Using the Bible in homeschooling

This post might wander a bit. I want to write about the Bible translation we choose for family and homeschooling use in light of spelling and punctuation and other purely practical matters.

Our family uses the NIV for general family and homeschooling purposes. At this young age, I also draw upon our collection of children's Story Bibles. There are lots of English translations available and an increasing number of paraphrases, and many of them have a place on our overburdened shelves in the study, but I don't use them regularly. I also have access to a Greek New Testament and a few Greek-English Lexicons, and my husband now has two years of NT Greek study under his belt, which of course does not make him either proficient or an expert, but it does help if I have a question for my own personal study.

Another well-loved translation is the KJV. If you are interested in the debate over the KJV vs the more recent English translations, I recommend The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism by DA Carson. It is clear, concise, lucid and frank. CS Lewis also wrote a great essay addressing some of the issues (initially as an intro to JB Phillips' translation of the NT epistles) titled "Modern translations fo the Bible" which is reprinted in God in the Dock. I don't want to get into that debate in this post. I just want to write about the practical considerations in using any English translation of the Bible in a classically Christian homeschooling situation.

The neo-classical model of education specifies that in the grammar years, the student should concentrate on developing a broad knowledge of truth in a variety of academic subjects, as well as aquiring the fundamental literacy skills in the teaching language, ie English. Particular tools of classical education which assist this endeavour include those designed to aid memory, such as recitation and narration, and those designed to aid literacy, such as tracework, copywork and dictation.

A worthy goal of grammar-stage Christian education is the knowledge of the words of Scripture. How can one say that one "knows" Scripture? It must be memorised. Scripture that is ingrained in one's memory provides a means through which the Holy Spirit may speak in later life. It also allows one to readily draw upon familiar Biblical passages which may then be used to support or refute any given proposed doctrine in a polemical or apologetic debate (or conversation). The use of narration, where the student re-tells in their own words the content of a reading, is useful in establishing firmly in the student's own mind what they have heard and can recall from a Bible reading. Regular, repeated recitation, on the other hand, is a tool for establishing the exact words of Scripture into long-term memory, from which they can be drawn upon as necessity or desire demands.

> It is useful to choose one Bible translation from which to do all general reading. The same translation should be used when identifying material to be memorised through recitation. This means that when passages familiar through reading are memorised, their context is recognised and understood. On the other hand, passages familiar through reading are often already half-memorised when they are undertaken to be memorised through recitation (especially if your family listens to audio recordings of the Bible text occasionally, such as on longer car trips).

The words of Scripture, beautiful for the truth they present, are often used by classical Christian educators. Scripture verses may be the basis for tasks designed to improve literacy from the basics of penmanship, to the fine points of grammar. Verses may be chosen for such varied practical reasons as to reinforce memorisation of the verse or in order to provide examples of spelling and grammatical rules. The chosen verse may be written out by the student, either in imitation of a written model (tracework or copywork) or transcribed from dictation. In each of these cases (unless the dictation is taken cloze, without pre-reading) the original Bible text must provide a good model of that which we desire to teach. This is where I have already run into problems, because I am an Australian and I want my children to learn Standard Australian English (SAE) spelling and punctuation, but we read from the NIV which uses American spelling and punctuation.

Consider the two verses which my children memorised in the weeks before and after Christmas: Isaiah 9:6
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counsel[l]or, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
and Luke 2:11
"Today in the town of David a Savio[u]r has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord."
Both of these include spelling "errors", from the viewpoint of SAE rules. So what do you do when you encounter spelling or grammar "errors" in the only Book which Christian doctrine teaches is "inerrant"? Obviously, there isn't really a problem from an adult's perspective, but I don't want my children to get confoozled, and begin to question whether the Bible really is trustworthy, if it can't even get simple words spelt correctly!

(As an aside, the Bible Society in Australia released a NIV with Anglicised spellings late last year. When the range of these increased, I'll probably purchase one of them for my kids rather than a NIV with American spelling. But until then...)

I am coming to see that this should be viewed as an opportunity to teach more about the Bible, rather than as a problem with the Bible.

> I would explain simply to the child that this translation of the Bible was completed by translators in another country (or a long time ago, if studying from the KJV). Some of the spellings of words are different in Australia to those in America (and have changed from those used in the past). A simple comparison of Australian and American dictionaries will show this to be the case. A source that will give comparative evidence for the KJV "ye olde English spelling" is the front page of Robinson Crusoe, which is often reprinted in facsimile in paperback copies. It includes the word "pyrates" and several old-style letter Ss, rendered more like a modern f. For a grammar-stage child, I would leave the explanation at that.

> Provide a handwritten or typed exemplar of the Bible passage from which to copy which uses the preferred spelling, after showing the original verse in the Bible, so that the child learns the preferred spelling.

> For the logic-stage child, add some discussion about the fact that God's word, recorded in the Bible, is reliable because God has chosen to preserve it for His people. Spelling differences do not change God's message for us in His word! This might be a good opportunity to also explain about footnotes, and show your student how the Bible translators have footnoted alternative texts where textual variants exist. You might even use this situation as an opportunity to compare different English translations and observe how they present the same message in slightly different words for any given verse. I have heard Psalm 1:1 is often used as for comparisons between translations.

> With a rhetoric-stage student, you could use this opportunity to talk about the difference between a translation and a paraphrase and the appropriate uses of each. If your child has studied Hebrew or Koine Greek, you might ask them to translate for themselves from certain verses and then compare their translation to the NIV or KJV or NASB or other translations/paraphrases. Ask them how and why do these translations differ? (Forewarned is forearmed: Jeff, who is presently translating and exegeting passages from Romans at Theological College for his Masters, tells me he thinks Paul is a very difficult writer to translate, compared to Matthew and John - but perhaps that is mostly because Paul's ideas are so complex.) Even if they haven't studied NT Greek, I find that looking up the word using Strong's concordance or a Greek Bible to find the original word, then looking that up (which one can do with a very minimal knowledge of the Greek alphabet) in a Greek-English Lexicon can be a very informative experience. Lexicons list alternative definitions with the uses of that word in the Bible and occasionally in other contemporary sources.

> You could also ask them to paraphrase selected passages for a variety different audiences, a great task for engaging their growing rhetoric skills. How would they paraphrase a certain parable for a child, another teenager or their grandparents? How would they paraphrase a certain psalm for a Aboriginal from the desert country, a salt-water Aboriginal or an Asian ESL speaker? This sort of task requires that the student empathise with their intended audience, and it would be a great accompaniment to apologetic and polemic debates as part of a senior Christian Studies course.