Bible Lesson: “Ancient and Modern Necromancy . . . . ‘

Bible citation #14 is James 1: 17, 21.  NEB translates verse 21 as:  “Away then with all that is sordid, and the malice that hurries to excess, and quietly accept the message planted in your hearts, which can bring you salvation.”  AMP has:  “So get rid of all uncleanness and the rampant outgrowth of wickedness, and in a humble (gentle, modest) spirit receive and welcome the Word which implanted and rooted [in your hearts] contains the power to save your souls.”

Each of the translations I checked was slightly different, which illustrates the challenge of getting to the real meaning, the spiritual sense, of this and hundreds of other Bible verses.  Words frequently have not only denotative but connotative meanings, rather like the overtones one hears from notes sounded on musical instruments.  AMP does a good job of giving these “overtones”.   It is also likely that each of us gives a slightly different meaning to many common words.  One has only to consider the meticulous care Mrs. Eddy took in choosing les mots justes, sometimes spending, as I recall, Flaubert-like hours or days on getting the  right word for a sentence, and I will reiterate my certainty of the modest enlightenment  I have gained  from using “The Students’ Reference Dictionary” or the full contemporaneous Webster’s dictionary, which I believe is sold now in Reading Rooms.  The student of the Bible and writings of Mary Baler Eddy cannot help but benefit from getting as close as possible to the author’s every word and the meaning or meanings he or she was probably intending.  Tedious as consulting other translations of a difficult or complex passage or a dictionary contemporary with Mrs. Eddy may seem to some, a word or definition  which resonates in the student’s thought may strike fire, even if it is just a humble, flickering light which illuminates in some small measure the dim path “From sense to Soul” before one.

Bible citation #16 is Philippians 4: 8.  Once again, each translation I checked was slightly different, and most use, to my mind, some words that potentially have an imprecise or uncertain meaning to a modern student, words like noble, just, good repute, honorable, admirable.  My possibly limited sense of noble or admirable, for example, might not quite coincide with yours or the writer’s.  AMP reads (for this verse):  “. . . whatever is true, whatever is worthy of reverence and is honorable and seemly, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely and lovable, whatever is kind and winsome and gracious, if there is any virtue and excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on and weigh and take account of these things [fix your minds on them].”

Bible citation #17 (the last) is Philemon 1: 4, 6.  Translations of verse 6 vary quite a bit.  NLT has:  “And I am praying that you will put into action the generosity that comes from your faith as you understand and experience all the good things we have in Christ.”  AMP has:  “[And I pray] that the participation in and sharing of your faith may produce and promote full recognition and appreciation and understanding and precise knowledge of every good [thing] that is ours in [our identification with] Christ Jesus [and unto His glory].”

For you happy few (or one or none) who have not yet had a surfeit of this wholesome repast I would humbly direct your attention to this week’s Responsive Reading.  Matthew 4: 1-11 records an important event in Christ Jesus’ ministry.  Dummelow’s Bible Commentary has an illuminating discussion of these verses, which is much too long to serve up here.  Any still peckish student of the Bible with access to Dummelow and a comfy, well-lighted chair would, I hope, find Dummelow’s comestible well worth noshing on, and it’s non-fattening to boot.

Bible Lesson: “Soul and Body”

The Golden Text was [Tempus fugit.  I should be saying is]:   “. . . hope thou in God:  for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.”  ESV has:  “Hope in  God;  for I shall again praise him,/my salvation and my God.”  NLT has:  “I will put my hope in God!/I will praise him again–/my Savior and my God!”

Bible citation #7, in part, is Luke 11: 34:  “The light of the body is the eye:  therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body is full of light;  but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness.”  NLT has:  “‘Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body.  When your eye is good, your whole body is filled with light.  But when it is bad, your body is filled with darkness . . . .”

Bible citation #13, in part, is I Timothy 4: 7:  “. . . refuse profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness.”  ESV has:  “Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths.  Rather train yourself for godliness . . . .”  NLT has:  “Do not waste time arguing over godless ideas and old wives’ tales.  Instead, train yourself to be godly.”

Bible citation # 14, in part, is I Corinthians 9: 26:  “I therefore so run, not as uncertainly;  so fight I, not as one that beateth the air . . . .”NLT has:  “So I run with purpose in every step.  I am not just shadowboxing.”

Bible Lesson: “Mortals and Immortals”

Bible citation #2 , Isaiah 40: 26:  “Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number . . . .”  NLT has:  “Look up into the heavens./Who created the stars?/He brings them out like an army, one after another,/calling each by its name.”

Bible citation #14, Isaiah 33: 6 (to semicolon):  “And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and strength of salvation . . . .”  NLT has:  “In that day he [the Lord] will be your sure foundation,/providing a rich  store of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge.”

Bible citation #17, Jeremiah 8: 22:  “Is there no balm in Gilead;  is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?”  NLT has:  “Is there no medicine in Gilead?/Is there no physician there?/Why is  there no healing/for the wounds of my people?”  The “NLT Life Application Study Bible” has this comment on the verse:  “Gilead was famous for its healing medicine.  This is a rhetorical question.  The obvious answer is, ‘Yes–God,’ but Israel was not applying the ‘medicine’;  they were not obeying the Lord.  Although the people’s spiritual sickness was very deep it could be healed.  But the people refused the medicine.  God could heal their self-inflicted wounds, but he would not force his healing on them.”

Bible citation #24, I Corinthians 15: 51:  “Behold, I show you a mystery;  We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed . . . .”  NLT has:  “But let me reveal to you a wonderful secret.  We will not all die, but we will all be transformed!”  The Greek word translated “mystery” throughout the NT, some 22 times, is mysterion:  “mystery, secret;  often refers to a misunderstood part of the OT that, with Christ’s coming, is now unveiled.”  (“Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance”)

Bible Lesson: “Adam and Fallen Man”

If there is anything exculpatory to be offered in defense of my recent absence–to which I now add tardiness for the entry at hand–it might be the Queen’s words in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass”:  “‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’”  Obviously, I didn’t.

Bible citation #1 was II Corinthians 11: 3:  “. . . I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtility, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.”  ESV has:  “. . . I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.”

Bible citation #2 was I Corinthians 3: 18 (to 1st period):  “Let no man deceive himself.”  NLT has:  “Stop deceiving yourselves.”  However, this is not intended as a stand-alone nugget of advice.  Paul is speaking about something specific, something which can only be discovered by those reading from the Bible itself.  Including the remainder of the verse and the next would have been truer to Paul’s intent.

Bible citation #11 was Psalm 17: 15 (I shall):  “I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.”  ESV has:  “. . . when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness.”  NLT has:  “When I awake, I will see you face to face and be satisfied.”  That comma after “awake” in the KJV should be noted and a slight pause inserted at that point when it is read.  The difference is subtle, but meaningful.

Bible citation #12 was Genesis 3: 15 [Remember, the serpent is being addressed by the Lord God]:  “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed;  it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”  NLT has:  “And I will cause hostility between you and the woman,/and between your offspring and her offspring./He will strike [or bruise] your head, and you will strike his heel.”  The”NLT Life Application Study Bible” has this note on verse 15:  “Satan is our enemy.  He will do anything he can to get us to follow his evil, deadly path.  The phrase ‘you will strike his heel’ refers to Satan’s repeated attempts to defeat Christ during his life on earth.  ‘He will strike your head’, foreshadows Satan’s defeat when Christ rose from the dead.  A strike on the heel is not deadly, but a blow to the head is.  Already God was revealing his plan to defeat Satan and offer salvation to the world through his Son, Jesus Christ.”   The “Holman Christian Study Bible” has this explanation for the “he” instead  of  “she”:  “Using an emphatic Hebrew construction, God announced here that a male descendant–He–would someday deal the serpent [meaning Satan] a fatal blow.  The NT writers understood Jesus Christ to have fulfilled this prophecy . . . .”

Dummelow has these interesting remarks [exerpted] on Genesis 3: 15:  “There is a mingling of the literal and the allegorical in the sentence.  The serpent, as representing the spirit of revolt from God, will continue to be the tempter of man. . . . While each will hurt the other, it is here implied that man will have the best of the serpent in the end. . . . in the course of human history it becomes more and more evident that mankind is unable of itself to gain the complete victory over evil.  This has been achieved by One alone, in whom the word of hope has been fulfilled. . . . It is in Christ that the seed of the woman crushes the serpent.”

Bible Lesson: “Probation After Death”

A Bible citation in the last section of this week’s official lesson was Acts 2: 28:  “Thou hast made known to me the ways of life;  thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance.”  (KJV)  NLT makes a bit clearer the KJV:  “You have shown me the way of life, and you will fill me with the joy of your presence.”  Acts 2: 25-28 is a Greek version of Psalm 16: 8-11.

In this past week’s lesson from April 1900 is the familiar Isaiah 55: 1:  “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money;  come ye, buy, and eat;  yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”  (KJV)  I confess that somehow I had never before thought about how one buys without money.  I had also never taken note before of that first semicolon, after the first “money”.  Reading it aloud there should be a pause at that point, but heretofore I had never read it that way, and I’m not sure it usually gets read that way.

But for a couple, the several translations I checked all preserve the sense of the KJV.  Buy in the original Hebrew means just that.  NLT, one exception, has:  “Is anyone thirsty?  Come and drink–even if you have no money! Come, take your choice of wine or milk–it’s all free!”  Most illuminating of all, though, is AMP:  “Wait and listen, everyone who is thirsty!  Come to the waters;  and he who has no money, come, buy and eat!  Yes, come, buy [priceless, spiritual] wine and milk without money and without price [simply for the self-surrender that accepts the blessing].”  Very nice.

AMP also cross-references Revelation 22: 17, which is rendered:  “The [Holy] Spirit and the bride (the Church, the true Christians) say, Come!  And let him who is listening say, Come!  And let everyone come who is thirsty [who is painfully conscious of his need of those things by which the soul is refreshed, supported, strengthened];  and whoever [earnestly] desires to do it, let him come , take, appropriate, and drink the water of Life without cost.”

Bible Lessson: “Doctrine of Atonement” (April 9-15)

Psalm 111: 2, 7 (to semicolon), 8.  In the KJV, verses 7 (to semicolon) and 8 read:  “The works of his hands are verity and judgment; . . . They stand fast for ever and ever, and are done in truth and uprightness.”  What is omitted in verse 7 is:  “. . . all his commandments are sure.”  Punctuated as it is there is some ambiguity about what verse 8 is referring to, and some translations retain the KJV punctuation.  Others, however, support my sense that the omitted phrase is actually what verse 8 is referring to, not the first part , and certainly not only the first part, of verse 7.

NEB has for verses 7 and 8:  “His works are truth and justice;  his precepts all stand on firm foundations, strongly based to endure forever, their fabric goodness and truth.”  LXX (Septuagint, “A New Oxford Translation”) has:  “Works of his hands are truth and justice;  trustworthy are all his commandments, fixed forever and ever, made in truth and uprightness.”

This may seem to be a “Get a life!” quibble, but the chucked phrase from verse 7 may well be what verse 8 is referring to.  At the very least, all of verse 7 should have been included, and one wonders why it wasn’t.  This appears to be yet another example of what might be kindly called negligent lesson making.  Sincere students of Christian Science deserve scrupulously honest attention to the Bible and “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures”, not just something that will do for the nonce for all those on-the-go guys and gals who who may be unwittingly traveling lite in more ways than one.

A meddling hand is also detected in the inclusion of a familiar Bible healing in this week’s lesson, a healing which appears  with suspicious regularity.

Bible Lesson: “Are Sin, Disease, and Death Real?” (Apr 2-8)

In this week’s official lesson the word “covenant” or “covenanted” appeared three times, each with a different meaning.  Malachi 3: 1 uses the word in its usual meaning.  Matthew 26: 15 had Judas covenanting with the chief priests to betray Christ Jesus.  This use of the Greek original, and its only translation as covenant in the NT, is translated as “paid”, “agreed to pay”, “gave him”, or words to that effect.

The third use of “covenant” as in Isaiah 28: 18:  “And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand”.  The NLT renders the entire verse as:  “I will cancel the bargain you made to cheat death, and I will overturn your deal to dodge the grave.  When the terrible enemy sweeps through, you will be trampled into the ground.”  The “Holman Christian Standard Bible Study Bible” had this note on verse 15, which relates to verse 18:  “The rulers of Judah had entered a dangerous agreement.  The agreement is said to be with “Death” and “Sheol”.  Sheol refers to the grave and in some contexts signifies the underworld.  Isaiah probably referred to treaties with foreign nations to try to  keep Assyria ["the overwhelming scourge"] from defeating them.”  Obviously, the symbolic or metaphysical meaning of these verses is what is important.