It's all Greek (and Hebrew) to me?

[Joe & Carol Ricciardi]

If like myself, you somehow missed for many years, the simple fact that any interaction involving human beings is much less predictable than say, whether the sun will come up tomorrow, then it is quite possible that when you “came” to this “revelation”, as I did much to my chagrin while trying to bring a kind of balance back into my life: you may have subsequently gone on a logic-free diet. Let me explain in more detail using a common example I’ve seen in the Church.

For many years, since the Reformation, the emphasis in the Protestant Church has been on the accuracy of the Holy Scriptures. And what a wonderful revelation this was to so many of those great pioneers of that movement when they, coming out a completely irrational system, basically the Roman Catholic Church of the early Middle Ages, clung desperately and thankfully to the truth that the Scriptures are both understandable, reliable and consistent for both faith and practice. This was a revolutionary understanding after the non-distinct, subjective teachings of faith and practice that were so predicated on the relationship between an individual and the Church, specifically the Pope and his pronouncements.

So it is no real wonder that there was a subsequent rise in scholarship, the etymology of language and the birth of textual research. This movement spilled over into the secular starting with the Age of Reason (17^th century or 1,600’s) and culminating with the rational movement of the 18^th century (1700’s). These movements were bracketed by what we know call The Enlightenment which ended in about 1800.

This was the age of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. It was during these years that men starting to move beyond just discovering the old Greek and Roman philosophers and started to publish new ideas and treatises concerning everything conceivable topic under the sun. It was also the age that gave us 1^st comprehensive English dictionary as well as the 1^st Encyclopedia (cycle of knowledge). Finally it was during this time that modern science, the father of technology was wrestling with and conquering concepts like gravity, longitude and the idea of the cell.

So what kind of attitude ultimately prevailed in our Protestant Christian thinking? Well of course: scholarship, rationality and scientific research. So the 1800’s, while the secular world was actually rebelling against the Age of Reason and dabbling with the more emotional and organic ideas of Romanticism in Art, Literature and Philosophy, the Church had it’s greatest progress in the era of Biblical History and Textual Research. For the first time in history, we were reaching back through the vail of the so called Dark Ages and re-connecting with our Eastern Oriental Biblical roots. And of course since the majority of reliable texts were in the Greek language (the Roman Catholic Church having taken Latin for their own domain), Greek became the language of Biblical Scholarship and there was a revival in Greek learning, understanding and even thinking.

Now there were certainly some Estrangelo-Aramaic texts (the Hebrew of Jesus’s day) but even the Apostle Paul himself, although writing in Hebrew, probably translated directly the earliest manuscripts into Greek because he was the Apostle to the Gentile world. And quite frankly, there are places where Greek, is a more exact language than Hebrew.

Now this became for the Church a two edged sword especially in the area of the prophetic. If language can be said to be either more rational or more emotional than certainly the Greek would fall on the side of the rational and the Hebrew would fall on the side of the emotional. The Greek would keep the texts intact and open up the Scriptures to an entire world even as English as done in the past 400 years since the King James version with the message of the Gospel. But some of the Hebrew relationships and the shades of meaning that come along with a word like spleen in Hebrew which can mean two or three different things depending on context, get either lost or overlooked in translation. We get the gist of the message but we lose some of the beauty and depth of the written Word.

Thankfully we are no longer totally dependent on the Written Word for relationship with God, now having a more sure word of prophecy than even the Old Testament Law and the Prophets (Tanakh) as Peter tells us in his epistle. We know have relationship with God through or by way of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord. So the things that were hidden to both angels and to the Old Testament prophets, who wrote about the grace that would come unto us, is now freely available to both know (theoretical, rational) and experience (practical, emotional) in Christ Jesus.

Unfortunately some of us, have stubbornly or ignorantly clung to either or Greek or our Hebrew heritage, blind to or unaware of the Truth that today in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus. This vestage of the Reformation in Greek texts plus the attempt in the past 50 years or less of sincere, well meaning Christians to bring balance back to the Church by clinging to all things Hebrew, even some things that have been rejected by God himself and superseded by the sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ, have caused a new division in the Body of Christ which is not new but was there even in the Book of Acts when the followers of James, the Lord’s brother, in an attempt to show Paul their righteousness according to the Law, these “Jewish Christians” were “zealous for the law” and in their zeal some of the attempted to actually kill the Apostle Paul the former Pharisee who was handpicked and called by our Lord Jesus himself to lead these same former Jews, out of the bondage of the Law and into the greater understanding of the new life in Christ Jesus.

But for some reason, their irrational adherence to the letter of the law, caused them to shut their ears against the Truth and they became those of whom the Apostle wrote in Acts 28 that because of their hard heartedness to accept the Truth, “I turn now to the Gentiles.” As he wrote in another place, the letter kills but the Spirit gives life”.

It is my assertion, because of this and many other truths like this, which we have not had time to go over here today, that it is the Spirit of the Living God, alive within a person who has been born from above, that, if allowed and heeded, governs the balance between the emotional and the rational within man thus bringing peace within each individual soul, and consequently to the Body of Christ as a whole.

It is my prayer therefore, that the Church can come away from our uneducated fascination with all things Hebrew, taking the good but leaving the rest and that we can turn away from our overeducated coldness with Greek theological speculations and that together we can go up and find green pasture away from the city, up on the grassy hill where the true shepherd of our soul waits patiently to instruct us in His Ways which will validate both the Jew and the Gentile in a way that history itself never can.

There is one Body (the Church), one spirit (the gift to the Church) and one hope of our calling (Christ’s return).

There is one Lord Jesus Christ, one faith, one baptism (in his name).

There is one God the Father of all who is above ALL, and through all and in you all.