In my bookshelves, I have a Hindi New Testament. I know exactly what the first words in the fourth gospel will say: “In the beginning was the Word….”
But I can’t read those words. The Devanagari characters are meaningless black squiggles.
Which is, in fact, all that any of us see on paper. But our minds turn them into meaning.
If I hand a sheet of music to a friend, I know what he’ll say: “I can’t read this. It’s just marks on paper.”
If I give that same sheet to his wife, she can sit at the piano and play Fritz Kreisler’s lilting Liebesleid.
Both of them are looking at exactly the same marks on paper. But what a difference in understanding their meaning!
Anyone who claims that what they see on paper means exactly what it says—especially about the Bible—hasn’t thought much about how those marks got there.
I’m not referring to the mechanics of printing ink on paper. Rather, the process begins with someone thinking. Someone becomes aware. Of something. An object, an idea, a feeling.
To communicate that awareness, the person uses sounds. But the sounds themselves are simply a series of vibrations radiating through the air. They bear no resemblance to whatever the speaker became aware of.
To get turned into written words, that series of sounds has to get sub-divided into its smallest components—the atoms of language, if you will—so that each sound can be represented by visual shapes on paper or parchment. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses 107 characters to define all possible vowel and consonant sounds in any language; English tries to do the same with just 26 letters.
But the letter shapes are also utterly abstract. Most letters bear no visual association with the sound they represent—perhaps except “o,” which does look a little like a mouth making a sound.
Then you, the reader, have to re-assemble those abstract shapes, that stand for abstract sounds that make up spoken words that stand for an idea, back into meaningful words. Assuming you understand the words at all. “Floccinaucinihilipilification” doesn’t make it into many vocabularies.
But you can’t do it if you can’t decipher the squiggles. Hindi and English share many sounds. But they render them in drastically different ways.
Even words as familiar as “In the beginning was the Word….”
I can accept that the original thought may well have been inspired by God. I cannot accept that God also operated all the tongues that mouthed the sounds, the quill pens and woodcuts and metal letters and sequences of ones and zeros, in this or any other language, that created the marks that you see.
It’s commonly claimed that there’s only six degrees of separation between any two people on the planet. There’s at least six degrees of separation between any modern reader of the Bible and the persons who originally thought those words.
The original writers might be appalled to see how time and translation have bent their intent.
