Reading Between the Lines

Saturday, 5th January 2008

I mentioned in yesterday's entry that I was at the Campus Crusade Media store during their 20% store-wide sale.

Back in October 2007, I had blogged about a video I saw in which Dr Larry Ollison spoke about how Jesus placed His own signature right in the very first portion of Scripture. In that video, Dr Ollison also made mention to an "interlinear" Bible, ie. a bible that has the original text interlined with its English translation.

I had planned to get one of those for myself, and what better time to do so than during a sale. I asked the salesperson and he led me to the Study Bible / Concordance section at the rear of the store.

I was in for 2 surprises: 1 not-so-pleasant and 1 pleasant.

The not-so-pleasant surprise is that there was no single Interlinear Bible. Instead, there was a separate one for the Old Testament and a separate one for the New. I suppose this is because the former was written in Hebrew/Aramaic whilst the latter was written in Greek.

The pleasant surprise happened when I was paying up at the counter. The original cost of the Bibles were S$158 and S$87.80 respectively, but it turned out that there was a 30% discount on all Study Bibles! Hence, I only paid S$110.60 and S$61.46 for them :-)

A sample of how the Bible looks like is shown on the right. Here is a passage from Luke 15, where we see the original Greek appearing line-by-line with its English translation.

In verse 31, note that the father actually referred to his elder son as a "teknon" (a minor, not yet in a position to be an heir) rather than a "huios" (mature full-grown son, old enough for heirship) as the word appears in other parts of the parable.

Like what Ps Prince highlighted in his sermon entitled "Why Some Christians are Not Enjoying Their Inheritance in Christ" preached on 30 Sep 07, the elder son was operating under the law (merited favour), and hence the father referred to him as a "teknon" rather than a "huios". The younger son was referred to as a "huios" throughout the parable because he understood that his favour with his dad was unearned.