The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser

Bruce, Do You Know Biblical Hebrew and Greek?

Written by

Bruce Gerencser

in

holy bible

I came of age in the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church movement of the 1970s. After high school, I enrolled for classes at Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan — a strident IFB institution. While attending Midwestern, I met a beautiful, darkhaired IFB pastor’s daughter. We married and embarked on a ministerial career that took us to churches in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. One constant in our lives was the Bible. We believed the Bible was a supernatural book; written by God, the Bible was inerrant and infallible. For most of our adult lives, we were King James Only, believing the KJV was God’s word for English-speaking people. Further, we believed God “preserved” his Word throughout history, guaranteeing humanity that they would always have the perfect Word of God.

Midwestern offered rudimentary one year classes in Biblical Greek. Taught from the perspective of King James Onlyism, the focus was on the underlying Greek texts that gave us the King James Bible. I planned to take Greek my senior year of college, but we withdrew before I could take the class. Whatever I learned about Biblical Greek I learned on my own. The same can be said for Hebrew. I was able to cobble together a plethora of books and software that helped in my study of Greek and Hebrew, but I never considered myself proficient in either language.

I determined early on that I would know the English Bible well. I spent 20,000 hours reading and studying the Bible. This seemed like a good approach to take, but I now know that not being proficient in the original languages hurt my ability to understand exactly what the Bible said. Contrary to what many IFB preachers will tell you, competency in Greek and Hebrew are essential to understanding the Bible. At the very least, pastors need to have books and software that will help them dig out the actual meaning of the text. Never consulting the original languages, make no mistake about it, will bite a preacher in the ass, especially if he has educated congregants who can spot his ignorance.

Christians wrongly assume that pastors are properly educated in the Bible. Go look at the average curriculum at an Evangelical Bible college, and you will quickly learn that pastors-in-training take a lot of classes that have nothing to do with preaching and teaching the Bible. Church marketing, anyone? Most Evangelical preachers graduate without receiving instruction on all of the Bible’s books. Imagine “preaching the whole counsel of God” without taking classes on all the books of the Bible. Talk about being ill-prepared for the work of a pastor. Colleges cover up this lack of comprehensive training by offering Bible survey classes. Anyone who has ever taken a survey class knows how shallow they are, offering very little knowledge of the text.

Is knowing Greek and Hebrew essential to preaching and teaching the Bible? Yes. And a hundred years ago sects and churches understood this. Pastors took several years of Greek and Hebrew to adequately prepare for the ministry. Those days, for the most part, are long gone.

The good news is that the Internet gives people access to tools that can help them understand the English Bible and its underlying original texts. Church members can verify the truthfulness of their pastors’ sermons by using these tools, but I suspect more than a few preachers won’t like congregants checking up on them. Many pastors believe their sermons come straight from God, so you can imagine how challenging something they preached might be viewed as a challenge to their pastoral authority. This is especially the case in the IFB church movement.

Are you a former Evangelical pastor? Were you conversant in Biblical Greek and Hebrew? Are you a former Evangelical church member? Did your pastor know and understand Greek and Hebrew? Did he regularly mention the original languages in his sermons? Please share your experiences in the comment section.

Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Comments

7 responses to “Bruce, Do You Know Biblical Hebrew and Greek?”

  1. Avatar
    Matthew

    After I dropped the charade and walked away from the fiction of christianity I ran into this quote. Never looked back.

    “If there really was one true god, it should be a singular composite of every religion’s gods, an uber-galactic super-genius, and the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos. If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God. It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn’t possibly compete with it. And you wouldn’t need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity. It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader. If God wrote it, we could expect no less. But what we see instead is the very opposite of that.”

    -Aron Ra

    Reply
  2. Avatar
    ObstacleChick

    There’s probably a difference in how pastors are taught among different seminaries, Bible colleges, and divinity schools. I’d imagine that someone studying at Princeton Theological seminary or UNC Divinity school or any other university affiliated divinity program would be required to take Greek and Hebrew as part of the curriculum requirements. I have a friend who is studying to become an Episcopalian priest, and he’s taking Greek and Hebrew (at General Theological Seminary where my alma mater Vanderbilt University is establishing its NYC satellite campus). But I’d imagine that Bible colleges that are more interested in focusing on teaching its budding pastors proselytizing over teaching wouldn’t focus on Greek and Hebrew. Maybe I’m wrong. And remember, a lot of denominations allow pastors to lead with no education at all as long as they are “called and led by the Holy Spirit”.

    I actually do not know if any of the pastors of Southern Baptist churches i attended or any of the pastors-turned-teachers or visiting pastors at the fundamentalist Christian school I attended learned Greek or Hebrew. The ones at the school all attended Bib Jones University, Pensacola Christian College, or Tennessee Temple University. I don’t know what the requirements were. Many of the pastors we had at church attended Southern Theological Seminary, Dallas Theological Seminary, or some other Southern Baptist approved seminary. One of my Sunday school teachers actually graduated from Vanderbilt University and got his MDiv and DMin at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. I believe he had to study Greek and Hebrew.

    Reply
  3. Avatar
    ObstacleChick

    There’s probably a difference in how pastors are taught among different seminaries, Bible colleges, and divinity schools. I’d imagine that someone studying at Princeton Theological seminary or UNC Divinity school or any other university affiliated divinity program would be required to take Greek and Hebrew as part of the curriculum requirements. I have a friend who is studying to become an Episcopalian priest, and he’s taking Greek and Hebrew (at General Theological Seminary where my alma mater Vanderbilt University is establishing its NYC satellite campus). But I’d imagine that Bible colleges that are more interested in focusing on teaching its budding pastors proselytizing over teaching wouldn’t focus on Greek and Hebrew. Maybe I’m wrong. And remember, a lot of denominations allow pastors to lead with no education at all as long as they are “called and led by the Holy Spirit”.

    I actually do not know if any of the pastors of Southern Baptist churches i attended or any of the pastors-turned-teachers or visiting pastors at the fundamentalist Christian school I attended learned Greek or Hebrew. The ones at the school all attended Bib Jones University, Pensacola Christian College, or Tennessee Temple University. I don’t know what the requirements were. Many of the pastors we had at church attended Southern Theological Seminary, Dallas Theological Seminary, or some other Southern Baptist approved seminary. One of my Sunday school teachers actually graduated from Vanderbilt University and got his MDiv and DMin at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. I believe he had to study Greek and Hebrew.

    Reply
  4. Avatar
    matilddaa

    I speak some welsh as my 2nd language having lived here 30+yrs. It’s made me question bible translation which I supported and was deeply committed to all my fundy life. Some words are untranslateable with 100% accuracy. For example randomly: ‘Cwtch’ is a popular welsh word, it means ‘hug’ but it’s more than that, it means empathy by maybe putting your arms round someone, staying beside them, expressing your desire to help them. Or ‘Panad,’ a cup of tea or coffee with friends and a catch up on their news, which like cwtch is untranslateable. It made me begin to question the accuracy of bible translations from their original languages and, as Matthew says, quoting Aron Ra, god seems to have made a real hash of producing a book of guidelines he commanded humankind to follow – there are an enormous number of interpretations which continue to multiply. You could have tried harder, O Omnipotent One to show us what you really meant in simple terms!

    Reply
  5. Merle

    I agree with the need to know Greek and Hebrew if one wants to represent themselves as an expert on the Bible.

    But knowing Greek means a whole lot more than being proficient in using Strong’s Concordance. I have been in many debates with people who will pull one definition from a concordance and allow that to override all the English versions, because they found a word in a concordance that can be used to make the Bible say something it never intended. Who inspired that concordance?

    For instance, Jesus made a failed prophecy that this generation would not pass away until all these things are fulfilled. Biblical fanatics have several ways to get around this. One is to find in a dictionary that the word translated as ” generation ” can have something to do with a race of people. But what is the best way to translate this word in this context? The majority of scholars say the best translation is “generation”. Waving a word one pulled out of Strong’s Concordance as though it nullifies the work of multiple teams of experts is foolish.

    In a field where a person is not an expert, the consensus of actual experts is the best source of truth. And so, for most people, the best source is to find reliable versions that represent the consensus of experts who debated the nuances of every word in the translation, and, better yet, to look for a consensus of many translations made by experts.

    On the other hand, there are many translations like The Message, which make the Bible say what they want it to say, and that is worthless.

    So, yes, if one really wants to understand a passage in detail, then one should take it a step further so that one can not only understand the wording that experts agree on but also understand the arguments that different scholars use for different wordings. And to truly understand that, one needs a solid grounding in the original languages.

    Better yet, one should become a true expert in the language, knowing in detail how ancient languages are studied and how people arrived at what the ancients meant when they used certain words. It requires immersion in the grammar and in many other Greek texts to understand the cultural context in which all this is written. And then one can become an expert and be able to make a legitimate case for a particular interpretation.

    Reply
  6. Ted M. Gossard

    Maybe it’s me getting older and paring down more and more over time, but while I think enough syntactical knowledge of Biblical Hebrew and Koine Greek to have some proficiency in reading the text is great, there ends up being so many questions in interpretation, that a number of translations are sufficient enough in themselves even for the pastor of a church. I took both Hebrew and Koine Greek in seminary, and value all of that. For those adept at going to the primary sources, that’s great, but for most others like myself who’ve lost what little proficiency they ever had in such, like you say, Bruce, there’s many great helps even online. I turn some to such places like the SBL Greek New Testament in the YouVersion app, but depend mostly on the NRSVue myself, referring now and then to the CEB. Systems often determine outcomes of interpretation (or utter lack thereof) and there’s really no escape from such. I try to be as agnostic as possible approaching the text, and I believe the word needed for the moment (I would call God’s word) is meant to break through only from the deliberations and dialog of community, the pastor and teachers being especially important in guiding and helping see that through.

    I personally believe there’s surely more discernment nowadays overall amongst any group of American white atheists than any group of white American Christians, especially evangelicals. Their systems fail to align with the Christ they claim to represent, often riddled with what’s contrary to Christ’s life and teachings as represented in the four gospels and ironically easily partake of the spirit of antichrist. I would not look to most churches to give a needed word for today, in fact I flee from such. On the other hand Black and ethnic mixed churches are overall less prey to such, especially when led by someone other than a cisgender white male.

    Reply
  7. velovixen

    Matildaa–Great point. My French and Spanish are pretty good, and I spoke a Sicilian dialect with my grandmother when I was a very young child. That idiom, in some ways, is very different from the Italian I later learned in a classroom and what I heard in other parts of Italy, let alone what Dante wrote. That makes me wonder whether the Greek and Hebrew of the Bible include colloquialisms and other expressions that can’t be translated or simply don’t make sense to modern ears, in much the same way that “break a leg” doesn’t sound like “Good luck!” to a non-native English speaker. Or is all of the original Biblical language formal or literary. (I know that the Romance languages have a “literary” tense; I wonder whether that’s true for Hebrew and Greek.)

    Reply

Want to Respond to Bruce? Fire Away! If You Are a First Time Commenter, Please Read the Comment Policy Located at the Top of the Page.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

More posts

Discover more from The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading