Monday with Mounce

Prof Bart Ehrman is famous for his rhetorically powerful statement that there are more differences among the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament than there are words. It is true that there are about 400,000 differences among the 5,500 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, but the real question is one of significance. How many differences could be authentic, and how many do impact the meaning of the verse?

I heard a popular preacher the other day say that he will not accept any theology that allows for suffering. All suffering, he says, is outside of God’s will and the experiences of an obedient Christian. There are few things that are more wrong than this absurdly non-biblical statement.

Sometimes participles are turned into indicative verbs, especially when the translator feels the sentence is too long. But in doing so, important information on the meaning of a verse can be obscured. Is anyone out there able to just "cast" their anxiety on the Lord? If the participle in 1 Peter 5:7 is left as a participle, it contains a clue on how to do this.

Jesus asserts that unless a person’s righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees and scribes, they will not enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:20). He is not calling for more obedience, but for a deeper obedience that comes from the heart. He then covers five examples of this deeper obedience (murder, adultery [including divorce], oath-taking, retaliation, and loving your enemies). V 48 then concludes this portion of the Sermon on the Mount with the admonition, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (NIV),. This is probably a citation of Leviticus 19:2, which uses “holy” and not “perfect” (Deut 18:13 speaks of being “blameless”).

“Begotten” is the KJV translation of μονογενής in John 3:16. It describes the unique relationship of Jesus to the Father. However, the KJV “begotten” is based on a misunderstanding of how the word was formed. μόνος conveys the idea of “one and only” (“being the only entity in a class,” BDAG) and γενός refers to a specific “class” or “kind.” From γένος, English derives its word “genus,” i.e., “species.”