What if it is all true?
I get to read a great deal of stuff that people debate on the Internet. It often seems to me that people get really caught up on the smallest of details. For instance I read a whole stream of posts the other day on the first few verses of John’s gospel where the question arises of the translation of “and the word was God”.
At risk of starting the argument up again here is my opionion on the matter (so we can get it out the way to ask the more important questions). You see in the original Greek there is no definate article so some have claimed we should translate it as “and the word was a god” not “was God”. Indeed this is exactly what we find in the bible of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (in my opinion a bad translation). Now whilst it is absolutely true that there is no definate article and whilst it is true that this COULD mean “a god” if you were taking a very literal approach it is also true that this would be a very bad translation of the phrase. Given that the definate article was seldom used anyway for God and that the writer was Jewish and so would never have written “a god” and that this verse mirrors the beginning of Genesis where we have “God” not “a god” it turns out that “and the word was God” is the most accurate translation. To insist on “a god” is the kind of translation you might expect from a first year student of Greek and not a true translation. Anyone who knows anything about translation (or who has ever read something translated by a computer) will know that there is a lot more to translation than just translating each word in turn literally. It should also be noted that this is not by any means the only passage that refers to the divinity of Christ but we are not going there now.
If you have got this far in this post you will realise how people can sometimes get really caught up in the detail and miss the point.
Fun though all this arguing is about the detail it seldom gets you anywhere. The bible has many stories where people who met Jesus got caught up in debating the smaller points and yet missed the bigger point of who they were talking to.
It seems to me that there is amuch bigger more important question to answer about Jesus than the translation of one word here and there.
What if it’s true?
What if the story of Jesus is all true (and I believe it is)? What if the things that Jesus said really are the truth? What if Jesus really did come from heaven? What if Jesus really did rise from the dead?
If it’s true then no moment of anyone’s life can ever be the same.
What if it is all true?
