In just about every church that you can find there is bound to be a few people who don’t like the way things are going. Perhaps they don’t like the music or they think they should celebrate the Eucharist more often. Perhaps they want the church to spend more money on missions or they think they should use the money to hire a new pastor.
Complaints within churches aren’t new, although some reasons for discontent in modern churches seem a bit less important that some that came up in the early Church.
Jerome (346-420 CE) met the growing concerns of bishops in the church of many different versions of Scripture circulating around with a new Latin translation that came to be known as the Vulgate. Jerome was a contemporary with St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo (354-430 CE), with whom he corresponded with regarding Jerome’s work of making a new translation. St. Augustine encouraged Jerome to learn Hebrew and translate directly from Hebrew to Latin instead of using the Septuagint (Greek) to translate the OT into Latin.
While Jerome was working on his translation, he sent his work to St. Augustine who started using the new Latin translation in his homilies. During a homily on Jonah 4.6, St. Augustine used Jerome’s new translation which called the plant which shaded Jonah from the sun an ‘ivy’ (Latin: hedera). This differed from the Latin translation that was being used in the North African church, which called the plant which shaded Jonah from the sun a ‘gourd’ (Latin: cucurbita). This didn’t merely result in a few members of the laity approaching St. Augustine after the service to voice their objections, but led to an all out riot. St. Augustine had to stop the homily and replace Jerome’s new reading (’ivy’) with the old reading (’gourd’) so that his congregation would not walk out of the service.
Early church: raised concerns and got upset about the words of Scripture.
Modern church: raises concerns and gets upset about the color of the carpet.
I guess that’s why they call them the ‘good ole days.’
(Source: F.F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Grand Rapids: IVP Academic, 1998), 94.)
31 August 2007 at 6.07 pm
I’ve got to agree with you here. Thanks for this post. I think it’s finally time to get back into the blog world. So yeah, I can’t go to Yesterday’s tonight but maybe some evening soon? You’ve got to swing by eventually because I have a gift for you from Kallie’s Jewish friend.
1 September 2007 at 8.47 am
As much as I do agree with you here that the current church is more often upset about the color of the carpet. I’m not sure the early church was much better. I mean, I’ve heard plenty of people get upset when a pastor reads from the NIV instead of the KJV or NKJV. Is this really all that different? The same people get upset about the color of the carpet.
The grass is always greener.