Why Bother?

I was asked, "Why are you bothering to teach about textual criticism at all? You could just skip that passage." That is true in this case; as you can tell from my "Sunday sermon" posts, I'm doing a series on people who encountered Jesus. I could just not deal with this passage, and use another encounter to make the point I want to make.

There are two reasons for preaching on John 7:53-8:11. The first is that it is simply a beautiful passage, both in showing how Jesus escaped the trap set by the religious leaders and in His interaction with the woman. The power of the image stays with people for a long time. (That may well be part of the reason this passage came to be included in a gospel.)

The second reason is that people need to know about some of the more technical issues that lie behind good evangelical Bible study. It does the church no good to duck behind an attitude of "I'll just follow what the preacher says" and fail to dig into Scripture for ourselves. It also does the members of our church no good to avoid issues and leave them wondering about the notes, lines, and asterisks in their Bibles. (Yes, even in a real 1611 KJV there are a lot of translation notes.) If they see them and never hear about why they are there, they are more likely to question the reliability of their Bibles than if we explain why they are there.

I don't believe in taking one translation of the Bible and making that the standard all others have to follow. It is true that some translations are better than others, and some translations fill certain roles better than others. (The NASB, for example, is an excellent Bible for study, but sorely lacking as one to be read aloud publicly.) In the church I am currently serving, there are several translations being used by different members of the congregation. When we "read around" in Sunday school, you pick up various nuances from each translation. Together, we use them to come to grips with what the writers actually wrote, and how those words impacted their audiences.

So I not only teach the Bible, but teach about the Bible. I want those who hear me to have a rock-solid confidence in the Word of God. I want them to understand that the Bible is entirely reliable, and that we essentially have the inerrant wording of the vast bulk of Scripture. Where there are questions, we face them and answer them, but we never lose sight of what the Bible truly is- God's Word to His people throughout the ages.