ONE-SHOT DOGMAS: Beliefs based on single Bible verses

 

 

     Imagine you got to launch your own church and – clever marketer that you are – you realized you needed to differentiate your new denomination by basing a prominent doctrine on a single Bible verse.  Which verse would you choose?

     Don’t scoff.  We all know it happens.  Plenty of denominations both within and at the fringes of Christianity have whipped up doctrines based on less.  If you’re a sect-watcher like me, you’re probably already thinking about the Latter-Day-Saint practice of baptism for the dead, a ritual based on one small, enigmatic declaration in 1 Corinthians 15:29.

     Those silly Mormons, someone may think, basing so much on so little.  But the Mormons aren’t alone.  This month I’m stepping back from my usual linguistics deep dives to make a quick survey of some one-shot dogmas, practices, and beliefs that have sprung from single verses of scripture.  It’ll get a little episodic, but it’s a quick read.

 

ONE VERSE: BAPTISM IN THE NAME OF THE TRINITY

     Nearly every Christian denomination, large or small, baptizes believers “in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  This practice is mentioned only once in the entirety of Scripture, a single verse (Matthew 28:19) out of the nearly eight thousand verses in our New Testament.  Elsewhere (Acts 2:38), believers aren’t told to baptize in the name of the full Trinity.  The apostle Peter teaches that believers are to be baptized “in the name of Jesus,” and two Bible chapters later it’s declared that there is “no other name under heaven” by which we can be saved.  That latter combination of verses is recognized by the Oneness Movement as having more weight than the Matthew 28 declaration of baptism in the names of the Trinity.

     To my mind, the two directives aren’t mutually exclusive.  To baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit does, in fact, include baptizing in the name of Jesus.  The fact remains, however, that the formula for our most common approach to baptism appears once, and only once, in all of the New Testament.  It is, in short, a doctrinal practice based on a single verse.

 

ONE VERSE: TATTOOS

     On a less weighty note: On the back of my left shoulder, I have a tiny tattoo of a koi fish.  Honest, I got it long before I ever read the book of Leviticus, in which a single verse prohibits the marking of one’s body with tattoos:

“Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves.”  (Lev. 19:28)

     While it’s tough to find a single denomination that bans tattooing outright, it’s pretty easy to bounce around the Web enjoying essays by individual Christians who condemn tattoos based on (1) this verse and (2) their sense of personal outrage.  On the other hand, it’s just as common to find rationales from Christians who justify tattoos by explaining the cultural context of that prohibition in Leviticus.  Least common was one little image gem I found online: Gorgeously rendered script on skin, elegantly announcing the citation “Leviticus 19:28” as a tattoo.  Inky irony in action.

     Whatever you conclude about the literal reading or the cultural considerations behind that verse, it’s probably good to keep in mind that the same chapter of Leviticus also bans:

• Failing to pay an employee on the same day they’ve done work for you
• Trimming your beard (hey, I never trim mine)
• Wearing mixed fabrics (check your poly-cotton blend socks right now!)
• Sitting down when an elder is in the same room as you

 

ONE VERSE: THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

     I should probably point out that the term “Immaculate Conception” is often confused with the idea of Jesus’ virgin birth.  This dogma isn’t about Jesus’ conception.  It’s the idea that Mary His mother was conceived without the stain of original sin.  It’s a fully Roman Catholic dogma based on a vague one-liner in scripture.

     The Catholic justification for this belief is a single word in the angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary in Luke 1:24. The angel calls her kecharitōmenē, “one filled with charis, grace.”  Because she was already filled with grace, the Catholic reasoning goes, then she herself must have been created by a special act of God without the burden of original sin, thereby becoming a worthy vessel to bear the messiah.

     It’s not a particularly compelling rationale, especially considering Mary herself immediately rejoices and calls God her savior (saved from what, if she were already created sinless?)  Historically, Catholics weren’t universally keen on it, either.  Thomas Aquinas, most prominent of all Catholic theologians, found the idea unworthy of the faith.  Dominican priests accepted it wholeheartedly, but Franciscans fought against the idea.  (Franciscans were pretty peaceful, so I’m using the word “fought” loosely here.  They probably just arched their eyebrows and tsk-ed audibly.)

     The matter was settled for Catholics in 1854 when Pope Pius IX declared the matter to be a dogma of the church.

 

ONE VERSE: THE 144,000

     Revelation is one of the most symbolic books of the Bible.  That doesn’t stop people from taking parts of it literally when it suits their doctrines or eschatology.  Thus, the one hundred and forty-four thousand “sealed servants of God” in chapter 7 of the Revelation became a favorite of new catastrophist sects of Christianity.

• Seventh Day Adventist founders felt it was the number of Adventists selected by God to be saved in the end times … until their own numbers surpassed 144,000.
• Mormons had a similar take and abandoned it for the same reason, upgrading the 144,000 to “high priests” who would forever minister to the eternal gospel.
• Jehovah’s Witnesses, however, managed to hang on to the number as a literal part of their eschatology by making the ethnicity of the “sealed” believers non-literal – 144,000 non-Jewish believers from throughout history who are anointed and get to go to heaven bodily for eternity, while the rest of the believing population remains on Earth in an eternal paradise overseen by heaven.

     Contemporary evangelicals don’t do much better with their literal interpretation of this single verse.  Those with a Futurist bent toward interpreting John’s Revelation tend to see it as a literal number of actual Jews being saved during the horrors of an end-times tribulation, this belief thanks to the influence of the Gospel According to Left Behind.  Their focus on the Jewish ethnicity of the “sealed” believers is slightly more literal than that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  However, the literalism falls apart when you realize that Revelation 7 calculates the sealed as literally having 12,000 representatives from each of the twelves tribes of Israel … ten of which no longer even existed when the Revelation was written.

     Should we maybe start appreciating a symbolic book as being, you know, symbolic?

 

ONE VERSE: SMOKING

      Denominations that doctrinally forbid smoking have even less than one verse on which to hang their dogma.  What they use seems to be a selective application of a much vaguer verse.  Do a hunt for “Should Christians smoke?” in your search engine of choice.  The articles you find will almost invariably reference 1 Corinthians 6:19 –

“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, that is from God?  You are not your own.”

     You can certainly argue that this verse applies to avoiding smoking as a way of shunning the “immorality” mentioned in the previous verse (18) so that you can “glorify God with your body” as pointed out in the verse that follows (20).  But if the verse applies to avoiding smoking, wouldn’t it equally apply to avoiding saturated fats?  Wouldn’t we also need to have doctrinal prohibitions against processed sugars in our sodas?  Shouldn’t our church doctrines also require believers to use seatbelts at all times?  Shouldn’t our credos include statements about honoring our bodies as temples by requiring followers to get all recommended vaccines, especially during pandemics?  If smoking is unholy treatment of our bodily temples, aren’t all those other areas as well?

 

ONE VERSE: GAMBLING

     There was a United Methodist Church up the road from my childhood home that had dozens of pamphlets in its foyer explaining why gambling was the worst of sins since humans ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.  Okay, I exaggerate.  One thing I noticed, though, was the recurrence of a single verse justifying United Methodist loathing of games of chance: 

“For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.” (1 Timothy 6:10)

     The United Methodist Book of Resolutions devotes numerous paragraphs to the evils of gambling, calling it a “menace to personal and social morality” and citing the verse above as the main, direct scriptural condemnation of all iterations of gambling and profit by chance.

     I won’t pick on Methodists.  Some of my best friends are Methodists.  But I do wonder how they feel about risk-sensitive investments in 401(k) and 403(b) retirement accounts.  And aren’t hedge fund investments a form of gambling, betting a company will fail for one’s own profit?  In fact, I wonder how they feel about all capital gains under the aegis of capitalism – profit accrued when money earns money, rather than income being earned by actual work.  How do they feel about how low taxes are on capital gains versus how high they are for income earned through real work?  And how do they feel about any fellow Methodists who work at banks and for credit card companies, where profits are earned through forbidden interest rates, aka “usury” (Leviticus 25:36-37)?

     Sometimes a single Bible verse can lead you down a long, long path.

 

ONE VERSE: THE CLOSING OF THE CANON

     This one might arch your eyebrows as high as the Franciscans arched theirs over Mary’s immaculate conception.  Modern Christians tend to cite one verse repeatedly to indicate nothing else can be added to the Bible:

“I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book.  If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share in the tree of life” (Revelation 22:18-19)

     Church after church and Christian after Christian have wielded this verse as evidence that the Bible is now closed and no new information can be added to the revealed canon of scripture.  This interpretation might have more weight if the verses above weren’t a reiteration of Deuteronomy 4:2, likewise prohibiting further adding to or subtracting from the writings and thus (according to the Sadducees of Jesus’ day) closing the canon some three thousand years earlier.

     When read closely, the words in the verse above are clearly referring to the book John of Patmos is writing, what we now call the Revelation.  It isn’t referring to the whole Bible.  In John’s day, there was no “whole Bible” compilation and there wouldn’t be for several more centuries.

     That leaves us (by which I mean Protestants who embrace the Bible rather than human traditions as the source of our beliefs) with a ponderous issue: If the Bible doesn’t declare a closing of the canon prohibiting any more additions, then on what do we base our faith that the canon is closed?  Is our faith in the traditions of men … in this case, specifically in the traditions of Catholic Councils in the 300s?  Is it founded on the authority of the Catholic named St. Augustine of Hippo, who oversaw those councils that decreed the canon?

     Is the closing of the canon an extrabiblical tradition?

 IN CONCLUSION

     I purposely included in these examples some single-verse beliefs that I do accept and others that I don’t.  It was a useful exercise for me.  It made me ask, “Why do I so quickly condemn some ideas, yet so quickly accept other ideas when the evidence is just as scripturally scant?”

     I can’t answer that question.  I can just share that I ask it, ponder it, and pray.

     But on a lighter note, I will answer the question I asked at the top of this blog post!  If I were going to forge a new doctrine for a new denomination based on a single Bible verse, I’ve decided I’ll go with Deuteronomy 23:13, which commands that each of us always carry a shovel, so that if we have to relieve ourselves out in the wild, we can dig a hole to cover it up.

     That won’t make my congregation any holier.  But carrying around those shovels will certainly teach us that basing high-impact doctrines on single Bible verses might lead to some pretty strange places.

 

Maranatha,

YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx

 

 

Gender and the Bible

 

     The word “wife” appears nowhere in the text of the Bible.  Neither does the word “husband.”

     You may disagree, and that’s understandable.  Our English translations of the scriptures are filled with occurrences of the words “wife” and “husband.”  You can’t get past Genesis chapter 2 without every major English translation referring to Adam and his “wife,” a term applied to her even before she receives the formal name “Eve.”  The English of Genesis chapter 3 follows up by introducing the word “husband.”

     What our translations conceal, however, is that there is no Hebrew word for “wife.”  Neither is there one for “husband.”  Hebrew has a single word, ishshah and its various forms, which simply means “woman” but in English passages is sometimes presented as “wife.”  The same is done with ish, a Hebrew word for “man” that is often rendered “husband” in Bible texts.

     For those who are already a step ahead of me, the same is true for the Greek New Testament.  Gyné is translated sometimes as “woman,” sometimes as “wife,” and andrós pops up as both man and husband, depending on which way the translation team decided to go.

     More news: When you read “the brothers” in Scripture, it may include sisters.

     When you read “the sons,” it may mean sons and daughters.

     And sometimes, when you read the word “man,” there’s actually no word at all, male or female, in the original text.

     What gives?

 

INCLUSIVE BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

     Let me state upfront that I’m not a fan of gender-inclusive versions of the Bible that artificially impose gender-neutral pronouns on my God or my fellow humans.  I see it as destruction of the original text.

     My position on that isn’t theological.  It’s linguistic and literary.  I’m just as put off by modern printings of Huckleberry Finn that omit the N-word from the very name of one of its main characters … an ironic adaptation in what’s arguably the most anti-racist book of its era.  The text of the Bible assigns God a male identity throughout, just as it assigns God female attributes in other places (see Isaiah 49:15 for God breastfeeding; Psalm 22:9-10 for God being a midwife; Deuteronomy 32:11 & 18 for God being a protective mother and giving birth; and Hosea 11:3-4 for God fulfilling a whole host of child-raising Mom roles).

     I’m grown up enough to know that God has no chromosomes, X or Y.  God has no genitalia, male or female.  God is spirit (John 4:24), and I don’t want the original versions of scripture neutered to adapt to anyone’s cultural agenda.  I want to know what it says, literally.  I’ll do my theology on the other side of my text analysis.

     That said … it isn’t just liberal-leaning translators of Scripture I take issue with.

 

EXCLUSIVE BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

     New Testament Greek has two distinct words we translate as “man” – andrós, mentioned above, which specifically means “a male human,” and anthrópos, “a human being.”  There’s a tradition among translators to render both as “man,” but anthrópos has a limited male slant to it.  Indeed, it can be used in the singular to refer to a single male, as it is in Matthew 19:5 & 10 and 1 Cor. 7:1.  However, the Greek writers Isocrates, Aristotle, and Antiphon all occasionally used it in reference to groups of women, as did the Septuagint (the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures used by Jesus and the Apostles) in Numbers 13:35.  So, anthrópos isn’t strictly gender-neutral, but it also doesn’t have a purely masculine meaning.  Anthrópos is flexible, and is usually best translated as “people” or “humans.”

     One interesting note: In Greek Scripture, the term “the Son of Man” is always written with a form of anthrópos.  Jesus is the Son of Humanity, a satisfying moniker for one born of a virgin with minmal male involvement.

     Back to English.  Sometimes when you’re reading “man” or “men” in Scripture, it’s referring to males.  Other times, it’s referring to people in general.  How are you supposed to know the difference if you don’t read ancient Greek?

     [From this point on, I’ll limit myself to commenting on the Greek parts of Scripture.  Kione Greek I can juggle, thanks to formal training; I’ve had no academic education in ancient Hebrew, so I’m no better with that than any other amateur flipping through a Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance.)

     One answer to solving the translation hurdle without taking five years of ancient Greek classes is to read multiple translations of the same passages. 

 

Matthew 6:14

• “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you.” KJV
• “For if you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you.” NASB 1977
• “For if you forgive people their wrongdoing, your heavenly Father will forgive you as well.” Holman
• “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you.” New Living Translation
• “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will forgive you.”  English Standard Version.

 

     Comparing these, I not only learn to appreciate the fuller meaning of the word “trespasses,” but I also get a sweeping view of how translators have dealt with the word for “men” in this passage.  Men, people, those who, and others make it clear to me that there’s a troublesome, gender-flexible word in there – and, in fact, it’s one we’ve already seen, anthrópois.  Therefore, I don’t get my heavenly Father’s forgiveness just by pardoning my husband, his brothers, and his male friends.  I have to forgive everybody.

      Reading multiple versions is a lot of work, I’ll admit.  As a people who hold the Scriptures as the very source of our faith, however, it strikes me that checking a few might be a worthy pursuit.  Besides, we live in an age where any number of Web sites do the work for us by assembling the versions.

     Still, I just annoyed some people.  Progressives who insist on inclusion in all cases are irritated at the first two examples I gave, the 1611 King James and the 1977 New American Standard Bible.  Both of those target the gender in the verse as male, a mortal sin in the progressive realm.  On the flipside, there are those of a more conservative bent who are furious that anyone would need to see the word "men" changed in early translations; shouldn’t we stop kowtowing to the feminists out there who are spoiling everything?

     Both sides have a political agenda.  Neither side sways me much.  My bias is a linguist’s bias: I’d like to see translations that are inclusive when the original language is inclusive, gendered when the original language is gendered, and vague when the original is vague about what sex is being addressed.

 

NOT AS EASY AS I THINK, THOUGH

     Let’s start with the easy stuff.

     As I mentioned above, Greek has no terms for the English words “husband” and “wife.” When you see those words in your Bible, you’re definitely seeing translations of the Greek words “male” (andrós) and “female (gyné).”  The way Bible translators know to render those words as the English terms "husband" and "wife" is context.  Most often, that context is what’s called the genitive case of a declined noun – or, for those not schooled in grammar, the “of” form of a word.  Greek has no word for “of,” so it builds that meaning into the end of a noun, adjusting “man” to mean “the man [of her],” which is to say, “her man,” her husband.  “The woman [of him]” becomes “wife.”

     But sometimes a translation runs into issues beyond the simple words.  We have cultural biases built into our way of thinking, and that affects our ways of reading (and our translators’ ways of translating).  Thus, there’s a built-in conservative assumption about verses like 1 Timothy 5:8: That it’s about a father’s requirement to be the breadwinner for his family.  Let’s read it in the English Standard Version, a version whose translators claim is gender-neutral when such language will "render literally what is in the original":

“But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

     Here’s our issue with the literalism-claiming ESV: Despite there being three decidedly male pronouns in that translation – his, his, and he – the Greek text written by Paul doesn’t have a single gendered pronoun in it.  All the verbs refer back to the Greek tis, the word “anyone,” an indefinite pronoun.    The Timothy sentence refers, literally in the text, to anyone’s household.  We recall that “households” in the New Testament sometimes belonged to women (Acts 16:14; 1 Cor. 1:11).  Frankly, though, I’m not the one willing to tell conservative preachers that the Bible isn’t talking here about dads being breadwinners.  I’ll leave that to braver souls.

 

THE BRETHREN AND, UM, SISTREN?

     The Greek word adelphoí is the plural of the word “brother.”  It seems it would be an easy translation.  One is a brother, more than one are a bunch of male brothers.

     But it’s language, so you know there’s a twist.  Let me tell you about my family.

     When my mother informed me that mis tíos were coming over for dinner, I at no point thought that all my uncles were the ones on their way to my house.  Tíos meant my aunt and uncle.  Yes, it’s a masculine word, and yes, it could have meant only my male uncles, but the context made it pretty clear I was seeing my Aunt Sofia and Tío Berto.  One Spanish word became three English words, tíos turning into "aunt and uncle" when migrated across the language border.

     The same held true for my mother’s hijos. We were her son and daughter, not two sons.

     The count got higher with my abuelos, my two grandmothers and two grandfathers.

     Make a masculine human into a plural form in Spanish, in French, in numerous Romance languages that evolved from Latin, and you often have a mixed group of males and females.  Or maybe all males (remember, context counts).  And it turns out non-Latin languages like ancient Greek have the same bundling property for plural males.

     So, should the word adelphoí be translated as “brothers and sisters” in most New Testament occurrences?  Some argue that doing so is ridiculous, since Greek already has the word adelphé, which means sister.  If sister isn’t in the text, why put it in?

     Remember the bundling, though.  I’d actually be misinforming you if I translated my arriving tíos as “my uncles.”  I have to add words by saying “my aunt and uncle.”  An accurate translation will sometimes have to add words.  For example, the first verse of the Gospel of Matthew has 16 words in the King James Version.  This is translated from 8 original Greek words.  Adding to the word count is not adding to the word of God – here, the KJV translation is 100% accurate.

     So, to my mind, translating adelphoí as “brothers and sisters” isn’t just allowable, it’s often the responsible thing to do … when the context allows.  I repeat: when the context allows.  One example: In Acts 16, when Paul and Silas address the "brothers" in the church meeting at the house of the merchantwoman Lydia, the term probably includes women since, you know, Lydia is standing right there being addressed in her own church.  But is that situation in Scripture common?

     Commentator Michael D. Marlowe sees these occurrences as exceptions to the majority of times the term “brethren” is used in Scripture.  However, the minister Dr. Jerry Jones gives example after example after example of Scriptures that prove Marlowe’s opinion just can’t be correct, providing citations where women are clearly mixed in with groups referred to as adelphoí.  I’ll conclude this name dropping with a reference to the opinions of the co-pastors called the Bayly brothers, who seem to argue that “brothers and sisters” should never be used in Bible translations because we all already know that “brothers” means “brothers and sisters,” just like it did in Greek.  We all just know it.

     That makes as much sense to me as my pointing at Aunt Sofia and Tío Berto while saying, “Have you met my uncles?”

 

THE VISIBLE MAN IN INVISIBLE GREEK

     I thought I’d end these reflections with a tip for those who use Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, a book that’s truly a blessing for those who wish to study scripture.  If you don’t own one, they’re pretty reasonably priced at the link above, although you’ll want to buy a magnifying glass at the same time for its tiny print.  (I don’t get a kickback from that link, FYI.  I include it because my studies as a young Christian were immensely enriched by both Strong’s and the text Gospel Parallels, a book chronologically laying out the synoptic gospels side-by-side on the same pages for instant story comparisons.)

     But book purchases weren’t my tip.  If you have Strong’s, you know that it’s laid out word-by-word, capturing every term in the Authorized and Revised English versions of the Bible.  To the right of the verses that use each word is a number referencing either the Hebrew or the Greek dictionary term the original Bible texts use.

     Should you have one, open it to the entry for MAN.  Scan the numbers to the right.  And now, start noticing the blank spaces, the times “man” is used in English without any word correlating with it in Hebrew or Greek.  Each of those is a judgment call on the part of the translator, a decision to insert the word “man” when it doesn’t appear in the original text.  Sometimes that works well, as when 1 Cor. 7:2 advises each [man] to have his own wife.  The context makes it pretty clear that “man” works better there than other options like “squid” or “microwave oven.”

     But some of those blanks, some of the insertions of “man” into the text where no man had gone before, reveal a clear gender bias in the translators.  And sometimes, that inclusion makes the text pointedly exclusionary:

“Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” ~ Matthew 16:24, KJV

     Any man.  Let him.  Himself.  His cross.  And yet the Greek has no “man” in it, not in the nouns or the pronouns.  It’s another case of the indeterminate pronoun tis, meaning “anyone” or “whoever.”

     As a woman, I can’t help but feel that I’ve been robbed of the true spirit of that verse by some long-dead translator.  I’m not "any man," as the KJV requires, but I am an "anyone," whom the Lord Himself invited.  And I confess it makes me soften to those who would like to have some inclusivity in the translation.  I can handle that, as long as it’s in service to the original text.

     Yes, yes, I can hear the Bayly brothers protesting, “’Man’ means men and women, we all know that!  We don’t have to add a ‘whoever’ to this verse!  Everybody knows it mean everybody.’”

     To which I offer one reply:

     “Have you met my uncles?”

 

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx, aka YoYo Rez.