The one I googled up with the phrase “Catholic Bible.”
In short, you can’t be bothered to check what translation you are actually using and want me to do the work for you. Having obligingly done so, I discovered that you are using the New Jerusalem Bible.
Please link me to a more authoritative Catholic translation.
You misunderstand the relationship between translation and doctrine. The version used most often by American Catholics liturgically (though criticized by many) is the
New American Bible, which says “know fully, as I am fully known”–very similar though not quite as strong. The
RSV, which some Catholics prefer though it isn’t a Catholic translation originally, is similar again, saying “understand fully.” The most traditional English Catholic version, the
Douay-Rheims, is essentially the same as the KJV: “then I shall know even as I am known.”
But for the record, are you saying that whoever did that Catholic translation wasn’t a “traditional Christian.”
Not at all, though it is true that modern translators often translate in ways that aren’t shaped by their theological tradition (the NAB, for instance, translates “ruach Elohim” in Gen. 1 as “a mighty wind” instead of “the Spirit of God”). More to the point, I am saying that one cannot base one’s doctrine on a single verse of the Bible taken out of context. You are ignoring the point Paul is making in that passage and making this verse serve a philosophical agenda that it isn’t addressing. This is what a Sola Scriptura position requires many Protestants to do. I get very confused by the ways in which Mormons both do and do not conform to the general American Protestant pattern. You have what you claim to be an authoritative Church and additional Scripture, and yet you also seem wedded to the bankrupt “commonsense” version of Sola Scriptura common 19th-century America and increasingly abandoned today by thoughtful Protestants, because it just doesn’t hold up.
You have to admit that it’s funny that the first Catholic translation on the google list happened to give virtually the exact translation that you said that the verse did not mean.
It was the second one that came up for me, though the NAB is very similar.
I granted in the very post to which you refer that the first meaning given the word in my lexicon supported your interpretation. So far was I from using my knowledge of Greek to make the text mean what I want it to mean, as you accuse me. However, the fact is that the passage
can be interpreted different ways. It’s certainly true that taken on its own it seems to be supporting your interpretation. We have no dispute there.
The way I’m doing? You mean look up a scripture, read it with my eyes, and see what it says?
Exactly. That may work for reading a text written with an immediate, practical purpose by someone living in your own culture and at your own level of knowledge/wisdom or below. But it’s an extremely bad way to read ancient texts, or sacred texts, or for that matter any text whose author may know more than you do about anything worth knowing.
The idea that one should read the Bible in such a way (as if reading the newspaper) is a bizarre invention of 19th-century Americans–it isn’t even the teaching of the Reformers, though it derives from theirs.
What’s the traditional way?
To read within a tradition, under the guidance of sages who are wiser than you are.
So Aquinas and Palamas supersede the Bible, and that’s the end of the inquiry?
It’s certainly not the end of the inquiry. You are the one who thinks that you can end the inquiry by quoting a prooftext.
Rather, it’s the beginning of the inquiry. I ask: “why, given what 1 Cor. 13 seems to say, would wise people of my tradition read it differently?”
I thought that’s what the whole “Sola Scritura” of the reformation was designed to get away from. Or are you saying that Protestants aren’t traditional Christians?
Insofar as they embrace the commonsense version of sola scriptura that you are defending, they certainly are not. Older forms of Protestantism are more borderline–they try to maintain many aspects of the traditional approach while rejecting certain doctrinal conclusions of the pre-Reformation tradition. I don’t find that this approach works very well, though I respect it a lot more than I do the “common-sense” idiocy of 19th-century American Protestantism.
Edwin
</that’s a joke> No, seriously, I envy you. Classical greek! That’s no small accomplishment!
If you want to read the REAL STORY about Joe’s “vision” & the sort, it’s a barn-burner.