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EDWARD D. ANDREWS (AS in Criminal Justice, BS in Religion, MA in Biblical Studies, and MDiv in Theology) is CEO and President of Christian Publishing House. He has authored over 160 books. Andrews is the Chief Translator of the Updated American Standard Version (UASV).
Some Christians say that we do not need Bible scholars. We only need the Holy Spirit.
Some Christians feel that Bible scholars are the Devil’s spawn.
One Christian says the Bible scholars “are our present-day Pharisees.”
Yes, some Bible scholars can be a little snooty.
But what would it be like if there was absolutely not one Bible scholar ever?
BIBLE SCHOLAR
A Bible scholar is a specialist in a particular branch of study. For example, we have Old and New Testament Bible scholars, we have lexicographers, grammarians, translators, textual scholars, paleographers, papyrologists, and on and on. Imagine a world where there are NONE!
A World with No Bible Scholars
Not all Bible scholars are the Devil’s spawn. I have come to know many, many hundreds of them over the past 35 years, and there are many who do a lifetime of work for next to nothing. I am aware of throughout the history of Christianity, where we have scholars who gave their entire lives, so you and I can hold a Bible today that is a mirror-like reflection of the original.
Yes, we have some fields of study where they are a bit stuffy but all in all, if it were not for Bible scholars, billions of Christians would not have a Bible, Bible dictionaries, Bible commentaries, Bible background books, Bible atlases, interlinears, critical texts, and any other of the dozens of Bible study tools. It takes 100 Bible scholars 10 years of work to bring us an English translation.
If you did not have one single Bible scholar ever, how would you read the Bible? You would have to learn to read ancient Hebrew and Greek but without and grammars or lexicons because here were no scholars to produce such tools. If you could get that task accomplished, you would have to then do what? There are no critical texts. You would have to travel the world many times at your own expense, looking for and digging through manuscripts. Remember, many manuscripts were discovered by archaeologists, textual scholars, but we never had any of those Bible scholars.
Every Christian would have to go through those things just to have access to a tiny amount of the Bible. You would have to spend your life learning several ancient languages without any tools. Once you get that accomplished, you would have to go throughout the world to read scraps of manuscripts. Then, you would have discovered hundreds of thousands of textual variants (errors) and you would have to figure out which ones were the original readings. By the time you were done, you would be very old or dead. Another question to ask is where would you get the money to live on while you study for decades and then travel for decades?
Now, if you so dared to write down a list of biblical words and what they mean to help future Christians, or make facsimile copies of manuscripts for other Christians, or try and figure out which of the many variant readings were original, and then make a translation of the Bible, well, you will have just become the spawn of the Devil, a Bible scholar.
Just think, absolutely no Bible scholars means that every Christian, if there were Christians, would have to go through all of these things. Now, it is hard enough to get a Christian to read the Bible for ten minutes a day, to bring a Bible to the church, to open and read the Bible when the pastor speaks. Oh no, wait, there are no pastors because there are no seminaries, because there are no Bible scholars because there are no Bibles and no Bible study tools.
What you have today is the greatest privilege, you can take your $14.95 and walk down to the local bookstore and buy any one of the 150 different English translations. If you have $24.95, you can get a study Bible that will give you tens of thousands of notes on Hebrew and Greek words, historical setting, Bible backgrounds, geography, weights and measures, and so on. If you have a difficult time understanding it, you can buy a book for $9.95-$19.95 on how to interpret the Bible correctly. You can get you a Bible dictionary, a set of Bible encyclopedias, some commentary volumes. None of these things would exist without your Bible scholar, including your Bible.
Many Bible scholars have been martyred. Before their execution, they suffered in dungeons, starving, cold, in pain, being tortured repeatedly. And the day of execution, a humiliation in front of crowds. All of this for daring to make a translation of God’s Word from the original languages into the common languages. For centuries, these Bible scholars worked tirelessly to compile, to keep a record of, to grow our knowledge of, to improve our understanding of, so that each generation of Bible scholars had more and more to build upon. They did none of this for wealth and fame but rather for the love of God and neighbor.
So, we should appreciate what we have and most importantly how we got it.
Experts in all vocations and specialized training are people susceptible to the same failings as others not trained. Spiritually, apply 1 John 4:1, 6 and Acts 17:11. Be respectful and give attention, but measure everything.
Experts in all vocations and specialized training are people susceptible to the same failings as others not trained. Spiritually, apply 1 John 4:1, 6 and Acts 17:11. Be respectful and give attention, but measure everything.