SCRIPTURE TWISTING: MINOR ERRORS

Although we sometimes focus on errors of biblical interpretation coming from the outside, it is even more important to deal with problems that come from within – those which probably all of us have been guilty of at one time or another. I hope none of you will be offended if I appear to be a little harsh in my treatment of some of these errors, but I will try to give them all the consideration they deserve.

How can we identify errors in Bible interpretation? It is said that the best way to recognize a counterfeit bill is to become well acquainted with the real thing. That is why I have also taught a class on the basic principles of proper Bible interpretation (also called Hermeneutics). However, the second best way is to get exposure to a variety of examples where Scripture is being misused so that you know what to look out for.

I would like to take this familiar passage as my overall theme:

“There are some things in them [Paul's letters] hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. You therefore, beloved, since you are forewarned, beware that you are not carried away with the error of the lawless and lose your own stability.” (2 Peter 3:16b-17)

There are several lessons we can derive out of this passage:

    1. It is reassuring to know that even Peter had trouble understanding all of Paul's writings.

    2. This is the first indication we have that the NT writings were starting to be considered as Scripture on an equal footing with the OT.

    3. Note that Peter identifies at least two classes of people who tend to misuse the Bible: (1) the ignorant, who don't know any better and (2) the spiritually unstable and lawless, who should know better. So if I pick on any one person or group for their misuse of Scripture in this post, please remember that I am not saying that I therefore think they are heretics or that their actions are necessarily done on purpose, just that they are mistaken.

    4. But, finally, even the most innocent twisting of Scripture can possibly have grave consequences for those who do it and for those who listen to them and believe it. Therefore, error needs to be pointed out in order to avoid those consequences.

Here are two proverbs that seem to address the situation. “Answer not a fool according to his folly lest you also be like him. Answer a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his own conceit.” (Proverbs 26:4-5). Even though Jesus tells us not to label people as fools, we can certainly call them out when they make foolish statements, and that is what the second proverb teaches. The tightrope to walk, however, is to do it without lowering ourselves to their level, as the first proverb indicates. And that is what I must admit that I often have trouble doing. Mark Twain said something similar: “Never argue with stupid people; they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” But you don't have to argue with them in order to gently point out their error.

I want to start out with some very innocuous examples of errors made out of ignorance, not malice. We will deal with more serious cases in the following lessons. Let's begin with some errors that I have experienced in our own church. The author of our Baptist quarterly one semester wrote that Paul's hometown was Troas instead of Tarsus. Our teacher contacted the editor, who was very gracious and said that in the future they would take more pains in proofreading their material. It was a perfectly innocent mistake that didn't at all affect any doctrinal points.

Another teacher had finished using 4 or 5 scripture passages to adequately prove a particular point he wanted to make, but he had to add just one more example just to clinch his case, this time from the very dubious ending verses of Mark's Gospel. The two oldest Greek manuscripts we have for Mark don't include those verses, but stop at Mark 16:8. By pointing out these verses, the teacher really weakened his argument by casting some doubt on his other points. I would call this mistake one of trying to gild the lily, which apparently some wedding planners will arrange for you if you really want to. I must admit that I have used quite dubious arguments on purpose myself at least twice that I can remember and gotten caught both times by someone who knew better. It is a special temptation when engaging in apologetics. So how do you know if someone is quoting a verse as authoritative when it might not have really been in the original? Pay attention to the textual notes at the bottom of the pages in your Bible. And if your Bible doesn't have any, get a new Bible.

Here is another interesting example. One Sunday school teacher asked the class who said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him shall have eternal life.” He expected the answer, “Jesus.” But instead I replied, “It was either Jesus or John.” That answer quite rightly confused him, and he said, “But that verse is in quotes and my Bible has it in red letters.” Unfortunately, the original manuscripts neither have red letters nor quotation marks, and so the translators have to make a judgment call. At least four major translations (NIV, RSV, TEV, and Jerusalem Bible) end Jesus' words before verse 16. The bottom line here again is that it has no effect on any of our beliefs either way whether Jesus or John made the statement.

But there is one teacher at our church I want to identify clearly so that you can be on the lookout for his Scripture twisting, because some of it is a little more serious. That is myself. During one of my talks at church I made the offhand statement that it never says in the Bible that Moses personally wrote anything down. Fortunately, someone more knowledgeable was in the audience and gently pointed out that I probably misspoke. Well, he didn't trust what I said, and so I certainly wasn't going to trust what he said. I checked it out. Of course, he was correct; there are at least nine passages in the Bible which state clearly that Moses did indeed write things down.

I always get in trouble when I make a statement without carefully checking out the facts ahead of time. So the lesson here is: if you are engaged in a biblical discussion with someone and they pose a difficult question or say something that sounds a little dubious to you, you shouldn't feel the need to respond to them right away. Tell them that you will have to consider the matter further, and then go home and check it out for yourself. In this particular case involving Moses, how would you go about checking who was right? Do as I did and go to an exhaustive concordance and just look up all the times the word “write” appears in conjunction with Moses. If you don't happen to have a good concordance at home, several of them are available for free on-line.

Here is a final example from our own congregation. “In all Paul's letters when grace and peace are coupled together, grace always precedes peace. The reason: Grace is the foundation of peace.” This is a quote from R. A. Torrey, the famous pastor and evangelist who died in 1928 and was the founder of Biola University. Torrey was then quoted by John MacArthur in one of his commentaries where it was read and repeated by the teacher of our Sunday school class. All three of these godly men are excellent teachers and I happen to agree with Torrey's conclusion, but unfortunately his facts are more than a bit off-base.

It turns out that grace does precede peace in Paul's opening greetings, but the exact opposite is true in the closing section of those letters. The conclusion I draw from the way Paul bookends his letters this way is that not only is grace foundational to peace, but actually “grace” is the beginning and end of the Christian life, the alpha and omega. This story illustrates that even prominent Christians are guilty of misusing scriptures on occasion, out of ignorance rather than purposefully. And it also shows how easily such errors can be passed down from generation to generation. Here is another famous illustration of that going back quite a way further in history.

The Catholic Douay Version of Romans 5:12 is based on a translation by St. Augustine. “Death passed from one man (Adam) to all men, in whom all sinned.” This is where the whole idea comes from that the original sin of Adam is automatically transmitted to each of us at birth. And from that concept comes logically two key Catholic doctrines: (1) the idea that infants who die without being baptized will go to limbo rather than heaven since even they possess sin at birth and (2) it explains the necessity of proposing the Immaculate Conception of Mary so that it could be said that she, and Jesus in turn, would be born entirely without sin. The problem is that Augustine mistranslated that verse, as all modern versions show: “death spread to all men because all sinned.”

We Protestants are not free from error either as most of the examples I will be showing demonstrate. The famous agricultural scientist George Washington Carver was also a devout Christian. At one point in his life he was pondering what to do for a career so he turned to his Bible and opened it up at random to this passage from Psalm 121: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence comes my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.” So he looked at the hills outside, saw a field of peanut plants, and the rest is history. Unfortunately, he was reading the KJV which obviously has some problems with it. Why would the Psalmist think that God lives in the hills? That was a pagan concept of the time as evidenced by the prophets ranting and railing against the “high places” where the apostate Jews started to worship.

The problem stems from not knowing which proper punctuation to use since, as I pointed out earlier, there is little to no punctuation in either the early Greek or Hebrew manuscripts. And in this case, even the NKJV realizes that the Hebrew is better rendered this way: “I will lift up my eyes to the hills – from whence comes my help? My help comes from the LORD who made heaven and earth.” The context of this particular psalm is that it is a pilgrimage song sung by those on their way to Jerusalem for one of the feast days. They have to traverse mountainous regions before they reach their goal. They look at the mountains and cry out, “Who will help me?” and the answer is God. I am personally glad that Carver trusted a faulty translation. Otherwise, we might not have peanut butter today.

Well, let's move on to three recent Christian leaders who know the ins and outs of Scripture quite a bit better, beginning with the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, Bill Bright. One of his most important insights, or innovations, depending on your point of view, was to start with this famous passage, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.” (Revelation 3:20) Bright applied this verse to evangelizing the lost. The whole concept of letting Jesus into your heart in the Sinner's Prayer and the Four Spiritual Laws is based on this verse. The problem is that taken in its original context at the very end of the letters to the seven churches, this verse is not addressed to non-believers at all. It is a call to us as Christians to let Jesus back into our individual lives and congregations when we have shut him out. So some feel that Bright was not only taking some undue liberties with Scripture, but that his ideas have furthered the concept of cheap grace. Just raise your hand and say a few words and you will be saved for life. Others feel that criticism is unfair, and that Bright's application is a valid extension of what Jesus was saying even if it does depart quite a bit from the original meaning. I'll leave it up to you to decide.

Well, if that one hasn't turned enough of you off already, let's pick on Billy Graham next. First of all, he would have been the first to admit that his strength and calling was as an evangelist, not a Bible scholar. Late in life he even said that one of his greatest regrets was that he hadn't spent enough time in personal Bible study. But he did write at least one book, Angels, on a specific area of theology. In it, he states that one of the functions of angels is to escort our souls up to heaven when we die to protect us while we are passing through earth's dangerous atmosphere where Satan and the demons live.

A variation on this belief has been around at least since the Middle Ages. Do you know where the idea of saying “God bless you” when a person sneezes comes from? One version of the story is that it originated with the idea that one's soul momentarily leaves the body when you sneeze. So saying “God bless you” prevents the demons in the air from snatching it away before it can re-enter your body. Well, what biblical justification did Graham have for his statement? You can see it on the official Billy Graham Evangelistic Association website where three different passages are coupled together to reach this conclusion:

    1. Hebrews 1:14: “Are not all angels spirits in the divine service, sent to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?” Therefore, it is reasoned that one of the ways in which angels serve us must be by protecting us from all danger, in life and afterward. A bit of a stretch, but a possibility.

    2. Luke 16:22: “The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.” The second passage comes from Jesus' parable about Lazarus and the Rich Man. The problem here is that the incidental details in a parable shouldn't be taken as representative of universal truths or used to establish any doctrines.

    3. Ephesians 2:1-2: “You were dead through the trespasses and sin in which you once lived following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air...” This shows that Satan lives in the atmosphere and evidences his power the most strongly there. But this is the only passage I know of where that idea is mentioned, and elsewhere in the Bible Satan is more associated with his actions on the earth and in the underworld. And as I have shown in another post (see “Ezekiel 38: A Chain of Reasoning”), coupling together multiple passages in this way always lowers the probability that the conclusion will be correct.

A friend cornered me one day before Sunday school and asked if I knew where Kay Arthur had come up with the name “Precept Upon Precept” for her study series and ministries. I didn't know, and so I did a little research. It is based on a common English translation of a passage in Isaiah (28:10,13). On the surface, it does sound like a great motto for how we should conduct an inductive Bible study and build up our understanding of the truth step by step, line by line, precept by precept. However, there are two basic problems in using the passage in this manner. First, it is not at all clear how to translate the Hebrew. Here is another possible translation, which isn't nearly as positive in tone. “For it is do this, do that, a rule for this, a rule for that...” I have actually seen six different ways of rendering this verse including “the law is the law is the law.”

The original sounds like this: “sav lasav sav lasav, kav lakav kav lakav.” which actually makes no sense in Hebrew as it stands. That is why the Jerusalem Bible footnote and the NIV Study Bible state that the words were probably never meant to be translated at all. Those who do attempt to translate the words admit that it is not that obvious what the words mean and any translation is largely guesswork. Probably these singsong words are the equivalent of saying, “blah, blah, blah,” “la-di-dah” or“twiddle-dee-dee.” In any case, the traditional translation has largely fallen out of favor today.

The second problem is that it is not clear who is speaking these words. It is probably the drunken false teachers making fun of Isaiah's teaching or speech defect or speaking in tongues by turning it into nonsense words, babbling baby talk, a sort of nursery rhyme. On the other hand this verse may be Isaiah himself making fun of the drunken teachers' ramblings. In this latter case, two commentators have pointed out that the consonants in this verse happen to be the initial letters in the Hebrew words for excrement and vomit; Isaiah is saying that is all the drunken leaders are capable of producing. Of course, a Bible study entitled “excrement and vomit” would probably not attract very many people. In any case, the context (especially v. 13) shows that God will only speak to the false leaders using those same nonsense words and it's going to lead to their destruction. So even if these are “precepts upon precepts,” following them will certainly not lead to the truth. Does any of this cast a doubt on Kay Arthur's ministry? Of course no