Three ways to live

My last post on the meaning of the word “abundant” in John 10:10 may give an impression that we cannot trust English translations of the Bible. This is certainly not the case. While you can get better insights if you know Hebrew or Greek, most established English translations are doing excellent job at conveying the original intended meaning.

But what do you do in those special cases when the meaning is unclear. Here are some tips:

1) Use a Greek (Hebrew) dictionary to study the meaning of the underlying word in its original form. In my experience, this approach in the wrong hands is quite dangerous. The problem is that dictionary will list all possible meanings of the word with little help to decide which one should be applied in your case. The Greek word “zoe” can mean “physical life” and “eternal life”. How do you decide between the two?
2) Check the meaning in a study bible or a commentary. This, again, could be quite dangerous, as people who write study bible notes and commentaries usually have some theological bias and hence might favor an interpretation that better agrees with their theology. For example, “Spirit-filled Life Study Bible” is a charismatic production and hence will favor charismatic interpretation. The only way to guard against bias is to own several commentaries and check them all - very time consuming. For my typical bible study preparation I check with about 5-6 commentaries.
3) Better approach - examine the context. Context is what helps us to narrow the meaning of the word. Start from immediate context - verses that surround the one you study. For example, the emphasis of John 10:1-18 is on Jesus laying down his life to give us life. Do you really think that Jesus died so you can have more money or more comfortable life? He died to give us eternal life.

If that is not convincing enough, examine larger context of the whole book of John, the gospels, all New Testament, the whole Bible - in this order. The reason to follow the order is because the narrower the context the more likely you to get a correct interpretation. While Old Testament has a few passages that could be interpreted as promises of better physical life in return of obedience, what we see in the Gospels is that Jesus says that serving money and possessions is opposite to serving God. Jesus promises us not a more comfortable life but persecutions in his name.

4) Even better approach - examine context with an Englishman concordance. The concordance reveals all locations in the bible where the underlying Greek or Hebrew word appears (without giving you the definition of this word). By seeing how the word was translated in other places, you can get a much better feel for the meaning. Try to limit your search to the books written by the same author, if possible. Different authors may emphasize on different aspects of the meaning.

Here is the concordance report (all occurrences of the word “zoe” in the book of John) generated with Logos Bible software: