I make no apology for cutting and pasting on this thread – simply that the authors I quote work directly from the texts, whereas I do not have any Koine Greek, nor anything like their breadth of education in the classics and the topics they discuss. These notes are, unless otherwise indicated, drawn from two substacks I subscribe to: D.B. Hart's "Leave in the Wind" and David Armstrong's "A Perennial Digression".
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This from Hart's Preface to the Second Edition of his translation of The New Testament
"I will only add that, in revisiting this translation, I soon discovered that I was once again experiencing many of the same things that had made writing the first version so strangely disturbing for me. Once more, I found myself in a positively uncanny world in some ways, conceptually quite unlike our own, in which – contrary to certain theological and cultural developments of later centuries – the partition between the natural and the supernatural, like that between the physical and the spiritual, simply did not yet exist.
It was a world in which numinous intelligences, in the form of stars, were visible to the eye in the sky at night, in which the heavens above were occupied by spiritual potentates of questionable character, in which angels ruled the nations of the earth as local gods, in which demons prowled the empty places, in which spirit and breath and wind were all one thing (at once transcendent and materially palpable), and in which the entire cosmos was for many an eternal divine order and for many others a darkened prison house soon to be destroyed and replaced by a redeemed creation.
And above it all, literally seated on high in an empyrean beyond the turning heavens, was God in his true dwelling place, in light inaccessible, from whom humanity was separated by a gulf at once spatial and spiritual. In that world, the highest divine reality was always near at hand – just there, above the stars, or just there at the rapidly approaching end of days – and yet also always beyond reach. And yet, as strange as that world now seems to us, what would have seemed far stranger to the people of that time was the extraordinary claim that the God who reigned on high, over this entire order of light and darkness, with all its radiant hierarchies of spirits and powers and its abysmal mysteries of demonic malice, had appeared in the form of a slave and
died as a criminal, only then to be raised up and revealed as the Lord of all things.
Whether one believes it or not, the very announcement of such a conviction in that world, in that age, was as singular an anomaly within the normal course of things, and within the ordinary frame of human history and culture, as there has ever been. I doubt any of us has ever understood it nearly as well as we imagine."
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This from Hart's Preface to the Second Edition of his translation of The New Testament
"I will only add that, in revisiting this translation, I soon discovered that I was once again experiencing many of the same things that had made writing the first version so strangely disturbing for me. Once more, I found myself in a positively uncanny world in some ways, conceptually quite unlike our own, in which – contrary to certain theological and cultural developments of later centuries – the partition between the natural and the supernatural, like that between the physical and the spiritual, simply did not yet exist.
It was a world in which numinous intelligences, in the form of stars, were visible to the eye in the sky at night, in which the heavens above were occupied by spiritual potentates of questionable character, in which angels ruled the nations of the earth as local gods, in which demons prowled the empty places, in which spirit and breath and wind were all one thing (at once transcendent and materially palpable), and in which the entire cosmos was for many an eternal divine order and for many others a darkened prison house soon to be destroyed and replaced by a redeemed creation.
And above it all, literally seated on high in an empyrean beyond the turning heavens, was God in his true dwelling place, in light inaccessible, from whom humanity was separated by a gulf at once spatial and spiritual. In that world, the highest divine reality was always near at hand – just there, above the stars, or just there at the rapidly approaching end of days – and yet also always beyond reach. And yet, as strange as that world now seems to us, what would have seemed far stranger to the people of that time was the extraordinary claim that the God who reigned on high, over this entire order of light and darkness, with all its radiant hierarchies of spirits and powers and its abysmal mysteries of demonic malice, had appeared in the form of a slave and
died as a criminal, only then to be raised up and revealed as the Lord of all things.
Whether one believes it or not, the very announcement of such a conviction in that world, in that age, was as singular an anomaly within the normal course of things, and within the ordinary frame of human history and culture, as there has ever been. I doubt any of us has ever understood it nearly as well as we imagine."
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