It’s not on the same level as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, but I’ve tried learning Gothic, partly to understand the crisis on the Danube in the 370s and 380s. And the Gothic version poses a few problems for the Fundamentalists and Seventh-Day Adventists:
It’s non-Catholic and non-Trinitarian,
It’s an early witness to the Byzantine text-type, especially going by the time of translation,
The Seventh-Day Adventists read parts of Revelation as describing suppression of non-Trinitarian churches,
Afaik, no fragments of the “western five” are present, which could be due to the incomplete text but would be an odd coincidence. 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and Revelation were probably not part of its canon,
Afaict, most clobber passages are absent, probably due to the incomplete text. 1 Tim 1:9-1:10 remains, but skips directly from murderers of people, to adulterers, to enslavers of people, to liars… I don’t know whether the Latin of Brixianus or the Greek of Bezae have similar readings…
The whole New Testament makes about as much flow from Jewish scripture as Book of Mormon does to the NT. Revelation is a middling fantasy short story read but the whole NT is a mess of stream of consciousness single layer narrative, not unlike my BB postings. There is clearly massive scholarly work put into Jewish scriptures, with easy to see and deeper symbolism and layered meanings. Not a word is wasted. Later Christian writings and legalities get interesting and fortunately for me they are in Latin.
And yet, I keep doing it, mostly in hopes of finally getting that little bit of information that allows me to finally understand people who seem otherwise so reasonable…
This is such a weird thought process to me that seems designed primarily to exist only to consolidate power for those that can properly interpret or are the keepers of “the word” (remembering that so many people weren’t literate until recently).
Even though I grew up in So. Cal, when you grow up with a tradition like this:
“Now, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by
scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by
agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought,
‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that,
‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these
qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted &
carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter
& remain in them.” -Buddha, Kalama Sutta
it’s very strange to hold any “truth” as immutable or unquestionable. (which leads a lot of buddhist children to be real pains in the ass during sunday school lessons with their questioning I’m sure…)
The only immutable and unquestionable truths I know of are found in mathematics. And even then, they’re rare to come by, and subject to the fact that we live in a universe where only one specific type of self-consistent logic holds true.
The problem with immutable truths in physics is that they all rely on measurement for final validation.
Even the conservation laws are only laws because they haven’t been shown to be violated yet (at least some of them). You can’t prove them with perfect certainty like you can prove things in math. At best, in physics, you can only say it’d be obscene to deny the massive amounts of evidence. But all findings must be provisional.
There’s a quote I can’t find from Good Omens where Crowley and Aziraphale compare their lists of world leaders in the service of Evil and Good respectively, and the lists were mostly the same.
@CarlMud Yeah, at least for the Old Testament the translators that gave us the Septuagint realized they needed to claim divine inspiration and that therefore translation didn’t distort the meaning. See also polyglot bibles for simultaneous reading of multiple editions/languages for comparison.
You’re correct, ‘proof’ is for maths and alchohol alone.
Truth though, even is physics is immutable, we may not be able to ‘prove’ it, but we can provisionally discover it.
