Is There a Plain Reading of the Bible?

One standard argument from Evangelicals is, why have a Church Magisterium, all we need is the Bible.

If you read it plainly, you can't go wrong.

Now, there is an opposite tendency among Modernists. They say "you always interpret the Bible some way however you approach it" - which on a certain level is correct, even with the plainest of readings, since you interpret words as having meaning, for one. But they then go on to claim, you can't know for sure what the Bible means.

First of all, this is where being a Catholic is great. Having the Catholic tradition, stated and restated most often by past carriers of the Magisterium, sometimes crystallised in definitions of dogma by carriers of the Magisterium, that solves the problem. Certainly, on some items you might want to have an extra certainty which side of Ephesus*, which side of Chalcedon**, which side of 1054*** the real magisterium is, but those problems are not quite unsolvable and also, many items, like baptism of infants, confession of mortal sins after baptism to a priest and absolution by a priest, four last things being Death and Judgement, then Heaven or Hell, fasting being necessary (as Lent reminds me), and a few more, are the same whichever of the five confessions you go to.

Here is an example of how a Modernist has reasoned:

There Is No Such Thing as a Plain Reading of the Bible
March 25, 2019 by Matthew Distefano | on All Set Free
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/allsetfree/2019/03/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-plain-reading-of-the-bible/

The problem, of course, is that this statement and ones like it are meaningless. Why? Because there is no such thing as a “plain reading of the text.”

First off, no one approaches the Bible tabula rasa, that is, with a blank slate. Everyone, including myself of course, approaches the text with presuppositions. Everyone reads the text through the lens of their own culture, theology, philosophy, and phenomenological experiences. And while we can do our best to transport ourselves into the various cultures the Bible comes from—the Bronze Age, Second Temple Judaism, and so on—we can never fully grasp what it would have been like to actually live in these time periods.

Fine. I cannot exactly know what it was like living in the early Middle Ages either.

But I can therefore not know that Manlius Boethius meant what he said when stating things like 2 added to 2 being four?

I don't think men are so estranged to each other's comprehension across cultures.

If you wonder what he meant by saying (as I suppose he did) that all numbers are rational, that is easy. He meant things like π (which he knew) and things like logarithms (which he did not know) are not numbers but proportions. Simple as that. I don't feel I was better equipped for calculating with 3.14 or 3.1416 as a standin for π back when I was OK with calling it a number than I am now when I say it is not a number and the rational ratio 314:100 is a standin for the real ratio which as such I cannot calculate with.

I am not a Puritan claiming geometry must never disguise as arithmetic (as we do when π is shown in a calculation like 3.14) or arithmetic as geometry (which we do when multiplication of numbers is shown my addition of lengths on slide rules, which is the most basic use of logarithms). Therefore I don't feel I need to englobe all of maths into arithmetic in order to do what is not purely arithmetic on the view of Boethius.

What’s more, everyone I know is reading their Bibles in English. Why is this important? News flash: English isn’t a language spoken by any of the characters or writers of the Bible, nor any of the earliest Christian theologians. Torah was written in Hebrew. Jesus spoke Aramaic. Paul wrote in Koine Greek. Augustine’s Greek sucked so he wrote in Latin.

There are such things as translations. Concepts vary to a certain degree, but not so widely as to make translations impossible. Someone recently claimed that the fourth horse was green, not pale, and referred to Muslims. The problem with this is, while Greek χλωρος can mean green, pale, yellow (and there are other languages that don't do a full "Classic" version of basic colours, these being perhaps essentially those of Arabic° - but Latin Vulgate translates the horse in Apocalypse 6:8 as pallidus - pale. Not as viridus - green. I suppose Syriac and Coptic New Testaments, not sharing the Greek conflation of yellow and green, also uses something similar, but I am not sure. That is why Douay Rheims and King James have "pale". The other horses also do have colours that naturally occur on horses, which is the case for pale yellow, but not for green.

Here on this particulart item, original language does matter to some degree for meaning.

However, if I want to understand Matthew 5:15 correctly, I don't need to know exactly how many litres of grain one could measure in a bushel. The point is, God intended His Church to be visible, and He warned His disciples on letting their light so shine before men, so as to be able to make the Church visible. This doesn't mean all Catholics or all clergy have to be saints for the Church to be visible, but there always are those who are. Those who are not may be at risk of losing the position as faithful, or as clergy.

English wasn’t on the scene until 1066, and even that variety looks nothing like it does today (if you don’t believe me, just try reading Beowulf in its original form).

I think the Gospels are easier in Anglo-Saxon than Beowulf is. I also note, 1066 was not a time when English in this form came on the scene, but rather started receding from the scene. But yes, reading "ealc Þara Þa gehierð Þas min word and Þa gewyrcð bið gelic snotran monnu" does take more than just my reading capacity of modern English, and knowing Swedish and German very much helps.

Let me offer an example of what I mean.

Take the doctrine of hell, for instance. In a handful of places throughout the Gospels, the term “hell” is used. Jesus warns people that they will end up in “hell” if they don’t change their ways. But what did he really mean? Well, that is where we would have to do our best to transport ourselves back into the first century and attempt to discern his words through the eyes of a Second Temple Jew.

With this as our lens, upon hearing the term “hell,” we would automatically know that Jesus is, first and foremost, talking about a literal valley just to the south of Jerusalem. How do we know this? Because Jesus used the Aramaic term that translates to “Gehenna,” which, in Hebrew, best translates to “the valley of Hinnom.” This is the place where, in 586 BCE, the Babylonians burned the bodies of the dead Jews after they sacked the city of Jerusalem. And it is also the place where, only a few decades after the death of Jesus, the Romans would do the same thing.

At the same time, however, some Jews indeed believed that Gehenna represented a place of punishment in the afterlife for those who turned their backs on God and lived wicked lives. So, it theoretically could be the context from which Jesus was speaking to. Will we ever know for sure? I don’t know. I have my ideas and loose conclusions, but that isn’t really the point of this piece.

In Luke 16, while Douay Rheims and Nestle Aland differ on division between verses 22 and 23°°, it is clear that the rich man was in hell, ἐν τῷ ᾅδῃ.

And the context indicates, the rich man was in a place of torture after death.

Now, would Jesus automatically first and foremost be talking of the place valley of Hinnom?

I think this would depend highly on the context. In English "do" first and foremost means "tun" in German, and also "göra" in Swedish when it does not translate to "make" or "machen". It means "agere" and not the most exact meaning of "facere" even if "facere" is sometimes used as a substitute for "agere."

However, I came to a context in which "do" (with object of person) means "frame", "put into a bad light" or "arrange an adverse verdict in court". Yes, such a context exists as I recently learned. In Our Lord's time on Earth, distinguishing between the two usages about Ge Hinnom would have been a case of reading the context.

And, from then on, we have tradition. If anyone were into apokastasis or thnetopsychism for evil persons, Tradition says no. Hell is real and eternal.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Audoux
St. John of Damascus
27.III.2019

* Orthodox Catholics or Nestorians. ** Orthodox Catholics or Monophysites of either Jacobite or Armenian confession. *** Are the Orthodox believers of the Catholic Church found among "Roman Catholics" or "Eastern Orthodox"? ° Abyad, ahmar, asfar, akhdar, azraq and aswad, from light to dark, with a difference of asfar (yellow) vs akhdar (green) where Greek has χλωρος for both, where Latin had more than one word for blue, more than one word for white, more than one word for black, more than one word for yellow. °° In Douay Rheims he was buried in hell, in Nestle Aland he is ἐν τῷ ᾅδῃ when he suffers and lifts up his eyes.