The Sims 2 and C. S. Lewis on Friendship

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960)

 

Days out with Friends = Best Times Ever.

Wouldn’t it be convenient to be a Sim sometimes?¹

Imagine being able to change outfits merely by twirling oneself around three hundred and sixty degrees; or to buy or sell any household object within the space of an instant; or to come away from a few minutes looking at oneself in the mirror sporting whichever hairstyle one chose, regardless of the length, colour, or other characteristics of one’s previous style.² Imagine being able to enter into any career path one desired merely by taking a look at a newspaper or browsing the Internet. Imagine being able to buy a property of one’s own after only a small chunk of one’s adult life spent earning and saving – oh wait, that one’s not supposed to be unrealistic, is it? Sorry, fellow millennials…

But in any case, my point is that when the creators of the Sims built this little virtual world, when they devised and arranged its structures and functions and possibilities, they had to decide how to render all these elements of the human experience in simplified, gameplay-friendly ways. On the Sims 2, a full Sim lifetime lasts about seventy days of Sim time; spending time playing a musical instrument builds a Sim’s skill in painting at the same rate; only electrical or plumbed household objects can break, and they are always repairable. There are only a certain number of variables to be exploited. Dig down to the core of the Sim world and it’s nothing but zeros and ones: everything ultimately has to be definitive and quantifiable. And one of those things is interpersonal (inter-Sim-al?) relationships.

The system on the Sims 2 works in terms of scales numbered from -100 on the left to 100 on the right. When two Sims first meet, each considers the other as a neutral acquaintance, sitting at zero in the middle of the scale. Friendly interactions between the two will increase that number, unfriendly ones reduce it. It’s possible for the relationship to be an imbalanced one: one Sim may like another as far as, say, seventy, while the latter only likes the former as far as, say, forty – but imbalanced relationships are quite difficult to build because most interactions have a mutually similar effect on both parties involved. What makes the system particularly interesting to my mind, however, is that for each acquaintance a Sim has, there is displayed not one scale but two. The top one is called the ‘daily’ relationship bar, the lower the ‘lifetime’ one.

Two Sims become ‘friends’ – a state of affairs represented by a single, pale blue smiley face – when each likes the other as far as fifty on the top, ‘daily’ bar. This is a pretty easy thing to achieve: it takes only a few hours of a Sim day to stack up enough positive interactions to get there. (Worth mentioning here is that an hour of Sim time is a minute of real time, but, given the length of a Sim lifetime, equates to about half a month of a human lifetime.) The number then slowly decreases over time, and so the relationship has to be regularly maintained by further friendly interactions in order to keep the blue smiley face in place. But that said, Sims hardly notice when they gain or lose a friend (except for the fact that if either Sim is getting close to dipping below fifty, the other party tends to start making passive-aggressive comments in the top right-hand corner of the screen³).

What goes on in the ‘lifetime’ bar is a somewhat different affair. Here a mutual fifty makes two Sims ‘best friends’, represented by a pair of bright green smiley faces, and requires a lot more time. A few Sim hours’ worth of friendly interaction might push the scale one or two points to the right, but it will take many days – the equivalent of as many years of a human lifetime – to reach the requisite fifty. When a Sim makes a best friend, the event is deemed worthy of record in his or her list of memories; the same is true if that Sim ever, by repeated negative interaction or neglect of the relationship, ceases to be a best friend. The single blue smiley face is ephemeral; double green smiley faces mean a lot more.

 

So the selected Sim is both friends and best friends with (and, incidentally, married to) the Sim in the picture. Thanks to Sims2Guy at strategywiki.org.

It’s a system I like, because it seems to me to be a reasonably good gameplay-friendly rendering of real human friendship in that it distinguishes between caring for someone on a ‘daily’ level and caring for him or her on a ‘lifetime’ level. Admittedly, the fact that the amount of time invested in the relationship is the key distinction between the one and the other doesn’t match up entirely with real life: much as that’s a factor, I tend to feel that the kind of interaction, rather than the length of it, is the key quality that determines what kind of relationship we build with someone in the real world. Still, Sim conversations are uniformly pretty unsophisticated, consisting as they do of a sequence of seemingly random icons in alternately uttered speech bubbles – “Ghost!” “Sumo wrestler!” “X-ray!” “Ladybird!” “Missile!” and so forth – and so let’s simply focus on the distinction between the idea of ‘daily’ and ‘lifetime’ levels of friendship. I actually think it’s quite remarkable that, in all its necessary oversimplification and blunt categorisation of the uncategorisable human experience, the Sims 2 has nevertheless articulated, albeit imperfectly, something quite profound about the nature of friendship. Compare the following nuggets of what C. S. Lewis says in his section on friendship (φιλία, philía) in The Four Loves:⁴

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had to … We not only had to do the things, we had to talk about them. We had to plan the hunt and the battle. When they were over we had to hold a post mortem and draw conclusions for future use … In fact, we talked shop. We enjoyed one another’s society greatly … [this is] something which is going on at this moment in dozens of ward-rooms, bar-rooms, common-rooms, messes and golf-clubs. I prefer to call it Companionship – or Clubbableness.

This Companionship is, however, only the matrix of Friendship. It is often called Friendship, and many people when they speak of their ‘friends’ mean only their companions. But it is not Friendship in the sense I give to the word. By saying this I do not at all intend to disparage the merely Clubbable relation. We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold.

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’ …

In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? – Or at least, ‘Do you care about the same truth?’

I liken Lewis’ Companionship or Clubbableness to the single blue smiley face of Sim ‘friends’, and his Friendship to the double green smiley faces of Sim ‘best friends’ – and the point I mean to emphasise is this: Friendship is not just Companionship in greater intensity, that is to say, one doesn’t make a Friend by being merely Companionable. You can have all the positive interactions you like with a person, but if they’re only ever taking place on a ‘daily’ level, then you might be pushing the hundred-point limit in the top bar, but you won’t have accrued more than a couple of points in the bottom one. I’m sure we all have people we see regularly, and chat to, and feel positively about, because we come across them merely by going about our business, and they share some part in that business – but we’ve never hit Friendship with them. They’re single-blue-smiley-face friends. Once time passes and distance elapses and shared interests dissolve and interactions tail off and the number slips lower and that smiley face disappears – not that we much notice when it does – we see this person again and find we’re nothing more than acquaintances now. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t have to be ‘best friends’ with every single person we meet. It’s not a slight on someone’s character to fail to reach that point with him or her; it only means we haven’t found that magic ‘What? You too?’ trait in one another, the thing that takes us beyond the ‘daily’ interests in front of us and into matters of ‘lifetime’ importance. The single-blue-smiley-face friendship is in itself a good and valuable thing.

But equally, we’re missing out if we never reach double green smiley faces with anyone; if with no one does our conversation ever move beyond the mundane shared task in front of us and into the realms of what is dear to our imagination; if none of our interactions ever shovel more than a point or two into the ‘lifetime’ bar. Friendship is a different thing to Companionship, and there is in it a joy unlike anything else. I am extraordinarily grateful for the double-green-smiley-faces Friends God has put in my life. I wouldn’t be doing them justice if I were to put them in the same category as my single-blue-smiley-face Companions, much as I don’t disparage the latter. They are a blessing of a quality all their own.

To finish with another snippet of Lewis:

When two or three or five of us, after a hard day’s walking, have come to our inn, when our slippers are on and our feet spread out towards the blaze, and our drinks are at our elbows, and the whole world and something beyond the world opens itself to our minds, and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for any of the others, but all freemen and equals as if we’d just met half an hour ago, while nonetheless an affection mellowed by the years is there and fills up the chinks, then we may well wonder whether on the natural level there is anything better than this.⁵

Footnotes

¹ Throughout this post, my Sims references pertain to the Sims 2, which is my favourite installation of the series and the one which has had the greatest impact on me as a person. You can still get hold of copies over ten years after the game was first released: https://uk.webuy.com/product.php?sku=5030930043209#.Wc_zujCX3IU.

² That last example reminds me of a rather funny multiple-costume-change scene in an episode of The Strangerhood, which is a great little comedy webseries produced entirely using the camera function on the Sims 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipNPktZPkVg&list=PLUBVPK8x-XMgXaMMMqQi0b8FaGMqgq3pC. Apparently there is now a second series. I must get round to watching it.

³ OK, so I went a little meta there – on which note, I’ll take the opportunity to introduce you to another brilliant Sims 2 webseries which could win all sorts of prizes for meta-ness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpjzg9DUEz0&list=PL4883046C390F83E8. Please don’t be put off by the terrible opening sequence.

⁴ Worth getting hold of: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/C-S-Lewis/The-Four-Loves/9002029.

⁵ That’s from the radio broadcast version of The Four Loves, available with delightful visual accompaniment at the ever-talented pen of the CSLewisDoodle YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hM4izbColg&t=1425s.

Nobody Saw That Coming

“Shi, why did you do this? I only wanted you to explain everything clearly.”

Ice Fantasy E39 (2016)

 

The sets for the Ice Kingdom in Ice Fantasy are almost as pretty as this.

It’s been a long time since I fell in love with a fictional world as drastically and distractingly as I find myself having fallen in love with the world of Ice Fantasy.¹ The named is a Chinese epic-fantasy drama serial that my housemates and I started watching as a fun and companionable means for one of them to work on her Chinese for an upcoming exam – and then kept watching because it turned out to be both hilarious (which I suspect the creators didn’t generally intend) and extremely exciting and emotionally engaging (which I suspect they did). On the first point: the action sequences tend to be ludicrously overdramatic; the special effects are frequently appalling (though the costumes and sets are incongruously gorgeous); seemingly every episode is peppered with superfluous relationship montages; there is an extravagant ubiquity of overused fantasy tropes like the introduction of some random magical relic or legendary location that nobody had heard of until five seconds ago but will somehow provide a perfect solution to the problem at hand; and the English subtitles are sometimes a few marks short of first class in the naturalness of their rendering (chortle-worthy quotations include “I didn’t know you were such an insane person” and “I didn’t expect the magic cube to be so amazing”). On the second point: it’s just such a good, fun, enjoyable story. Despite all the peripheral daftness of the programme – and it is plentiful – I care about these characters so much. Not one of the main ones is poorly drawn. They don’t do stupid things without any plausible motive for the sake of driving the plot forward. Even their bad decisions make sense, and they’re by and large virtuous enough that I can really root for them. In short, I’m really invested in what happens, which means that Episode 39, easily the most soul-stirringly dramatic of the series as far as I’ve currently seen it, has been playing on my mind so determinedly that I pretty much had to write a blog post about it.

I’ll slot a spoiler warning in here: I suspect that not a great many of my darling readers watch Ice Fantasy, and part of me wants to insist that you go away and watch all thirty-nine relevant episodes before reading any further, so that you might enjoy the plot twists properly, but I’m aware that’s a bit much to burden you with and may not represent the most responsible recommendation as to how you ought to use your time. It’s just that I never saw the climax of Episode 39 coming, and indeed that’s kind of my point.

The episode in questions sees a confrontation between brothers Ka Suo and Ying Kong Shi (Shi for short), both princes of the Ice Clan with flawed claims to its throne. Ka Suo was always the favoured heir, but lost his ‘spiritual power’ (the essence of his being more than a mere mortal; that which enabled him to live for thousands of years and cast magic spells, like everyone else in the Ice Clan) in a previous confrontation with the king of the Fire Clan (the bad guys, to keep things simple). Shi, on the other hand, is extraordinarily supercharged on the spiritual power front, and actually beat Ka Suo in a contest they fought for the throne and was subsequently crowned, but is secretly not actually the Ice King’s son or even from the Ice Clan at all, a fact that he was attempting to cover up until the body count got too high and he fled to the Fire Clan for refuge. So everyone in the Ice Clan thinks Shi is a traitor, and to be fair he’s behaving like one. He helps the Fire King attack the Ice Clan’s capital city, uses his magic against Ka Suo in order to track down a special sword capable of killing an immortal, and declares his intention to use it to kill the Ice King (together with a whole bunch of other statements of the “I will have my revenge!” type). The last thing I was expecting, then, was for Shi to use the special sword to kill himself in order to transfer his spiritual power to Ka Suo.

It was well dramatic. I was gaping at the TV screen for minutes on end.

And it might just be because I’m a bit slow on the uptake – as is often true of me when it comes to spotting plot twists; Captain Oblivious strikes again² – but I did at least have the reassurance that none of the other characters within the world of the programme saw it coming either. Even Xing Gui, whose help Shi commissioned in putting together a dream-message for Ka Suo to explain his actions after the fact, hadn’t twigged what the contents of the dream might be. Even Ka Suo, incredulous as he was that the brother whose character he thought he knew had apparently fallen in step with the bad guys, could believe that more easily than he could believe what Shi was really up to. Everyone was totally thrown that the most powerful guy they’d ever met was all this time planning to die for the sake of saving someone he loved whose spirit had been destroyed.

Yep, Ying Kong Shi is my proposed fictional Christ-type for this week. Nevertheless, as entertaining a time as I’m sure we could have were I to spend the rest of this post expounding similarities between the two (the whole legal-father-not-being-the-same-as-biological-father thing would do for a start), I’m not sure that would be enormously edifying for either of us. Rather, what I’d like to point out is that nobody saw Jesus’ death coming either.

Because in Shi’s case, it made sense that his death was a shock to everyone. He had been deliberately concealing the fact and leading them all astray. Even when he told the truth, it was obscured: for instance, his declaration that he needed the special sword to kill the Ice King was true in a sense, since he himself had technically previously been crowned into that role – but the context strongly suggested that the Ice King he was planning to kill was the one he had formerly believed was his father. Shi had lied and tricked and altogether behaved in a very unscrupulous manner for one about to do something so self-sacrificial. Jesus, by contrast, could not have been more explicit about the fact that he was planning to die. Mark’s account of his life and works records three separate occasions – coincidentally in successive chapters according to the standard system of division – on which he told this to his disciples in no uncertain terms at all:³

And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly.

And again:

They went on from there and passed through Galilee. And he did not want anyone to know, for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him. And when he is killed, after three days he will rise.”

And finally:

And they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them. And they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. And taking the twelve again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. And they will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. And after three days he will rise.”

So why, when the time came and Jesus went to the cross, didn’t all his disciples nod to the effect that they had known this was going to happen, and stick with him to wait out the requisite three days because they also knew what was going to happen next? Why were they as nonplussed by Jesus’ death as the cast of Ice Fantasy by Shi’s?

Well, happily for us, Mark tells us that too:

And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

And again:

But they did not understand the saying, and were afraid to ask him. And they came to Capernaum. And when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you discussing on the way?” But they kept silent, for on the way they had argued with one another about who was the greatest. And he sat down and called the twelve. And he said to them, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.”

And finally:

And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came up to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What do you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized? … You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

After every instance of Jesus explicitly informing his disciples of his impending death for their sake (incidentally, note that what prompts Jesus to rebuke Peter’s rebuke is taking a look at his disciples, the implication being that for their sake he is determined to go to the cross – nice little heart-melting detail from Mark there), the disciples immediately demonstrate that they haven’t understood a word of it. They’ve got their minds set on the things of man. They’re interested in security and importance and prestige. They’re nursing false, human conceptions of what it is to be great, conceptions that certainly don’t fit with being delivered over and killed. It’s clear that this was their obstacle to getting what Jesus was on about, because he responds to their lack of understanding every time by impressing upon them that true greatness is to deny oneself and make oneself last and behave as a slave to others, following the example he himself sets by giving his life as a ransom. What Jesus was saying about his impending death was as plain as day, but the disciples couldn’t get their heads round it because it contradicted the worldly assumptions they were bringing to the table.

I think we often open our Bibles and think God’s being cryptic with us – obscuring the truth like Shi with his Ice King double entendre. We reason that if what God says is hard for us to understand, it must be because the message itself is abstruse. But Jesus wasn’t being at all cryptic with his disciples when he informed them of his impending death, and yet it was still a total surprise to them when it happened exactly as he said. So doesn’t it seem likely that our own lack of understanding of what God says to us is, like theirs, a result of our bringing worldly assumptions to the table before we even hear what he has to say? We might be better placed than the disciples in that we already know the end of the story, whereas they had to live through it for themselves – but are we really going to understand Jesus’ death any better than they did if we’re nursing the same false, human conceptions of greatness?

Our false conceptions aren’t a problem we can address in ourselves: one can’t fight worldly thinking with more worldly thinking. But God grants us a renewal of our mind, so that we might be conformed to Christ rather than to the world.⁴ Let’s pray for that renewal next time we’re tempted to think God’s obscuring the truth from us rather than revealing it plainly. That’s the way we’ll gain a fuller understanding of and so a more wholehearted love for the one who purposed to give his life in order that we whose spirits were dead might be saved.

Footnotes

¹ The whole series is available on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80128696?trackId=200257859. Because I’m sure you needed another excuse to while away the hours in front of a screen.

² I here reference a post I uploaded in May of this year; I’m sure you’re au fait with finding things in the box on the right by now.

³ I’ll give you chapter 8, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+8&version=ESVUK, and then you can click the arrow to take you to the next two chapters.

⁴ As it says in Romans 12: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+12&version=ESVUK. I don’t pluck this stuff out of thin air, you know. (And if I ever should, you have my permission to have a right go at me.)

A Christian's Thoughts on Pliny's Thoughts on Christians

“Yes, in one short evening, I’ve become the most successful impresario since the manager of the Roman Colosseum thought of putting the Christians and the lions on the same bill.”

Blackadder Goes Forth E3, ‘Major Star’ (1989)

You might or might not know that the earliest reference to Christianity in an extant pagan source is found in a letter of Pliny the Younger – who was at the pertinent time the governor of the province of Bithynia and Pontus (now northern Turkey), though in good Roman fashion he held a whole bunch of different military and civic offices during his career – to the Emperor Trajan, and dates to about 112 CE (and certainly to no later than 113, because that’s when Pliny died). At this point, then, the Church had been going for about eighty years – and the Roman authorities, you won’t be surprised to know, were none too fond of it. But there’s more than that to be gleaned from Pliny’s letter. I’ve had a stab at translating it:¹

 

The library at Ephesus, which was not in Bithynia and Pontus, but is also in modern-day Turkey. And is very pretty.

Caius Plinius to Traianus the Emperor,

It is customary for me, lord, to refer everything about which I am uncertain to you. For who is better able either to direct my hesitation or to instruct my ignorance? I have never been present at inquiries about Christians: therefore I don’t know what it is appropriate to punish or to seek out, and to what extent. I have been inordinately stuck as to whether there be any distinction with respect to age, or the young, however so, be no different from the mature; pardon be given for repentance, or if whoever has been a Christian at all be unable to stop; the name itself, if it be without crimes, be punished, or the crimes attached to the name. Meanwhile, among those who were denounced to me as Christians, I have followed this method. I asked them whether they were Christians. Those who admitted it I asked again and a third time, having threatened capital punishment;² those who persisted I ordered to be taken. For I was not uncertain, whatever it was that they said, that defiance and inflexible obstinacy ought to be punished. There were others of the same senselessness whom, because they were Roman citizens, I noted down to be despatched to the City.

Soon – due to this very treatment, as tends to be the case – the scandal disseminated itself, and many varieties of it turned up. A publication was put out, without author, containing the names of many people. Those who denied that they were Christians, when, as I dictated, they called upon the gods and prayed to your image – which I ordered to be brought nearby for this purpose along with likenesses of the divinities –with incense and wine, and moreover they cursed Christ (none of which, it is said, those who are in actual fact Christians can be forced to do), I thought ought to be released. Others named by the informer said they were Christians and promptly denied it; indeed they had been, but had stopped, one of them three years ago, another one many years ago, some even twenty years ago. All these also worshipped both your image and the likenesses of the gods, and cursed Christ. But they affirmed that this was the sum total of their guilt, or their error: that they were accustomed to come together on a given day before dawn, and to say a song to Christ as if to a god, by turns with one another; and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime or other, but that they would not commit theft nor robbery nor adultery, nor break a promise, nor deny an entrustment to one calling for it. When these things were done their custom was to disperse, and meet again to take food, though normal and harmless food; and they stopped doing even that after my edict, in which, following your orders, I forbade that there be any religious brotherhoods. For this reason I believed it all the more necessary to seek out what was true from two slave women, who were called ministers.³ I found nothing other than perverse and excessive superstition.

For this reason I delayed the inquiry and hastened to consult you. For it seems to me a matter worthy of consultation, largely on account of the number of people in danger. For many of all ages, all classes, and both sexes even, are being called and will be called into danger. The contagion of this superstition has pervaded not only the cities but also the villages and countryside; still, it seems to be possible to halt and correct it. Certainly it is evident enough that the temples that were just now almost deserted have begun to be frequented; and the customary sacrifices, neglected for a long time, to be resumed; and the meat of sacrificial animals to be sold here and there, for which it has hitherto been very rare to find a buyer. From this it is easy to believe, what a crowd of people might be corrected, if there be a place for repentance.

A few observations:

1) It isn’t actually very clear what the Christians are supposed to have been doing wrong. Pliny doesn’t really know what he’s looking for. He can either condemn people merely for bearing the name ‘Christian’ – which has the advantage of being a straightforward category, but doesn’t seem like much of a crime in itself – or for the crimes associated with the name. The trouble is that Pliny can’t find any crimes associated with the name. In fact, these guys have been placing themselves under oath not to commit crimes. Other than that, they’ve just been singing hymns and eating food. (So, you know, not much has changed since then in terms of what your average church service involves.)

Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honourable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.⁴ – 1 Peter 2:12

2) Apostasy isn’t a new phenomenon. A whole bunch of these people followed Pliny’s command to worship the Roman gods and the emperor and curse Christ. Some of them had given up the faith as many as twenty years before. Almost as long as the Church has existed, people who ostensibly belong to her have been falling away, giving in to the pressures of the world, breaking faith. When we see the same thing happening today, much as it’s appropriate to be saddened, there’s no need, in the grand scheme of things, to be discouraged: it’s always been like this.

And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away.⁵ – Luke 8:13

3) The Church transcends every human social barrier – age, class, sex, neighbourhood, you name it; no group is immune to the ‘contagion’ Pliny describes. That kind of unifying power was terrifying to the Roman authorities. They knew it was capable of overturning the structures and traditions and norms they held dear; specifically, Pliny was worried about empty temples and the stagnating trade in sacrificial animals. The unifying power of the Church as she is today is not diminished. Modern authorities have something to be terrified of too.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.⁶ – Galatians 3:28

4) One’s worldly status has no impact on one’s eligibility to carry out church ministry. The two ministers Pliny interrogated with torture were slave women; no lower status existed in the Roman world. They would have had no education, no resources, no reputation; but none of that hindered them from being able to serve their brothers and sisters in Christ.

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.⁷ – 1 Corinthians 1:27-29

5) People have always thought Christians are crazy. It’s not just modern rationalism that views the worship of Jesus as perverse and excessive superstition; Pliny, who worshipped a whole pantheon that included his own boss, thought so too. He couldn’t believe that even Roman citizens could be so deprived of their proper senses as to fall for this nonsense. And those who weren’t Roman citizens, he was prepared to have tortured and killed on account of what he saw as their senselessness. Being thought crazy and dangerous by the world is part of the Christian’s job description.

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. – 1 Corinthians 1:18

Some of those Pliny interrogated refused to deny that they were Christians. He sent them to their deaths. Their refusal looked like folly to Pliny, but these guys knew that the word of the cross was the power of God. They knew that by losing their lives for the sake of their Lord and his gospel, they would actually save them.

Footnotes

¹ I got the text off Perseus, as usual: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0139%3Abook%3D10%3Aletter%3D96.

² The word I’ve translated ‘capital punishment’, supplicium, could actually refer to any sort of punishment, but it probably means capital punishment here. Here’s what the legendary Lewis and Short have to say on the matter: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=supplicium&la=la#lexicon.

³ Most translations prefer ‘deaconesses’ here, but given that the Latin word is actually ministrae (a feminine plural form of minister, which is by itself a Latin word), I tend to feel there’s a good case for the translation ‘ministers’. At any rate, the word really means one who attends, assists, or serves – which is what ministry is, right guys?

⁴ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Peter+1&version=ESVUK.

⁵ It’s from the parable of the sower, just in case all this business of rocks and roots was confusing you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+8&version=ESVUK.

⁶ You know the drill: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gal+3&version=ESVUK.

⁷ This one will do you for the next quotation too: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+1&version=ESVUK.

Dear Fellow-Believers Who Don't Read the Biblical Languages

Someone:¹       It seems like it’s a mixture of two languages, but they failed to determine which two langages.
Diana:              Ottoman and Sumerian.² Surely someone else in this room knew that.
Someone:        Who is this woman?
Steve:               She’s my, um … secretary, sir.
Someone:        And she can understand Ottoman and Sumerian?
Steve:               She’s a very good secretary.

Wonder Woman (2017)

Some books in Hebrew. Square script is so pretty.

Dear Fellow-Believers Who Don’t Read the Biblical Languages, 

Now look, I don’t want to put words in your mouth or anything; it’s just that I’ve noticed that when I’m chatting to someone after church and said someone, having made the understandable but unfortunate mistake of asking me what I do for a living, discovers that my obsession with ancient languages extends as far as the languages in which the Old and New Testaments are written, said someone’s reaction displays a remarkable tendency to fall into one of two camps: either it’s to the effect of, Wow, that’s amazing, I would love to be able to do that, or it’s to the effect of, Wow, that’s amazing, I could never do that in a million years. 

I’m not here to criticise either reaction. I’m certainly not here to put myself on a pedestal and make lofty pronouncements about the superiority of my understanding. Rather, I’m here as a sister in Christ who would be pleased to offer you some encouragement in accordance with what God has given me, just as I in turn receive encouragement from brothers and sisters to whom he has given different things. It’s how the Church works, guys; don’t you just love the whole one-body-with-many-parts thing?³ 

I’ll start off by saying that I think it a shame that knowledge of the Biblical languages (for ease, henceforth BL) isn’t more widespread among the Church. I think it a shame that learning the BL is seen as something exclusively for academic types like me and ordained ministers.⁴ I would love to be able to do that – but the church I’m at can’t tell me anything about how to get started; and anyway it would feel a bit pretentious for a random layperson like me to have a crack at it; and even though I’m committed to furthering my understanding of the scriptures in all kinds of ways and I spend time and effort and money on making that happen (maintaining personal study and reading theological books and attending conferences and whatever else), it doesn’t feel justified to spend time and effort and money on this particular possibility. Or, I could never do that in a million years – because I’m sure you have to be really clever and do a theology degree and stuff, since the only people I’ve ever come across who know the BL are really clever people with theology degrees, namely academic types and ordained ministers, and since it’s not my vocation to be one of those, the BL are just not for me. Fair enough, there are a good number of people who really can’t stand learning languages and for whom the time and effort and money really would be better spent elsewhere; I’m not saying that it would be a realistic possibility or even a good idea for every believer to learn the BL, just that it’s a shame that so few do.

I would love it if we had a church culture where it was normal for random laypeople to pick up a bit of Greek or Hebrew, where church leadership and infrastructure facilitated that, where your typical house group (small group/cell group/life group/whatever) would have at least someone in it who could bring along an original-languages copy of the Bible and competently consult it as would be helpful for the group as a whole’s understanding of the passage under discussion. And the reason I would love that isn’t just so that I’d have more people to nerd out about ancient languages with. It’s not even purely because knowing the BL is really helpful for understanding the Bible, as true as that is. It’s also because I belive passionately that the scriptures and the right to interpret them belong in the hands of ordinary believers. There is no exegetical elite: a good preacher will never make the text come across as some great mystery whose secrets only he and the enlightened few can disclose, but will rather make you smack yourself on the forehead for not realising that the text quite obviously says what he just told you it says. But if the BL are restricted to academic types and ordained ministers, there’s a danger that everyone else – namely you guys whom I’m addressing – will get the impression that what you can see in the text is less valid than what someone who knows the BL can see.

Granted, sometimes you guys genuinely might get the wrong impression about the precise implications of a passage because you’re working from a translation only. That, after all, is the essence of why it’s even useful to know the Biblical languages – because a translation is an interpretation and only the original-language version of the text can be considered truly infallible – and that’s why my theoretical house group would contain at least someone able to pick up on any errors of this type and correct them. But those of us who know the BL make exegetical errors too, just as much as you guys do, and are just as in need of correction. It’s how the Church works, guys; God’s given us all different brains and different experiences, and different people are going to be good at seeing different things. I beseech you never to be shy to challenge someone making a clever-sounding argument about the original Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic⁵ if what he or she is saying doesn’t stack up with what you know about God, or if it just sounds a bit dodgy. If it’s true, it’ll stand up to scrutiny.

One thing in particular that I suggest you would do well to be suspicious of is appeals to vocabulary, that is, arguments that depend on the (mis)translation of an individual word. It takes almost no real knowledge of Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic to look something up in a dictionary, and of course a word in one language is never going to cover the exact same range of possible meanings as a word in another language, so it’s really easy to produce plausible-sounding eisegesis by claiming that such-and-such a word ‘really means’ something different to what the average English translation says. Devising dodgy translations by substituting in other definitions of the same words is actually a pretty fun game. For instance, if you replace every word in Mark 1:4 with a different definition given for the same Greek word in the legendary Liddell-Scott-Jones dictionary, you can come out with: “There was produced John, the one who dipped, in the case won by default, crowing a baptism of an afterthought into emission of failures.”⁶ Of course, sometimes there genuinely is a case to understand a word in a particular sense different to that given by the average English translation, but such a case should always be backed up by uses of the word in the same way within the same book or, failing that, wider corpus (e.g. Paul’s letters, the whole New Testament, or other Greek texts from the time – each of these being less compelling than the last).

The Greek word translated as ‘baptise’ does mean ‘dip’ in the same sense in which one dips churros in dulce de leche, but that obviously doesn’t mean we should construe baptism in a manner strongly analogous to churro-dipping (and not only because they didn’t have churros in Second Temple Israel). Mm, churros.

The thing is, as much as those of us who know the BL like to belittle English translations (especially those that take more of a ‘dynamic equivalence’ approach than a verbatim one⁷), the fact is that the mainstream translations are generally pretty good. They were put together by experts, earnestly prayed for, and probably agonised over, and while that doesn’t make them infallible, it does mean that if two or three translations are saying the same thing, you can be almost entirely confident that that really is what the underlying original text means.⁸ Bible translators are not amateurs, especially not English Bible translators; if someone pops up saying they’re wrong, he or she had better have very good evidence.

And frankly, some of us who read the BL like to think we’re a lot cleverer and better informed than we really are. It’s fun to be right when everyone else in the house group is wrong, and it’s even more fun to be right when a committee of Bible-translation experts is wrong. We’ll take every chance we can get to show off our linguistic prowess, and even if we’re not downright eisegeting, it doesn’t necessarily mean that what we’re saying is actually useful for the upbuilding of our brothers and sisters in the context we’re in. This, again, is why it would be useful to have more people about in the church who know the BL, so that we might keep each other humble and in check. But regardless, you guys shouldn’t have to be putting up with our unhelpfulness. If we’re getting pretentious, call us out, if not for your own sake then for ours. Mishandling scripture is a serious sin. So is the arrogance that leads to it – being so pleased with our own cleverness that we’d rather use scripture as a means of showing off than see more of God in it. If you love us, please be bold enough to rebuke us for such sins. Correct us where we need it; we’ll correct you where you need it; it’s how the Church works, guys. This is why it’s so key that we keep the scriptures in the hands of all believers.

After all, at the end of the day, what qualifies a person to interpret the scriptures rightly? Well, check out the following chunk of the second chapter of Paul’s first letter to the community of believers living in Corinth: 

Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.⁹ 

The difference between not being able to understand the truth about God and being able to understand it is having the Holy Spirit. To have the Holy Spirit is to have the mind of Christ. And guess who has the Holy Spirit? 

In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. 

That’s from the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the community of believers at Ephesus.¹⁰ If you believe the gospel, you are qualified to interpret the Bible, because you have received the Spirit of God that you might understand the things freely given you by God. That doesn’t mean you’re automatically a Bible expert, or that you’re not going to need a lot of help and correction along the way (it’s how the Church works, guys) – but it does mean that you’re immediately better able to interpret scripture rightly than a world expert on the BL who nevertheless hasn’t believed the gospel.

To summarise, then:

1) It would be a good thing for more Christians to know the BL. If you have much of an inclination to learn them, I’d encourage you to pursue that, and will leave a few suggestions as to how in a footnote.¹¹

2) Mainstream English translations are generally reliable. Be suspicious of people who challenge them without good evidence, because those of us who know the BL are horribly prone to showing off about it and need to be called out on the fact.

3) Ultimately, the only qualification for being able to interpret scripture is having the Holy Spirit, which everyone who believes in the gospel does.

I hope you find this useful.

Yours sincerely,

Your sister in Christ 

Footnotes 

¹ A transcript very helpfully provided by some thoughtful human here, https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=wonder-woman-2017, doesn’t include a record of who’s speaking when, and I couldn’t remember who said which lines. It doesn’t much matter for getting the gist of the quotation. 

² Neither of which are Biblical languages, I feel I should clarify, and neither of which I can read, though I do have my eye on getting to grips with Sumerian at some stage in the future… 

³ I here allude primarily to 1 Corinthians 12: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+12&version=ESVUK. You might like to keep 1 Corinthians open; we’ll be heading there later. 

⁴ Or not-ordained ministers because your denomination doesn’t believe in ordination, but regardless, I’m talking about the preacher/pastor/elder types who stand at the front and deliver the sermon. 

⁵ Although let’s be real here, next to nobody reads Biblical Aramaic even among academic types and ordained ministers. 

⁶ Thanks to Step Bible for making it so easy to consult the LSJ entry for each word of the verse successively: https://www.stepbible.org/. Under other circumstances, I tend to consult the LSJ using Perseus’ Greek Word Study Tool, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/search (on the right). The LSJ deals with all kinds of Greek from antiquity, not just the koiné variety of the New Testament period, so one has to be careful in applying what it says to New Testament vocabulary, but it’s still a very good dictionary. 

⁷ The term ‘dynamic equivalence’ was coined by Eugene Nida and basically means focussing on transmitting the sense of the original text in a way that sounds natural in the translation language, at the expense of keeping as close as possible to the grammatical and syntactical structure of the original – sense-for-sense or thought-for-thought translation. The opposite approach, word-for-word translation, is called ‘formal equivalence’. My local Christian bookshop will give you a nice diagram of where different translations sit on the spectrum: http://www.bridgebookshop.co.uk/guide-to-bible-translations. 

⁸ Fancy some Adam4d hilarity on the subject of different Bible translations? Of course you do: http://adam4d.com/what-your-preferred-bible-translation-says-about-you/. 

⁹ I keenly urge you to read the whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+2&version=ESVUK. The context is actually really key here in terms of the contrast Paul is drawing between how to explain the gospel to those who don’t know it and how to increase the understanding of those who already believe. 

¹⁰ Aw, we all love this chapter, don’t we? https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=eph+1&version=ESVUK. 

¹¹ A few suggestions of ways to learn the Biblical languages:

1)      If you’re at university (which I know some of my readers are), you might be able to take modules in the BL even if they’re outside your department (the system for that at my university is called Modularity). Alternatively you could sit in on them not for credit; try emailing the relevant lecturer.

2)      Hebrew’s easier to pick up in a Jewish context than a Christian one, so a bit of Googling in that direction might not hurt. The Jewish Chaplaincy at my university runs Biblical Hebrew classes, for instance.

3)      On that note, Google is your friend. Who knows what might be on offer in your area? Plus, the Internet is chock full of resources that can help you out.

4)      You can pick up Modern Greek and Modern Hebrew through all the usual systems for language learning (I’m having a go at Hebrew on Duolingo at the moment). Obviously it’s not quite the same thing (particularly in terms of vocab), but bear in mind that Modern Hebrew was resurrected straight out of the Bible when the state of Israel began existing, so it’s pretty close; and Greek hasn’t changed as much as you might think either. This is probably something to do alongside another method rather than by itself; Duolingo provides good motivation to practise daily!

5)      If you have a friend who knows one or more of the BL, he or she probably won’t refuse if you ask for a bit of tuition.

6)      There’s always the option of getting hold of a textbook and teaching yourself. Lily Kahn’s Routledge Introductory Course in Biblical Hebrew, http://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/_author/kahn-9780415524803/, and Jeremy Duff’s Elements of New Testament Greek are both really excellent. The latter is even available free online: https://www.academia.edu/7846071/The_Elements_of_New_Testament_Greek.