Loading ...At LA Times, ‘Word of God’ becomes the ‘words of gods’
flockwoodThere’s a strange little story that just moved on the wire from the Los Angeles Times. It’s about Southern California universities acquiring rare sacred texts. It begins:
“LOS ANGELES — The words of gods have appeared in many forms over the centuries, as scribes and printers have transmitted holy writings by hand and machine. Now two Southern California universities are preserving some of this history with separate sets of rare religious texts that originated 1,500 years apart but share a common biblical thread.”
So guess which “gods” are mentioned in these rare texts that originated 1,500 years apart? Gilgamesh? Baal? Marduk? Ishtar? Quetzlcoatl? Shango? Bumba? Jupiter?
Nope. The rare texts are all about a little-known deity. English-speakers refer to Him as god God.
“Azusa Pacific University has acquired five fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest known versions of the Hebrew Bible.
The 2,000-year-old goatskin shards, featuring passages from the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, will be exhibited in May at the evangelical Christian university.
At Loyola Marymount University, a leaf from one of the first Gutenberg Bibles is now available for public viewing at the campus…”
This isn’t a story about the words of gods. This is a story about the Word (or at least the words) of God — with a large G. God is what English-speaking Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Mormons call their deity. It’s what English-speaking Jews call their deity. It’s what English-speaking Muslims call their deity.
But what about Hindus? Hindus also describe themselves as monotheistic. They say there is one supreme God — with a capital G — though he has many names and manifestations. Referring to Hindu’s God as a god is likely to cause offense.
It’s awfully hard to find polytheists — especially these days. It’s even harder to find polytheists who are printing books, with machines, about gods.
So why refer to God with a small ‘g’?
September 15th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Probably because the opening sentence is referring to all religious texts as such, not just the specific ones they later go on to describe.
September 17th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Maybe because there are many gods that aren’t God. Your god can be your car, home, spouse, false prophet or anything you worship. Even the Bible mentions gods with a small ‘g’:
Deuteronomy 30:17
But if thine heart turn away, so that thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them;
Exodus 20:3
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
September 17th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I’m with Niall on this one. In fact, a close reading reveals that the writer used careful wording which puts some distance between the two sentences.
As for whether the Muslims and Mormons worship the same God as Christians, a lot of folks would disagree. Ask the Jack Chick crowd what they think.
September 17th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
The word gods, refers to plural, so it can’t be God, since there is only one.
September 18th, 2009 at 11:27 am
I think what is throwing everyone off is that the LA Times is simply treating biblical texts the same way they would any other ancient text: they’re putting them into context, that is, putting them into a category, then defining how they differ from other texts in the category. The article, in referring to the texts generically as works about gods, puts them into that category, then specifies what they are. The specific reference to “gods” wasn’t concerning the Christian texts, but the entire category of texts about gods. If this were a ticket to a sailing ship, they’d say that tickets had been issued for every form of conveyance from sailing ships to steam ships to trains to airplanes, then say it was a sailing ship ticket.
Sometimes I think that people expect the mainstream media to cover Christian texts in a fundamentally different way than they cover other types of stories about archaeology or history. I think it’s refreshing that the news media is beginning to report on the results of modern biblical scholarship. We saw an example of this earlier in Frank’s story about the theory that the mark of the beast is 616, not 666.
September 19th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Biblically speaking, god(s) with a small g was often referred to a demon, idol (made by hands) or even Lucifer/Satan.
we must remember that everything was written by hand, and if an error was found the whole book was trashed and started over. It is safe to assume that some of those trashed were not completely destroyed–making it way into mainstream documents~~hence the difference between the 616 and the 666.
September 19th, 2009 at 10:58 am
The real problem, Peach, is that they usually didn’t trash the book and start over. Most ancient manuscripts of the Bible contain serious errors. It’s only by putting all of the texts together and seeing where they agree and disagree that we can separate the wheat from the chaff. It is apparent that, over time, certain texts began to be accepted as genuine and others as not genuine; there is far more uniformity among later manuscripts than earlier ones. It is therefore highly unlikely that the texts we use today (which are largely based on the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus, two late versions of the text, or in the case of the King James Version, based on the Textus Receptus, an even later text) bears very much resemblance to the way it started out. Whether that is bad or good, I suppose, is up to the individual believer.