Is the New Testament scripture equivalent to the Torah?

I have found that I have to be very careful around my Christian friends regarding the veracity of certain translations. Most do not want to consider that their favorite translation might have some issues. ie “Don’t confuse my dogma with your facts.”

That being said, one cannot spend any serious time studying the bible, verses just reading it, and not have some concerns about the translation. Since both Hebrew and Greek are subjective languages and the meaning is dependent on the context, there pretty much has to be bias built into every translation. The context that you use will determine the meaning assigned to the word. For instance, if I say "Bob is a big man", do I mean that he is tall, fat or important? Thus the vital need for puting the New Testament into historical context.

It used to bother me that even with careful translation of the original texts, there still appear to be contradictions or errors. However, I once heard a teaching by D. Thomas Lancaster at the FFOZ Y3K conference responding to the anti-missionaries who use these contradictions as ammo to criticize Christianity. In his talk, he pointed out that the Jewish scholars do not have any problem with contradictions in the Talmud. In fact, they will put two diametrically opposed views right in the same discussion and have no problem saying that they are both from God. They do not, however, grant the same allowances for the New Testament. They will use the smallest of inconsistencies between the writers, even those that might be due to translation errors, and state that they render the entire NT invalid.

I do not believe that the authors of the books of the New Testament believed they were writing scripture equivalent to the Tanak. And because of that, they did not hesitate to use Jewish teaching styles and in the case of Paul, even Greek teaching styles. To try to read the apostolic scriptures as literally as the Torah, misses out on the teaching points the first century Jewish writers were making.

Shalom, Jeff.