Mankind makes it to the Moon

 Fifteen years ago, I noted that only men had ever been to the moon. I didn't say it in that post, but it was obvious to me that whenever men did return to the moon, it was inevitable that there would be a woman along; failure to tick off that box would be an unimaginable offense to the gods of sexual equality. 
And sure enough, the Artemis mission this year to the far side of the moon included a woman. What's interesting is that taking a woman along required a private bathroom facility, and the need to build a spaceship big enough to accommodate that did delay this milestone mission by several decades. 

The NIV's Reformed slant in Galatians 6:16

Part and parcel of Calvinism is the notion that the Church has replaced Israel as the object of Divine favour and as the recipient of Divine promises. Popularly called Replacement Theology, it's technically referred to as Supersessionism, and it not only serves as a doctrinal pillar of Reformed Theology, it can even be shown to have roots about as far back in Church History as we are able to go. The Epistle of Barnabas, placed by its compilers in the very text of Codex Sinaiticus and thought to date almost as early as the New Testament itself, features it as a core teaching. According to Wikipedia, it argues that the Old Testament scriptures were always intended for Christians, that the Jews misinterpreted them by taking the Law literally, and that the covenant with Israel was broken early on (linked especially to the golden calf incident). Christians alone, it argues, are the true people of God.

Now, there are a lot of Bible verses that have to be suppressed--or at least ignored--for this to work. In writing to the Romans, the apostle Paul painted a picture of the Gentiles being grafted into Israel, not replacing them. His concern with the Jews was not that God had rejected them, but that they had rejected God--a situation he clearly saw as temporary. Thus throughout the millennia, Christian scholars have wrestled with the paradox that although Israel appears to have been set aside in favour of the Church, God's eternal promises to Israel have not been, and cannot be, annulled--if the words of Scripture actually mean anything like what they say. Thus, Barnabas' enduring assertion that God never intended the Law to be taken as written is crucial to the entire argument.

Now, the Geneva Bible, in its notes on Romans 11, does hold out hope that Israel will be saved eventually, but by joining the church; kind of a reverse of Paul's scenario, combining the permanence of all of God's promises to Israel with  the entire church being the actual beneficiary (which still requires some creative interpretation--could we even call it a dismissal?--of a lot of them). But it was this very doctrine, weakened as it was, that led Oliver Cromwell to open throw open the gates of England to Jewish immigration, and eventually led to a widespread rejection of Supersessionism among readers of the English Bible--especially in the United States, where both Dispensationalism and Ministries to Jewish People flourished in the 20th century. It appears that which Bible translation one uses really can affect his doctrine and practice, even at a national scale.

Not to say that I haven't already tipped my hand, but the point of this post is actually not to argue for or against Supersessionism--but rather to point out that the Committee for Bible Translation has done that very thing. A main point of Replacement Theology is to equate the Church of God with the Israel of God, and this is exactly what several Bible translations--could we even call them that--do at Galatians 6:16.

Peace and mercy be upon all who walk by this rule, upon the Israel of God. --RSV
All who walk by this standard are the true Israel of God - his chosen people. Peace and mercy on them! --The Message
May God’s peace and mercy be upon all who live by this principle; they are the new people of God. --NLT
Peace and mercy to all who follow this rule—to the Israel of God. --NIV

All four of these, ranging from the fairly literal to the wildly paraphrastic, have to do one thing to be able to equate the two: ignore not just one, but two of the three occurrences of the word και (and/also/even)--specifically the last one, which appears to draw a distinction between two groups of people: "those who follow this rule" and "the Israel of God." 

Contrast this to the versions that don't leave out any of the conjunctions:
And whosoever shall follow this rule, peace on them and mercy: and upon the Israel of God. --Douay-Rheims
And as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God. --KJV
And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God. --ESV

Here, the two categories are clearly separate. It's easy to see that someone whose theology would dictate that they equate Israel and the Church would be inclined to leave out that crucial 'and' to find scriptural justification for their position.

Actually, this is one of the places where I don't think either the KJV or the NIV got it quite right. One recent craze in hermeneutics has been to find chiasms all over the scriptures, and while I think it's possible to take this way too far, the point can be made that a chiastic structure is in play in this verse, and it should actually be translated the way the HCSB did:

May peace be on all those who follow this standard, and mercy also be on the Israel of God!

--which appears a much better fit to the context of Pauline theology in general and Galatians chapter six in particular. 

Whether one decides to directly translate all of the 'ands', or to leave out the first as superfluous in English, it's a doctrinal choice--not a linguistic one--to ignore the last of them.

The CBT made the doctrinal choice, by taking away a word from the Scriptures, to use their translation to push Replacement Theology--or at least the result was indistinguishable from if they had. This, from the Bible whose introduction states that the translators went to great lengths to avoid sectarian bias.

This post will probably undergo a lot of editing over the coming weeks, but it's been percolating in my mind long enough to finally start the process of getting it in writing.

EDITED TO ADD: I do recognize that at least the last couple editions of the TNIV/NNIV have 'and' here in a footnote--but I reiterate that it was a conscious decision to relegate that reading to a footnote rather than leaving it in the text. Unless, of course, the allegation is true that the NIV was just a reworking of the RSV, in which case they did leave intact the reading in their favoured text, and any criticism about this sectarian bias would deservedly be moved back to that translation committee. I forget whether the RSV introduction proclaimed their translation to be free of sectarian bias, but that's one of the things I can track down for future updates. 

A mathematical formula that can guarantee lottery winnings, revisited

It's been almost a decade since I first posted about the scam going around that a mathematical formula can guarantee lottery winnings. Well, I just found out that I was wrong--sort of--and I'm back to make an apology.
Joan Ginther was a math whiz as a kid, graduated at the top of her class at a small Texas high school, and went on to get a PhD in mathematics, with an emphasis on statistics, at Stanford. She then dutifully spend the next sixteen years teaching maths at small colleges in the Western US, but all that changed when she won a $5.4 million share of the Texas Lotto in 1993. Like most lotto millionaires, she quit her job. And like most lotto millionaires, she kept right on buying lottery tickets.
But here is what made Joan Ginther different: she actually HAD found a mathematical formula to guarantee lottery winnings, and she used her initial windfall to keep playing in such a way that she went on to win big two more times in the next 15 years--enough millions to keep up her lotto habit without having to borrow against future payouts. She'd found a way to lower her odds of winning from one in tens of millions down to about one in hundreds--which means that, given the right time and place, buying out her hometown Texas store's supply of lottery tickets produced better than even odds of hitting the jackpot. This she finally did in 2006, winning $10 million from one of a stack of $50 Extreme Payout tickets she'd gotten someone to purchase for her. She also allegedly hired an attorney to come to Texas, pick up the winnings, and return them to her Las Vegas hideout.

Once Texas Lottery officials realized this mega-winner obviously had some formula for buying winning tickets, they launched a full-on investigation of her. This turned out to be quite difficult to do, as she had stopped coming to Texas in person to buy the tickets, so there wasn't much to investigate. They tried to get the FBI involved, but once the FBI learned that she was using publicly available information--published by the Lottery Board itself--and legal proxy buyers, they had to patiently inform the Lotto officials that if researching ticket distributions was legal, and ordering publicly available information was legal, and hiring someone to buy and redeem tickets in your name was legal, then there was no crime to investigate.

Joan Ginther, though, never attempted to sell her forumla. Why would she? It was working fine for her. But after she cashed in for the fourth time, the ensuing investigation resulted in changes to the distribution of tickets that basically rendered her formula useless.
In 2010.
So by the time "Jared" started trying to sell me his mathematical secret to winning the lotto--if "he" had in fact managed to break into the Sanford Archives and get "his" hands on her dissertation from the early seventies (allegedly on the way winning lotto tickets were distributed)--it was already obsolete. So I do apologise for scoffing at the idea that it could be done--but I note that in the decade since I made that claim, every multiple lottery winner has turned out to be relying on fraud and inside access--not a mathematical formula. So yeah, it's not much of a mea culpa, because it doesn't have to be.

I also need to give credit due to Nathaniel Rich and Peter Mucha, the reporters who broke the story. According to Mucha, she never stopped buying Texas Lottery tickets, even after her big win, but the fifth big payout eluded her. As for me, I'm happy to go to my grave at a ripe old age never having purchased a single one.

John MacArthur and ancient baptism

A little further reaction to John MacArthur's sermon on 1 Peter 2:
It's actually a good sermon overall, encouraging believers to fill their lives with God's word. But besides reading the whole text through Calvinist glasses, John twists Christian History itself when he makes this claim:

There was an interesting routine that was followed by some early Christians in their baptism where they would be baptized in their old clothes, and then when they came out of the waters they would go to a dressing room and they would be given new clothes. This was a symbol of the fact that salvation marked the shedding of all that was old and the beginning of all that was new.

Alas, as longtime readers of this blog are aware, the ancient custom involved removing clothes, all right: but BEFORE the baptism, not after. Cyril of Jerusalem, for example, in his teaching on the Mystery of Baptism, is recorded as saying:
"As soon as you entered, you put off your tunic; and this was an image of putting off the old man with his deeds. Having stripped yourselves, you were naked; in this also imitating Christ, who was stripped naked on the Cross, and by His nakedness put off from Himself the principalities and powers, and openly triumphed over them on the tree."

John MacArthur and 1 Peter 2:2

I concluded this post with, "Calvinism, of course, does not stand or fall upon a paraphrase of 1 Peter 2:2. It is able to twist any scripture to its ends, and this one need be no exception. So why not just translate it as it stands, and leave its (mis)interpretation up to the theologians?" and I observed an interesting example of this in a sermon by the late John MacArthur that I heard recently on Christian radio.
John was exegeting 1 Peter 2 and read the verse in its entirety. Since his favourite Bible version contains the phrase, "with respect to salvation," he read that part too--but then went on to exegete the verse exactly as he would have had it not been present.

EDIT: Oh, what do you know--Grace to You has made the whole sermon available on their website, so you don't have to take my word for it.
Note what he did here: he took the words "with respect to" which are, at best, a loose paraphrase of the Greek word εις, ַand applied them literally--something I'm sure would be frowned upon if any of his homiletics students at The Masters College (formerly the Los Angeles Baptist College) tried it on virtually any other passage in the New Testament. It's a metaphor of salvation, he says. A figure of speech, not meant to be taken literally.
John, who started out preaching from the New Testament using the King James Version, switched early on to the NASB because, he said, it was so literal and close to the Greek (well, except for this verse, I guess). It should have bothered him, knowing Greek as well as he did, to see what liberties the NASB translators--some of whom he knew personally--took with this verse, but even when he helped oversee a revision of the NASB--the Legacy Standard Bible--he kept in the paraphrase, I suspect because it suited his Calvinist worldview like a literal, close-to-the-Greek translation (one that stands in the text of the ESV, but in the LSB was relegated to a footnote) never could have.

I thought that Calvinism, to pass itself off as a scriptural worldwview, would not have to rely upon a paraphrase that turned something literal on its face into a metaphor. But if that were indeed the case, why couldn't a Calvinist expositor and Bible translator, one who prides himeself in being as accurate to the literal meaning of the original languages as can reasonably be expected, handle a literal interpretation of this one verse?