A Matter of Interpretation
"You will do well to pay attention to this [God's prophetic word] as
to a lamp shining in a dark place . . . First of all you must understand this, that
no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, because no
prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke
from God. But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will
be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even
denying the Master who brought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And
many will follow their licentiousness, and because of them the way of truth will be
reviled" 2Peter 1:19b-2:2.
Peter was very clear in this verse, for the sake of our souls we have to pay attention
to God's word but nothing in scripture is up to our own interpretation. He goes on
to state that Scripture did not originate from any one individuals views but from the Holy
Spirit. He warns that not everyone who claims to be speaking from the Holy Spirit
are telling the truth. In the old testament there were many instances where false
prophets deceived the people and Peter tells us in this verse that the same thing will
happen again. These false prophets will secretly deceive the people because they
will use the Scriptures to defend their own interpretations. Therefore we must avoid
private interpretation. We must adhere to the interpretations of the Bible that have
stood the test of time, the interpretations that have been passed down to us, through the
traditions of Christ's Church from the founding fathers nearly two thousand years ago.
Peter warns of a time that "many will follow" these incorrect personal
interpretations. In a day when there are over 20,000 Christian denominations and the
divisions in the Christian community has become an object of scorn among non-believers we
can safely say that the time Peter prophesied has now arrived.
Many people do not even realize that they are following false teachings. For example,
the New International Version (NIV) has tried to mask Peter's statement by deviating from
a literal translation and by inserting words into the verse which do not appear in the
original Greek version. For example, a literal translation from the Greek would be
"knowing this first, that every prophecy of Scripture is not of one's own
interpretation." An acceptable translation into more modern English could be
"Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture is of one's own
interpretation." The Greek text uses the word idias "of one's" not
the word for "the prophet's" tou prophetou. But the NIV uses the phrase
"came about by the prophet's" (tou prophetou) which changes the translation to:
"Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the
prophet's own. . .
Look at the first two examples of this scripture reading. They both clearly state
that prophecies of the Scripture are not up for owns own interpretation. When one
looks at the NIV translation the verse has a totally different meaning, it appears to
state that the original Scriptures did not come from the prophets interpretation.
The slight change in scripture (change idias for tou prophetou) completely changes the
meaning. In making this translation error the NIV provides us with an excellent
example of the extent which private interpretation can corrupt a Bible text. Here the
translators of the NIV have not only shown their willingness to impose a private
interpretation on a text but to impose their private interpretation into the text,
deviating from what the text literally says , therefore bringing in a destructive heresy
in the most secret form of all -- where it is insulated into the words of the translation
itself, so the faithful Christians reading the translation have no opportunity to even
compare the private interpretation with the actual words of Scripture, because the
translators of the NIV have replaced the actual words of Scripture with their own
private interpretation. This illustrates what Peter warns "that no prophecy of
Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation."
There are other examples throughout the NIV where they inserted their own private
interpretation. The translators of the NIV always want the word
"tradition" (paradosis) to be used in a negative sense, and so in those verses
the word "teaching" is used in place of the original Greek.
Some Evangelicals try to minimize the role of the particular translation by saying that
it does not affect any substantive teaching of the Bible, but as one can see from this
example, that slight deviations in the translation can make enormous differences in the
meaning of God's Word.
What happens if one makes a mistake in this area? "Our beloved brother Paul wrote
to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking . . . as he does in all his letters.
"There are some things in them hard to understand, which the unlearned
and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. You
therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, beware lest you be carried away with the
error of lawless men and lose your own stability" 2Peter 3:15b-17. The price of
error in how to read the Bible is one's own destruction, and it is easy for the unlearned
and unstable to do with scripture because there are "things in them hard to
understand." |
"First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of
scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation"
2Peter
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