Logos: Bring Your Brain Bible Study

An Introduction to Logos

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Logos is a different kind of Bible study. Most Bible studies are devotional, that is to say, they ask “How does God speak to us from this text?” What Logos does is ask how the author of the text speaks from the text, and how his community speaks from it, what the author believed about God, and about Jesus, and how what the author believed, and wrote, compares with what other authors, and communities believed and wrote. In other words, Logos uses the texts of the Bible as a window through which we can see into the heart, the mind, and the life of the earliest Christians and their Church. Logos does not attempt to gloss over controversies about the texts, or controversies within the texts, nor does it pretend that conflicts and contradictions don’t exist within and between the various books and authors on the Bible. Rather, it recognizes that sometimes it’s through those conflicts and contradictions that we get our clearest view, and our richest appreciation, of what a diverse and lively movement early Christianity was.

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Instead of concentrating on particular books within the New Testament, Logos concentrates on particular topics within the New Testament, and pursues them through the four gospels and Paul’s letters, asking what those texts have to say about those topics. The gospels were written during the late first century AD, after Paul wrote the seven letters that we know for certain are his; indeed, the composition of gospels may have begun as a response to Paul’s teachings, which focus on the risen Christ rather than on the life and teachings of Jesus, like the gospels. The Church believed that the gospels embodied the accounts of Jesus’ disciples, but none of the gospels says who its author was (the titles “Gospel According to...” originate in subsequent Church tradition). The earliest of the gospels is probably Mark, though some Catholic scholars continue to make a case for Matthew; Mark would date to about AD 70 or a little earlier. Matthew and Luke were written ten to fifteen years later, are based on Mark’s gospel, and flesh out its narrative. John wrote around 100 AD, probably in response to his group of believers having been expelled from the synagogues when the rabbis banned Jewish Christians at the end of the first century.

All the books of the New Testament were composed in Greek, and when they quote the Hebrew Scriptures they quote the Septuagint (i.e., Greek) translation rather than the original Hebrew texts. This is because although Christianity started out within Judean Judaism, it spread through the Mediterranean via the Greek-speaking Jewish communities of the so-called Diaspora. Thanks to Paul’s mission to those Gentiles who associated with Diaspora Jewish communities, Christianity outside Palestine came to be dominated by Gentile Greek-speakers. There are about 5800 manuscripts (hand-copies) of the various books of the New Testament in Greek, most of which are fragmentary and most of which date to the Middle Ages (we have only a handful of manuscripts from before AD 300). No two of the manuscripts of the particular books completely agree. The conflicts between different copies of the same texts mean that scholars have to make judgment calls in order to produce a Greek text for translation, and are always revising that text as more Greek manuscript fragments are found. Translating ancient or medieval Greek into modern English involves still more judgment calls, and more revision. The result is that the Bibles we use, however we choose to understand the matter of divine inspiration, are very much the product of modern scholarly judgment, and are always being “tweaked”. No translation is perfect. The texts used in Logos are taken from the New Revised Standard Version translation, or NRSV, the latest stage (1989) in a five-hundred-year tradition of English translation that goes back through successive stages including (in reverse order) the Revised Standard Version, the King James Version, the Bishops’ Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Great Bible, the Thomas Mathew Bible, the Coverdale Bible, and the Tyndale Bible. The NRSV is used by mainstream Protestant denominations in their services, but there are more than two dozen other English translations on the market today, with new ones coming out every five years or so. Conservative evangelicals prefer the New International Version (US) or the English Standard Version. Fundamentalists prefer the King James or New King James versions. Catholics use the New American Bible in mass, but also have the Jerusalem and New Jerusalem Bibles available to them, as well as their own New Revised Standard. It never hurts to compare translations, because each translation is nothing more than a translator’s opinion, and you should always feel free to get a second opinion.

Feel free to bring your favorite translation to Logos meetings. I will bring the latest scholarly Greek text of the New Testament for reference, to see New Testament scholars’ latest take on what the “original” text of a passage actually says.

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—Bob Dise