Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we were diving into the ocean of truth. We’re looking at the topic of Inerrancy tonight. Were going to wrap up our look at ways of interpreting Scripture by looking at the topic of paraphrase.
There are some Christians out there who would despise a translation like the NLT which is a paraphrase. After all, we want to know what it was that Jesus said. The problem is that if that’s your attitude, you’re going to be sunk in many areas. Consider the case of Jesus asking the disciples the question of “Who do men say that I am?”
Three gospels record this question. Three gospels have Peter answering differently. I do not believe they all have the exact words Peter said. One of them could. However, I think they all did record what Peter said. They didn’t record it word for word. They recorded a paraphrase. What mattered was they got the content of the message if they did not get the exact wording.
In recording the speeches given at the time, this was entirely acceptable. One could give a summary of what was said or put in words the speaker did not exactly say but carry the content of his message. For instance, do we really think that for the former that when Peter preached his great sermon in Acts 2 that led to the conversion of 3,000 that it really lasted such a short time that we can read it in two minutes today? (Of course, if it did, we have great cause then to tell pastors to shorten their sermons.)
It is quite likely we do not have everything the prophets said in the OT. We have what God wanted us to have. These people spent many years in ministry and no doubt gave many sermons and such. Their most important messages are the ones that have been written for us.
Even if we compare the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy, there are some differences in the wording. These are minor and do not affect the commandments, but they are different. This was how Moses was handling the very words of God and he didn’t have a problem with that.
The danger is that if we think we have to have the exact wording every time we’re going to get into a kind of fundamentalism that sees the first example used tonight as if it was a biblical contradiction. Instead, we as Christians should trust that God had written down for us what it was that we needed to know for the sake of our salvation.
What does this say about Bible Translations? Of course not all paraphrases are created equal and if one wanted to do serious study of a passage of Scripture, I would not recommend they use something like the NLT. If one is going outside doing evangelism however, I would generally not have a problem with that. The people on the street need to know the content but not necessarily the exact wording.
Paraphrase is not a dirty word. Don’t treat it like one.
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