Seventy Disciples Or Seventy-Two?

Last Sunday at St John's we tried to get the congregation seeing (and feeling) a Bible passage from the inside, as it were, by getting them all to take part. The results were remarkable and illustrated just how much power there is in Scripture if you take the time to go deeper than the abstract religious stuff. But that's not my point today.

The passage we used was from Luke's Gospel, in the New Living Translation, and began:

The Lord now chose seventy-two other disciples and sent them ahead in pairs to all the towns and places he planned to visit.

Straightforward enough, one might think, except that we've been seeing this passage quite a lot during our Partnership for Missional Church initiative, but usually in the New Revised Standard Version where it begins:

After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.

Spot the difference.

On Sunday nobody mentioned this - they were too busy being struck by the contrasting experiences of welcome, exclusion and judgement which come later in the passage - but it certainly struck me as being odd: how can two modern translations of the Bible differ on something so simple? So I did some research.

The short answer seems to be that the original written by Luke probably said seventy-two, but that seventy makes more sense.

Translators don't have access to Luke's original, of course, so they have to work from copies of copies. The people who made these copies were incredibly accurate, but over centuries changes and 'corrections' did creep in. The earliest copies we have of this passage say 'seventy-two', but later on someone seems to have 'corrected' that to 'seventy' and copies of this 'corrected' version went on to be very influential in early English Bible translations.

So now we have a situation where translations which prioritise faithfulness to the original, such as the NLT, say there were seventy-two disciples sent out, whereas those which prioritise faithfulness to tradition, such as the NRSV, say there were seventy.

Problem solved? Not really: it just moves the question on to why anybody ever thought 'seventy' was a correction in the first place? Which takes us to the book of Genesis.

In chapter 10 of Genesis you get a passage known as the 'Table of Nations', where Noah is presented as the father of all the different races and people groups in the world. In the earliest Hebrew versions of this we have found there are seventy names in this list. However, in the main Greek version, called the Septuagint and translated two or three centuries before Luke was born, there are two extra names, making seventy-two. If I tell you that Luke's Gospel, like the rest of the New Testament, was written in Greek and tended to quote from the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew Scriptures, you can probably see where this is going.

The odds are that Luke was trying to make a point in this story about the disciples who were sent out representing all of the races of mankind, not just one or two. This sort of inclusiveness is an important theme in Luke's writing. So he uses a number which his readers would have recognised as referencing the Old Testament list of all the peoples of the world: seventy-two.

But later translators of the Old Testament used the Hebrew as their primary source so they ended up with just seventy races in the Table of Nations list - breaking the connection. Therefore they 'corrected' Luke to restore the likely point of the number in the first place.

So which number is best today? To be honest, hardly anybody in churches today knows their Old Testament well enough to recognise the point of either, so it doesn't really make a lot of difference.

Today we tend to think that numbers are all about counting, so we are more inclined to ask something along the lines of "how many were there really?" This would have seemed a very odd question back then, but does tend to bother us today.

The short answer, of course, is that we don't know. A longer answer might be that if Jesus was wanting to make the point he would have used the number from the Hebrew Scriptures: seventy. But for Luke the correct translation of that into Greek - meaning for meaning - would then be seventy-two. So working on pure likelihoods: seventy is probably the correct count of disciples, seventy-two is probably the correct literal translation of Luke, and seventy with a footnote back to Genesis 10 would probably be the truest meaning-for-meaning translation: I don't think any of them do that!

So, is there a less technical point to all this Bible geekiness? Actually I can think of three:

1. The mission of the church includes everybody, irrespective of race, gender or all the other things that normally divide us;
2. Have sympathy with Bible translators: it is a far more difficult job than we imagine;
3. If you're given to quoting the Bible at people, always do so with extreme humility: there's a lot more to Scripture than we can possibly grasp, and our understanding is bound to be less than God's. The flip side of this is that if someone quotes Scripture at you, especially if they do so in a judgemental way, treat their words with caution: their understanding is also far less than God's, and if they are being judgemental then they don't even understand the very basics of Scriptural teaching:

"Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgement on another you condemn yourself"

On which (slightly judgemental) note I wish you grace and peace in the days ahead, and every blessing for you and yours.

You Are Loved

Churches can be so frustrating sometimes!

It's a month since the EU Referendum result, when a truly horrible campaign from leaders of both sides led to a situation characterised by anger, despair and terrible division. Churches in this part of the world have talked internally about prayer and reconciliation over this period, but bog-all is visible externally.

Some of that, of course, is down to uncertainty about what can be done on a corporate level. Individually, being nice to foreigners and buying The Big Issue seem to be the order of the day, and the need for reconciliation has turned up in a sermon or two (most fervently in one case where the preacher had witnessed a racist attack in the middle of Reading the previous day). But that seems to be about the lot, in spite of the Bishop of Reading putting out a call for churches to get involved.

I'm not good at grand ideas, even less good at organising people, but surely we could start by doing something as simple and visible as telling people they are loved (even that idea I nicked from the Big Issue).

This is a core belief within Christianity: "God is love", "For God so loved the world", and so on. And the churches in CTM Parish were already being challenged by the PMC team to do something more positive with our noticeboards. It's not brain surgery.

I thought we had agreement to do some sort of poster a couple or three weeks back. So when I drove past St John's a few days ago I deliberately looked at the noticeboard to see what it said. "Thieves beware!" was all I could read from the road. :(

I need to check I am not treading on anyone's toes, that there is nothing already underway, but it looks as though I'll just have to put something up myself. This is my default approach, if I'm honest, and I've deliberately spent the past month trying to do things a better way: to get others involved; to cooperate, coordinate and consult; to seek better ideas and better ways of implementing them. Hmm.

I started this post intending to come from a completely different angle, actually, prompted by this post from HTB which makes the disappointing assumption that all parents feel instant and overwhelming love for their children and, more seriously, that all children are loved by their parents. It seems to me that maybe amongst those who most need to know that they are loved are precisely those who have least prior knowledge of their parents' love.

One role for the church is to show what love looks and feels like in practice, so people can have a starting point for recognising the love of God, whatever their background may be.

The referendum exposed deep divisions and insecurities in our communities. But these were already there, really. People need to know that they are loved, then that love can overflow to their neighbours. As I said before, it's not brain surgery - but it does seem remarkably difficult to do anything about in practice.

Fortunately I do believe in a God of miracles (as well as love)!

Edit 15/08/16:

It turns out that the poster was actually underway. A week or so back it turned up on our noticeboard, which now looks like this:

The person who did the posters is a gifted graphic artist, so I can only assume the brief he was given was somewhat ... unassuming.

Partnership For Missional Church: Initial Impression

PMC kicked off this weekend, with representatives from churches across Reading and Berkshire meeting together for the first big session. Coming at the end of a long hard week, it took me much too far beyond overtired. So, was it worth it?

It'll be a while before I get my brain into gear well enough to really get to grips with it, but my early impressions are generally good.

Some of the publicity earlier in the year was concerning: they quoted statistics for "churches who completed the programme", which is a big no-no statistically, and some of the language was reminiscent of the many 'big-church' programmes which have come out of the US over the years.

One of the main speakers at this weekends launch was from the USA, where the programme was developed, but he was careful to point out that PCM was based, at least in part, on the work of Lesslie Newbigin, the British theologian who emphasised the need for mission within our own communities long before that became fashionable.

Over the past twenty or thirty years I have been involved in a lot of mission initiatives amidst the general decline in church congregations in Caversham and beyond. In all that the only serious church growth I have experienced came, not as a result of a mission programme but, it seems to me, as a direct result of one good minister following another in a church, who focused on serving God in our community as best we could. Even then it didn't really stick: after he left the church returned to slow decline.

Common features of such mission programmes have included them being centrally driven, process-led, with a general attitude of helping 'them' to see the truths that 'we' hold, and often focused on a big early push, typically without much follow-through.

One thing about PMC which impressed me early on is the idea that God is already at work outside the church congregations, in the surrounding communities. Part of the 'partnership' idea in PMC is that we can find 'partners for peace' amongst people who may have no direct contact with church at all. The hope is that we can find ways to work with them so that both parties gain.

The other big positive is the timescale. PMC basically runs over three years, but with the intention of creating permanent changes over those years, so that mission becomes an ongoing part of church life beyond that.

The first year is labelled as a 'listening', or 'discovery', phase, although the activities seem very much aimed at improving communications both within church congregations and between congregations and their neighbours.

Because PMC is a long-term thing, it obviously needs to run in parallel with our other mission work, although maybe encouraging us to a greater awareness of what we are trying to achieve and why.

Someone once told me that if you want to push a destroyer away from a dock wall, there is no point giving it a short hard shove, you'll just put your back out. The secret is to give a long steady push, which will slowly give the movement you want ... unless the wind is blowing the other way.

My first impression of PMC is that it is trying to be a long steady push, whilst helping us discern which way the wind is blowing so we can work with it not against it.

Time will tell if I'm correct.