We are Brett & Jenni Bartlett. Grace, Truth & Love is the fruit of our love for the God of the Bible, the Ultimate Author, who has inspired us to dig deeply into His word and mine it for priceless treasure: truth and life. We would love to encourage you in your faith in God’s faithfulness to effectively communicate, preserve, and fulfill His unfailing Word.
Our Story
Jenni Bartlett, here. I’m finishing up the degree requirements for an M.A. in Biblical Languages and Culture, and I have a few more hoops to jump through to obtain a Master’s in Biblical History and Archaeology. I’d like to share with you my passion for the Scriptures, the specific reason I’m studying Biblical Languages and Archaeology, and what you can do to support my efforts to effectively communicate timeless yet relevant Ancient Truths to our Modern World.
Brett and I live in Palm Coast, Florida, where we have homeschooled our six children, and we now have four precious grandchildren as well. Our approach to education has been to develop in ourselves and our students an understanding of the scriptural principles upon which to build our lives. We believe the Scriptures provide us with the wisdom and confidence to express our God-given gifts and talents for His glory. In the interest of truth, we think it’s important to think critically, to examine all teachings, identifying and addressing fallacies, so that we are not merely parroting the traditions of those who have gone before us, but so that we can critically evaluate information about the Word and the world, and discern what is fallacy and what is objectively true. This “Berean” trust-but-verify approach has led us down some strange and wonderful rabbit trails, including travel to biblical sites and involvement with an organization that specializes in biblical archaeology. Reason consistently validates our faith in the Word of God!
My journey into Biblical Languages began while I was preparing a lesson on the Inerrancy of Scripture. During my research, I came across a passage in the book of Deuteronomy that was translated differently in various English versions of the Bible. As I tried to determine which meaning was correct, I discovered that some of our English translations of the Old Testament were following the Hebrew tradition, and some were following the Greek (often called the Septuagint). Although Hebrew is the original language of Scripture, the Hebrew in this passage just didn’t make sense, whereas the Greek seemed to clear things up. As I tunneled in a little further, I discovered several other passages in the Old Testament in which the Greek was obviously the better choice over the Hebrew. I’ll be honest; this led to a crisis of my faith – not in God, but in the Bible – in God’s preservation of His Word. After much prayer and consideration, I decided to go back to school to study the languages of the Bible for myself, and I can now say that there is lots of evidence that God has preserved His Word. In fact, the New Testament is bulletproof. For a great synopsis of that evidence, I would encourage you to watch a movie entitled Fragments of Truth (2018), featuring the esteemed Craig A. Evans, scholar extraordinaire.
That said, there are some complexities in the Old Testament that primarily affect chronology. When the Hebrew Bible is compared to secular history, where the two do not align properly, the Bible is often assumed to be wrong and is discredited. However, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, often called the Septuagint, resolves many chronology problems without compromising the truth. God’s words were preserved in Greek nearly three centuries before Jesus ever walked the earth. The Torah, at least, was translated into Greek by Jews who knew the Torah and both Hebrew and Greek presumably well, but many of our English translations (and many other Bibles that are based on those translations) follow the Hebrew, which seems to have suffered corruption during the early part of the second century before reaching its present form in the Masoretic Text (MT). Early English translators naturally leaned on the Hebrew text, assuming it preserved the original reading, and evidence suggests that it does for a huge portion of the text. However, sometimes the Hebrew is ambiguous or clearly flawed, so translators rely on the Greek, often with a footnote to indicate that the LXX is the source. The story line in both languages is the same (although there is some variance in expression; some details are added or subtracted), but the timeline numbers in the Greek are larger, leading to a difference of almost 1,400 years between Creation dates. For example, according to the Hebrew chronology, which almost all English versions follow: “When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth” (Genesis 5:3, ESV). However, in the Greek chronology, “Adam lived two hundred and thirty years and fathered a child according to his appearance and according to his image, and he gave him the name Seth (Genesis 5:3, LES). After accounting for what evidence suggests is the deflation of the Hebrew timeline (not the inflation of the Greek) and a few other changes relevant to chronology, the Septuagint chronology leads to a Creation date of around 5400 BC, for about 7,400 years of history from Adam forward to the present. This is not a popular view, but it seems to be correct!
Why does this matter?
Because the Greek fits other historical synchronizations, suggesting that it reflects the numbers from the original Hebrew better than the modern Hebrew does. Applying the Greek leads to a better understanding of the Bible as a reliable account of the portions of history it records, allowing for a straightforward, plain-sense interpretation that aligns with significant historical events, such as the Israelite exodus from Egypt, which is the subject of my thesis.
There is a mountain of evidence to support the Greek Old Testament, but there are a lot of misunderstandings about it that prevent conservative Christians from embracing “a different Bible.” To this I would simply say that any translation, including English, may have suffered some loss of resolution, but the message of Scripture is essentially universal by definition; the Gospel, especially, can be communicated in any language. How do we know? Because it’s our mandate, which implies our accountability to fulfill that mandate. The takeaway is that we need a a Bible that will accurately reflect the nuances of phrasing in the Greek OT. In fact, the Greek text has long been available in English translations, but most are unaware of the excellent scholarship that continually goes into the text behind the text that we read in English.
Grace, Truth, and Love 