A couple of months ago, because I saw Richard Peers discussing it on Facebook, I bought a new copy of the Greek New Testament. It is A Readers Edition of the United Bible Societies' (5th Ed) . It is fairly large and has a small lexicon in the back and footnotes on every page translating the more obscure words. It arrived 8 weeks ago and I began to read it. It's been transformational.
Every so often I've made it a project to read the Bible through from beginning to end. For a good while I did this annually, but it's become less frequent. Last time I did it I used Bibliotheca, a version without verse or chapter numbering and with no footnotes or any other kind of textual apparatus. I recognise in myself a growing desire to get close to the text; to avoid other people's opinions on what it says and means. Bibliotheca did this, but reading it I was aware that it was an Evangelical translation, produced by a committee and there was a resulting blandness to it, like a family photograph that has been put through a Photoshop filter. When I finished Bibliotheca I read David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament and found it refreshing and enlivening. It is, by a country mile, the most accurate and literal translation of the New testament into English that I have ever seen.
And then this.
I rise most mornings at 5.00. I light the fire, I make coffee and sit in the old red leather armchair with my Greek New Testament. Then I stumble through the text. I don't have any pre-set idea of how much I will read but it generally works out at about a half a chapter a day. The amount is decided on a Lectio Divina basis: I read one heartfull. I keep David Bentley Hart's version beside me and consult it when the going gets tough, ie about every third sentence on average. When I've read enough I sit with it for a while and then do the formal exercise of my morning sit of Centering Prayer.
There has never been a time in my remembered life when I did not know the basic Bible stories. I studied the Bible formally for several years and teaching it to others was my life's work. I have read it cover to cover many, many times. And for all that, sitting in our warm house on a series of dark and cool Dunedin mornings it is as though I am reading it for the first time ever.
Perhaps it is the exercise of reading it in a language which is not my mother tongue. I read slowly, word by word. Perhaps I could have achieved the same result by reading in Spanish or Maori, but I think not. I am aware of my own struggle with the language, and simultaneously of the one who wrote it. He too was not a native Greek speaker. This is not a polished literary work, but a heartfelt attempt to make known something that is important and life giving. My slow reading somehow matches his laboured writing and the communication is more acute for that. Because, in a way that it has never done for me before, the New Testament is communicating.
And what it is communicating is Jesus. He has never been more real or more clear to me than in the daily wrestle with these pages. His parables, about which I thought I knew all there was to know, are new and intriguingly challenging. The stories of his acts of mercy are newly convincing. But what is most powerful is the theme which runs through every word: that of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom which is never absent and which I must change my perspective to see. It is the Kingdom about which Father Thomas, and before him John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart and Teresa of Avila and all those other holy ones wrote.
When the book first arrived I determined that I would read it through. I thought I would not tell anyone about this intention until I had proven to myself that it was possible. (egg, face, etc etc). So here I am. For the duration of the exercise I don't intend to read anything else in the Bible, as the engagement with one small, daily piece of the text has proven to be more than enough to be getting on with. I expect that over the course of the exercise, the great structure of the New Testament (The life of Jesus, the formation of the Church, the baffled working through of the meaning of it all, the expression of cosmic hope) will impress itself on me with new force and clarity. It's taken 8 weeks to read 28 chapters, so I'm expecting it to take me another 18 months. It's the beginning of Mark tomorrow. Woohoo! I can hardly wait!
Comments