The three videos below are from Dr. Tabor’s YouTube series Lost in Translation. He shows how Paul has misinterpreted OT verses to support his gospel, which differs from Jesus’ teachings.
Tabor from the video’s description – Paul’s foundational verse for what he calls “my gospel,” is taken directly from a quotation of the Hebrew Prophet Habakkuk–seldom read by hardly anyone. However, he completely reverses its meaning!
From the Video’s description – In Romans 4:3, Paul quotes Genesis 15:6 about the “faith of Abraham,” being “reckoned” as “righteousness,” which is a meaning quite opposite to the original context and literal Hebrew phrasing. And yet, this along with Romans 1:17, are the TWO PILLAR texts of his entire understanding of what he calls “his Gospel.”
The following two paragraphs are by Tabor from the transcript
[Paul is] trying to defend the idea that nobody is righteous, everybody’s a sinner, and everybody is lost forever, damned, excluded from God, except by the grace of God given through faith in Jesus Christ. So it’s literally the bedrock of evangelical Orthodox Christianity, that idea. So he’s got to defend that.
The just shall live by faith. In other words, you have a promise or a hope that a vision, or in this case that Abraham is going to have a son, he has faith that God is righteous and God’s going to do what he said he would do. So you can see, once again, the original meaning of this has been lost in translation, it’s being misappropriated, and it’s now become the banner of Christianity. That the just are forgiven through faith and it’s faith that brings them their righteousness and that it depends upon the blood of Jesus. And that’s not the meaning or the context either in the book of Habakkuk, Romans 1:17, or here in Romans 4 where he quotes Genesis 15 verse 6. So I think it’s important to read the verses in their original context.
Tabor from the video’s description – A Single verse of the Bible–Jeremiah 17:9, has been mistranslated and misapplied to millions over the past two thousand years to imply that humanity is hopelessly lost in sin, desperately wicked–and that means EVERYONE, even those who are living a righteous life. What it really says is quite the opposite. As it turns out, it is the apostle Paul who has shaped the entire Christian world into the idea of the “total depravity” of all humankind.
