Central Lutheran Church - Elk River

#120 - When Culture Rewrites Scripture In Our Heads {Reflections}

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What if the stories you love sound different once you hear them in their own world? We kick off the year by naming a blind spot many of us carry: we read an ancient Near Eastern text through modern Western eyes, and those assumptions quietly rewrite meaning. So we slow down, step into first-century streets, and let place, language, and culture do their work.

We start with Jesus’ trade. The Greek word “tecton” doesn’t lock him inside a woodshop; it opens to a broader builder. In Galilee, stone ruled construction. Picture a laborer dusted with lime, setting foundations and shaping masonry, and watch how that image charges Jesus’ metaphors about rocks, cornerstones, and houses on solid ground. We trace how medieval European translators, surrounded by forests and timber frames, handed down “carpenter” and how that choice still colors sermons, art, and our sense of Jesus’ solidarity with working-class life.

From there, we reframe modesty in 1 Timothy. Instead of policing skin, Paul likely challenged status display—gold, expensive attire, social flexing that fractured a young community. That shift asks harder questions of our culture: what do we flaunt, and who gets pushed to the edges when wealth becomes a stage? Finally, we revisit the journey to Bethlehem. Rather than a lone couple on a perilous road, think extended family on the move. It’s safer, more communal, and closer to how people lived and traveled in the ancient Mediterranean.

Throughout, we offer simple tools to read more contextually: ask what assumptions you bring, check key words, consult archaeology and geography, and lean on trusted guides like N. T. Wright and Kent Dobson. Small corrections—builder over carpenter, wealth over skin, caravan over couple—can unlock deeper clarity and a more grounded devotion. If this conversation helped you see familiar passages in a new light, share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review. What lens are you planning to question next?

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SPEAKER_00:

What is up everybody? Hey, this is Ryan. Welcome to our Reflections podcast. And uh, hey, happy new year. It's the new year. Happy New Year, Olivia. Thank you. I think we're we're saying it too late in the year. It's already the sixth or the seventh. What day is it? Anyway, seventh. I was in Israel a couple years ago, and that was when I learned that I think I I was it was re uh I was reminded that many of us, when we read the Bible, we actually read it through, most of us, anyway, in the Western world, we read it through this very specific modern Western lens. We were over in Israel, and our guide was talking about Jesus being or not being a carpenter. And we're just again reminded like that many of us, when we read the Bible, and you do this, I do this, all of us do it. It's not really a bad thing necessarily. It's a fact. But we all, when we pick up the Bible, like many texts or any text, we read it through a specific lens. The lens of my own context, where I was born, how I was raised, how I view the world, my own sort of way of seeing how the world works and so on. And um, it's unavoidable that most of us do this all the time. The thing is, whether it's good or bad, is it's it actually can it can be misleading. And so we would do well to recognize it. Because it may or may not be. Usually it's not, because we're in the Western context. It's such a far-removed context from the ancient Near East, but our modern Western readings of these texts might be radically different than how the original audience would have heard it, how those original authors would have meant it, and uh can possibly change the meaning of so many things in the scripture. So, for example, Jesus being a carpenter or not. Now, the Greek word used in the scripture doesn't mean carpenter in the modern furniture maker sense. At its core, the the the word is in the Greek, the word tecton, it's usually spelled uh T-E-K-T-O-N. And tecton, in a broader sense, means something more uh broad, like a like a skilled craftsman or a builder or like a construction worker. And so it's not really specific to anyone material, it's more of like a broad trade term. And so I think more like a builder or a construction tradesperson than a guy who like builds tables or or cabinets for family homes. So the gospel writers, if they had wanted to be precise and say that Jesus was a like a woodworking cabinet maker, they could have used words that were more specific to that and they would have told you that that exactly. But they didn't. They used this broader term. And in the first century, here's the deal. In first century Galilee, like it today, if you look around in you know, in first century Galilee, where Jesus was born, you know, was raised, where he did most of his uh spent most of his like early days, there are not a lot of dense forests around. There just aren't. Uh and houses in this area of the world back then in the first century in Galilee, they were primarily built not out of wood, like many of our houses today, but out of local limestone, out of stones. And stone, not timber, dominates the archaeology of this area. It's like in places like Nazareth, Copernaum, Sephoris, these are overwhelmingly would have been like houses or buildings that were stone construction. And so a tecton in Galilee would have certainly been a person who probably worked with stone. So he was probably a stone worker, a stone, maybe plaster tradesman, something like that. Um this is why most scholars today think that Jesus was not probably at all a cabinet maker who made wooden tables or rocking chairs or like that. But he was like a stone worker, maybe with some wood worked in there, but more so he was like a he worked mostly with stones. And so here's why, though, Carpenter ends up winning out in our in our Bible translations, because our English Bibles don't come straight from the Greek sources, they come through by way of the medieval Europe. And so in medieval Europe, when they're translating the Bible, and then we get our translations from them, a general builder wouldn't have been a stoneworker. In Europe, medieval Europe, a stone or a general builder would have been a carpenter because there are dense forest everywhere in Europe when the but where the Bible kind of comes out of that medieval area in Europe where our Bibles come from. And there was a massive lumber industry, and so timber frame construction was everywhere. And they assumed wrongly, but they did, fair enough. They assumed that everybody built the way that they did. They thought everybody, even including first century Palestine, would have built their homes with wood. But they hadn't really been to first century Palestine. They didn't know there was no wood, not much wood around anyway, but they uh there would have been mostly stone. So they were wrong. But the word stuck. And so most of our Bibles today read that Jesus was a carpenter, not a stoneworker, which changes it because Jesus probably looked more like this outdoor physical laborer with like stone dust all over his body, calloused hands, like he just came out of the construction site. And it changes how we read him in stories and even metaphors he uses about stones or uh these kinds of things. And uh it changes how we see him relating to like the working class and people who were on the outskirts and poor people and that kind of thing. That was generally what these people were. And so it changes the meaning. All because in our sort of Western eyes, we assume that a physical laborer in this way, like a general tradesman, would have been uh a carpenter, not a stonemason. But Jesus was probably a stonemason. Here's another crazy example. In 1 Timothy, Paul is writing this letter to Timothy, and he's exhorting women to dress modestly. Now, here's the thing. In our modern Western culture, we assume that Paul is exhorting women to dress modestly, meaning like uh like sexually modest or like you know, sexual modesty, like so how they dressed, is it revealing or not revealing? But here's the deal that's probably not how they would have heard this uh admonition or this encouragement in 1 Timothy. In Timothy's church in Ephesus, some of the women who are Christian women were dressing inappropriately, but not in the context of like sexual modesty, but economic modesty. They were asked, and read the whole verse in 1 Timothy chapter 2, he goes on to exhort them and encourage them to dress with economic modesty. So don't flaunt your wealth. So read the rest of the verse. In our Western culture, though, we tend to emphasize, over-emphasize, maybe sexual modesty way more than economic modesty. It's never a pro, it's not, well, I shouldn't say never. It's rarely a problem when Christians today dress without economic modesty. It doesn't seem like it's a problem that the Bible would have addressed us walking around flaunting our wealth, wearing gold watches or earrings and these kind of things. But that's probably what Paul means when he says that, not sexual modesty. Again, reading this text through our own Western lenses and eyes, which is not how they would have heard it, which changes the meaning dynamically. Okay, one last example, I'll keep it short, but in our modern Western culture, we we value and tend to champion individuals, which is a good thing. You know, it's great that we champion individualism. But um, but in the ancient world, individualism was not as prevalent as it is today. So when you look at many pieces of art, or when you tell the story about Mary and Joseph, for example, traveling this long way to Bethlehem before the birth of Jesus. They have to go back to you know to Bethlehem to be counted for the senses. It's usually an image of Mary and Joseph by themselves. Yeah, because we read this story with our modern Western lenses and eyeballs and assume, oh, they'd have been alone. That's how it works in the world. But not then. Back then, the family system would have all gathered together and gone together. So they would likely would have traveled in this large entourage of their huge extended family. And it's a wildly different picture. It's more safe. In fact, them traveling alone would have been outrageously dangerous because all the bandits and the dangers that were along the way. And so they would have never made it, probably. But they really would have gone with this extended family and there would have been probably, you know, lots of people at the very least. So here's my encouragement. When you read the Bible, acknowledge, hey, what are the ways I'm bringing my own culture and context to bear on this text? And maybe it's unfairly. And then do some digging. You don't have to do a lot of digging now with the internet or even, you know, uh different AI models. You can, like, hey, what are some of the contextual clues in this story that can help me understand it better? You know, there's great authors like N.T. Wright does a phenomenal job in the New Testament. Um, you know, Kent Dobson has a Bible that he uh he wrote a commentary for, it's wonderful, and he unpacks a lot of the cultural context. But find any Bible study tool that helps you unpack the ancient context to understand it better. Because again, when we read it through our own modern and western lunches, it can change the meaning. Okay, love you guys. Happy New Year, peace. Hey, if you enjoy this show, I'd love to have you share it with some friends. And don't forget you are always welcome to join us in person at Central in Elk River at 8 30, which is our liturgical gathering, or at 10 o'clock, our modern gathering. Or you can check us out online at clcelkriver.org. Peace.

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Ryan Braley

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