Thread: Trinity
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Unread 02-26-2008, 12:54 PM   #29 (permalink)
Chase
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 2,320
Taking the English translations of The Holy Bible or any religious tract or any translated writing of any kind as literal is doomed to failure.

Of course you will not find the actual word “trinity” in most translations of The Holy Bible, as the word didn’t find its way from Latin into the Middle English language until the 1200s.

Go back to the beginning of Christianity. Because Jesus spoke Aramaic, all his words and actions were remembered by others in that tongue, mostly by word-of-mouth, then gathered by translators into Greek (don’t ask me why, but Greek was the “language of the learned” in Rome). You can sure see why gospel and gossip, both terms for “word-of-mouth” have similar roots.

However, as many have pointed out, the concept of trinity is there for scholars, most who are wise enough not to select a single word or phrase or even passage out of context and build an entire philosophy on it.

An example of isolating one word to argue endlessly is found in the Hebrew bible (a generic name for the Jewish version or Tanakh) coming down to us in Hebrew. Many English translations follow the King James version stating the sixth commandment given to Moses was “Thou shalt not kill.” If you take that literally, it doesn’t say animals, so we can’t even uproot plants, much less hunt or raise livestock for food.

But in the nearest English translation to the original Hebrew, the message is “You will not murder.” The differences in meaning are huge, and makes lots of arguments seem really foolish.

As in all writing, meanings are there for those who search.
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