Death be not proud

Bill Mounce reflects on the death of his father.

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I am going to interrupt my normal Greek blogs to share some thoughts about my dad, funerals, and death.

Dad passed away due to complications from two surgeries, broken hip, shoulder, and elbow, all from falling. He was 97. His obituary is on his blog site, Shout4Joy.net.

It is expected to be reflective in the face of death, and I am no exception.

1. Death is final

No dah, but it is. I am now the oldest Mounce in my family, the patriarch. No one to call for senior advice. No one to remind you of the details of your life. No one to help put history in perspective.

I wasn't going to look at my father's body in the casket, but when they opened it my wife thought I should. I would never have recognized him, but it was extremely clear that he wasn't going to sit up and talk again. He was dead. There was nothing left for him to do.

Our days are numbered. Our life is but a vapor. Don't waste it (with apologies to John Piper and his excellent book on this topic). Do what really matters. You don't get a second chance.

2. The ground is level at the casket (and the cross)

There is some irony in where dad is buried. It is a family plot, with his parents to the right, grandmother further to the right, uncles and cousins to the left. It is basically farm land where the only facilities are a questionable outhouse.

No one reading the memorial stones would recognize the name of a University of Chicago professor born in Gravelswitch Kentucky, educated by traveling teachers in exchange for chickens, and whose first time in a school was as the teacher. My Grandfather.

No one would recognize the name of a published poet whose most famous writing was on the day that Lincoln died. My great-grandmother.

No one would recognize the two women who traveled the Oregon trail and taught as single women in Kellog, Idaho at a time when single women never did that sort of thing. My grandmother and her sister.

In time, no one will recognize the name of Robert Hayden Mounce. He was one of the first graduates of Fuller Seminary who, along with David Hubbard, pursued their Ph.D.'s in Britain and gave Fuller educational legitimacy. Or who wrote the question and answer column for Eternity magazine for 22 years. Or who wrote one of the best commentaries on Revelation. Or who ended his career as the president of Whitworth University.

And in time, no one will remember the name of Bill Mounce, and that's just fine. Despite the human desire for self-aggrandizement in death, everyone is six feet under. They're all dead. And they will stand equally before an impartial judge who will determine their eternal destiny. He is not impressed with what impresses people. Neither should we.

3. Death and legacy

A lot of people talk about legacy. I have never been impressed with the desire for legacy. Books fade. Friends who know you die. As important as BiblicalTraining.org is to me, the only thing that really matters are my wife and children, and the friends whose lives I have touched and who have touched me. If you want to consider that as legacy, then fine.

As my grandma used to quote, "Only one life will soon be past, and only what's done for Jesus will last." If my legacy is a family and group of friends who love Jesus more because I was in their life, then that is enough. There are no heros in the graveyard, only dead bodies waiting to be reunited with their resurrection bodies if in fact they followed Jesus.

As for me, my "legacy" is the embrace of my savior and those long-awaited words, "'Well done, good and faithful servant! Come and share your master's happiness!'"

Whoever

This is strikingly confused:

https://www.billmounce.com/monday-with-mounce/does-john-3-16-say-whoever

i) John doesn't say God loves the world. John didn't write in English. We've been conditioned by a traditional rendering, but that's prejudicial.

ii) John says God loves the kosmos. So the question is what kosmos means in Johannine usage. 

iii) Yes, pas is indefinite, but that's not independent of the sentence in which it functions. Pas is qualified by "those who believe". So the combination makes it definite. Not "everyone" in general, but everyone who believes. 

iv) There's a danger that when people read the Greek NT, they're not reading it from a Greek perspective. They're not getting inside the Greek. Rather, they're superimposing their knowledge of an English translation back onto the Greek. Not translating from Greek to English, but substituting English connotations for Greek words. 

The Absolute Basics of the History of Textual Criticism

I've subscribed to Koinonia's "Mondays with Mounce", a series by William Mounce, author of "The Basics of Biblical Greek". Mounce is on vacation, and Koinonia is republishing some of his past installments.

This afternoon I came across one, discussing the "disappearance" of John 5:4 from modern translations, and in the process, Mounce gives one of the best five-cent overviews of Textual Criticism I've seen:

Here is the basic reconstruction.

1. The writers wrote their gospels and epistles and sent them to their churches.

2. These documents were copied so they could be shared. In the process of copying, changes were introduced. (By the way, this is not academic conjecture; we have these different manuscripts and can see the differences for themselves.)

Some changes were accidental but others appeared to be intentional, but not always for nefarious reasons. It is often to add an explanation, or substitute an easier word to understand, or to harmonize the gospels, etc.

In John 5:4, most believe that a scribe (the person doing the copying) thought it was puzzling why the man would lie there for 38 years. Perhaps he knew a tradition that said the angel periodically came down to stir up the waters and the first person in was healed, and so he added in the verse. (Others would argue that for some reason the verse was dropped off.)

3. As time progressed (and as we can tell from archaeology), biblical manuscripts were collected in five different geographical areas. Since the center of the church was in Rome, this area had the greatest number of copies.

4. Erasmus (1500s) created a Greek text based on two manuscripts from the 12th century (Matthew through Jude) and another 12th century manuscript for all but the last 6 verses of Revelation. He went from the Latin back into Greek to get those last 6. His work became the basis of the King James translation.

5. 150 years ago we started digging up new manuscripts that were in fact [much] older (by centuries). They came from a different geographical area than the majority of the texts we currently had, and they were different in places. For example, they did not have John 5:4.

And so the science of textual criticism was born, which is the science of determining which of the different “readings” is most likely original.

The general preference is to see scribes as adding verses, not removing them. For that reason, and others, most feel that John 5:4 was added after the fact; there is no good reason why it would have been omitted.

But God in his sovereign love made sure that the differences among the manuscripts would not hinder our faith.

Pruning

An encouraging post on John 15:2-3.