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Mikeb85 | 3 years ago

Americans have a weird fixation on translating the Bible. No religion apart from Protestants attempt to interpret holy texts without supporting ancient commentsry.

Jews have the Talmud and other commentaries, Muslims have hadiths, Orthodox and Catholic Christians have centuries of commentaries by saints, similarly Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and others all have many supporting texts, not just a single canonical one.

Yet Protestant Americans are looking for a "perfect" translation so that they can magically understand a text that was never meant to be a single text nevermind interpreted on its own. It's also strange that Protestants trust the Orthodox/Catholic church to decide what is scripture but throw away commentary by saints, including those who lived through the councils that decided what is considered scripture.

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shakna|3 years ago

Protestants are absolutely trained to make use of commentaries. Its one of the bare fundamentals of exegesis, which is taught in first year in basically every Bible college. Its nonsensical to say that they ignore the masses of study on these documents.

bandie91|3 years ago

yes they trained to use, however i never heared a preacher appealed to a commentary source, only to the bible itself. strange. they usually answer any question with 1 bible verse, no more.

Mikeb85|3 years ago

Protestant commentaries are way too modern and they throw out basically anything they deem "too Catholic".

They also threw out books of the Bible that everyone used for the better part of 1500 years.

cafard|3 years ago

There are some strains in at least American Protestantism that do so, I suppose. On the other hand, Eerdmans, based in Michigan, publishes https://www.eerdmans.com/Products/7978/eerdmans-commentary-o... .

Mikeb85|3 years ago

When I say commentary I mean ancient commentary, or you could call it supplemental texts, ancient homilies, whatever. I mean writings closer to the actual time of Jesus. People like Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, Gregory Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Irenaeus of Lyon, Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, even Origin or Tertullian, and so on...

Protestants basically ignore that there's a TON of writings from the early church.

Even slightly later writings like John Climacus are still much, much closer to the time of Jesus and the early church than the reformation is, nevermind modern times.