Templar Edification

An old memory recently came to mind at our Summer Bible Study on miracles. Forgive me if you’ve heard me tell it to you before. The summer after seventh grade, my family moved. The basement of our new house had yet to be finished, so we stored a lot of the boxes that we hadn’t yet gotten through down below, including quite a few packed-up books. Alas, when autumn came around, we learned that our fresh, clean, concrete basement had been built over a seasonal spring, and the whole thing flooded. We came home on the evening of my birthday to find three feet of standing water working its way up the stairs. My mother waded waist-high through the deluge, taking stock of the damage, when, looking down, she spotted something yellow and rectangular on the bottom. She reached underneath, soaking her entire arm, pulled the object up, and immediately grew pale. Our home congregation, which I’d attended ever since my birth and baptism, used bright yellow Good News Bibles for Sunday School and Youth...

The Bible is a vulgar thing—from the Latin vulgus, meaning “common people.” When St Jerome translated the Christian Scriptures into Latin at the end of the fourth century, he did so because few in the West still spoke Greek. Latin was the common tongue of the common people; thus, Jerome’s Bible came to be known as the Vulgate, regular language for regular folks. The dialect of Greek from which Jerome had worked was koine, which also means “common.” Koine was the language of the Hellenistic world, of all the varied cultures and kingdoms conquered by Alexander the Great. The Gospels were written down in koine, despite Jesus teaching in Aramaic, so that everyone could hear and understand. And what was Aramaic? Why, it was the common Semitic tongue spoken by the Judeans following their return from the Babylonian Exile. We read in the Book of Ezra that most exiled Israelites could no longer understand Hebrew, the language of the Law, and so when the Law was read aloud, learned Levites had t...

Last night our daughters informed me that they had finally grown too old for me to read to them at bedtime. Granted, the younger was in a grumpy mood, having generally gotten too little sleep over the holiday break. But as they are in fifth and seventh grade respectively, I can’t say that they’re entirely off-base. I knew this day would come. Our son was in seventh grade when he likewise asked me to stop reading to him, and I still view that as something of a bittersweet milestone. Together we had read about medieval Japan and World War I and chocolate factories and New England whaling and the Native American invention of lacrosse. I miss those bedside adventures. For as long as I can remember, books have been holy to me. Credit this to my parents, both lifelong educators, and especially to my mother, who read to me from day one—and who taught me to read on my own when, at three years of age, I grew frustrated with my inability to do so. Frugal as they were when I was growing up, my pa...