already there. The meaning is even more clear in the original. It’s not a valid *re-translation*, it’s just a literal reading.
So, as there is nothing really new about this, it will have zero impact on the fundagelicals. They’ll just ignore it, as they do all things Jewish that disagree with whatever it is they want/need to believe. Weird to say this, but Zdenny is right: Christians certainly don’t take this seriously. Only “this” means “what the OT actually says”.
But we already knew that from too many other examples.
That doesn’t completely surprise me – the early Jewish tradition that was probably the basis for Genesis was still heavily influenced by more general Near-Eastern religious traditions, and a lot of those traditions included the idea that the earth or even the entire universe had existed in a chaotic state, and that a deity or deities had then brought order to it, creating the earth and the heavens as they currently exist.
Hell, if anyone knows ANYTHING about the Old Testament, it’s the Jews. This totally makes sense to me. So, is it just that only now a Christian twigged onto the fact that their foundational texts are mistranslated, but the Jewish clergy knew all along?
That whole creation myth, I always thought, was originally something about Yahweh slaying the dragon of chaos Tiamat and using its body to create the landform. The landform that was placed into the waters, which existed prior to the “Earth” being created. In other words, they thought the “Earth” that God created, was just the land atop the water. They had no idea that the Earth *includes* the land when they wrote their mythology books.
The way I learned it, Tiamat *was* the chatic void, only depersonalized, and Elohim was understudy to Marduk. The “taming” of Tiamat produced offspring, which in Mesopotamian myth were gods, but in Genesis ch 1 are just objects, like land, sky, oceans etc.
If I’d bother to look, I’d imagine that there are several versions of these ancient Sumerian/Babylonian (etc) myths, but the gist of it is there.
As to trying to work out what they were actually thinking, I love this:
“They had no idea that the Earth *includes* the land.”
I’ve often tried to think about the light in the sky as having nothing to do with the Sun – that big bright ball just only comes out when the light is here – as a way to reconcile Day 1 with Day 4. That it gets quite light out in the morning with the Sun yet to make an appearance may go some of the way to understanding this, but it’s still mind-boggling.