It sounds impressive when someone says “This word, whatever it may be, in Greek means….” Those listening think “wow, this person is really knowledgeable and I can trust what they tell me.” Face it, this is one of the reasons we go to the church we go to, we trust our pastor(s) to guide us correctly. Very few people, pastors included, will ever become scholars that actually know the three languages the bible was originally written in; Paleo Hebrew, Koine Greek and Aramaic (only a few chapters).

When I was a young Christian a preacher was explaining why Yeshua (Jesus) said to be ‘baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit’ ( Matt 28:19 ) and in Acts it says to be ‘baptized in the name of Yeshua’ ( Acts 2:38 , Acts 8:16 , Acts 19:5 ). The apologetic went something like this, “In Acts where it says to be baptized in the name of Yeshua, the actual Greek means ‘be baptized as Yeshua commissioned’ and how did Yeshua commission? In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” This made perfect sense to me but I didn’t have the resources to verify that. Now I do, and the reality is that the preacher was wrong! In Acts where it says “baptized in the name of Jesus” in Greek it really says “baptized in the name of Jesus” not “baptized as Jesus commissioned.”

At a church I was attending I was taking notes when a preacher said “in Greek/Hebrew, the word … means ….” and I went home and looked up the actual meaning of the word. The sad thing is, that out of 4 words, they did NOT define ONE correctly! 0 for 4 is not a good record in almost anything!

This is a really good church that teaches the gospel but it is lacking in their translation skills. My guess is that they heard or read it somewhere and didn’t do their due diligence to verify it was correct. Then they passed the error on as being fact.

Here are 2 of the 4 errors I mentioned above:

Looking back I wish I’d have written more of these down. I’m certain there will be more to come…