Monday with Mounce

Sorry I have been absent for so long. Between finishing the third edition of Greek for the Rest of Us, the laminate sheet, the workbook, building a pole building (that will house the new studio for BiblicalTraining.org) and bedroom addition, and moving to the cabin and trying to sell our home -- life has been a bit crazy. I won’t start M w/ M back up until September, but I do want to continue the discussion I began in Why I Trust the Bible. So the rest of that discussion will continue on Mondays.

Every once in a while I come across a phrase that makes no sense in English, even in the NIV. I expect it more with translations like the NASB and ESV, but not the NIV. When this happens, it is often in a traditional and well-known passage.

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.