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| [source: earthtimes.org] |
Our teacher was an enormous, good-natured pastor, who also taught history and coached football. And his aim in the course was not to make us read the Bible, but to give us some tools that would help us to understand it.
He told us that we were using an old English translation of an even older Greek text, and that the words we were reading were spoken in Aramaic.
He warned us against relying on any single translation, and told us not to take any English text literally.
And he told us that Jesus often spoke in parables, trying to make a point about something his audience didn't understand by a parallel reference to something they knew well. So even if we had the original Aramaic text, it still wouldn't be a good idea to take every word at face value.
Every day, we would read a passage in class, and then we would have a discussion. And the discussion would almost always revolve around the same point: What do you think this passage is trying to tell us?
One day the discussion was particularly memorable, at least for me.
We join the story late in the second chapter, where Jesus is teaching his disciples about doing the appropriate thing in any particular circumstance.
In verse 21, Jesus says:
No man also seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment: else the new piece that filled it up taketh away from the old, and the rent is made worse.Our teacher explained that this means: after the garment is patched, the next time it's washed, the "new piece that filleth it up" will shrink, pulling on its stitches, so that it "taketh away from the old" and leaving an even bigger hole, thus "the rent is made worse."
And we all understood this, because we had seen the same principle in action. This was why we saved old denim to patch our jeans.
But then we came to verse 22, in which Jesus says:
And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles.Nobody had to explain what the words meant; we were all familiar with wine and bottles. And we knew you could put new wine into old bottles without bursting them; that's why the bottles went back to the store when they were empty.
The old bottles were washed and re-used, and the wine wasn't spilled, and the bottles weren't marred. So what was Jesus talking about here?
Our teacher explained that this was a translation error. The original text said "wineskins" as opposed to "bottles." In Biblical times, people used animal hide to make pouches which they filled with wine. The wine would react with the skin, which would change the wine, and of course it would change the skin too.
So an old wineskin was very different from a new one, and it couldn't support the same process again. An old wineskin would literally burst if it was filled with new wine. And everybody knew it, back in the day.
Why, then, does the King James Bible say "bottles" rather than "wineskins"?
According to our teacher, there were probably three reasons:
First, he said, the King James translators were a bit stuffy and stodgy, and they were always looking for ways to "tone down" the text, which they thought might be a bit too "earthy" for an English King to be publishing.
Second, they were trying to make the stories more accessible to their readers, who knew all about bottles but nothing about wineskins.
Third, critically, they didn't understand the difference between wineskins and bottles, or they didn't realize what a big difference it was, so they overlooked the fact that what they had written was not only false but obviously so.
Were they so keen to tone down the text and make the stories accessible that they didn't mind making Jesus look like an idiot? Nobody asked this question in class, presumably because the answer was obvious.
But that was then, and this is now.
Now, if you do some research into The Mandela Effect, you may learn that the King James Bible has recently been changed, notably in the parable of new wine and old wineskins, where the word "wineskins" has been replaced with "bottles."
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