Featured David Chilton and the Greek

The whole point here, as you know, is that Chilton is not a scholar and can easily be refuted, despite claims by you and Gary North that his work is impossible to refute. I'm not really working up a Greek sweat here refuting his Greek errors. And if he makes so many errors in the Greek, in which he pretends expertise, how can he be trusted in other areas?

Just so you know (and maybe prepare your thoughts), I plan to debunk his strange hermeneutics in a future thread.

Tell you what, I'll make his comment on a time text my next post.

 

It's not just "his application of certain words." He can't be trusted in more general and basic areas of scholarship. For example, he claims on p. 411 that "Megiddo is a city on a plain, not a mountain," so there can never be a literal Battle of Armageddon. However, a little basic research in an authoritative source reveals that "“Megiddo itself was a hill town, and the district was in part mountainous" (ISBE, rev., Vol. 1, p. 295).

Personally, when I find that an author is not dependable in basic areas, I chuck his book in the trash.

 

On p. 52 of Days of Vengeance, commenting on Rev. 1:1, Chilton writes:

"It must be stressed that the Greek expression for our English word shortly plainly means soon, and those who first read the phrase would not have understood it to mean anything else (c.f. Luke 18:8; Acts 12:7; 22:18; 25:4; Rom. 16:20; Rev. 22:6). A futurist interpretation is refuted in the very first verse of Revelation."

This is of course one of the famous "time statements" that preterists and others like to dig up ostensibly to prove their position. The idea is, if the fulfillment of the prophecy was "soon," then it couldn't be "someday." I have a number of times here on the BB proven (at least to my own satisfaction) that preterists have the same trouble with these time statements as anyone else. But I digress.

My first question for Chilton is, really? What proof do you have for these grandiose statements? How do you know that the a Greek reader of the first century would have interpreted it like you? He gives no evidence, quotes no authorities, seeks to prove nothing. He simply makes his statement, and we are then required to accept it without proof.

Now, Chilton apparently did look up the Greek word used here in Rev. 1:1 for "shortly," because his list of references is just where the word is used in the NT. The word is taxos, but the interesting thing is that in all six of these passages it occurs in the dative case in a prepositional phrase, viz, ἐν τάχει. Chilton doesn't explain this, maybe because he couldn't read Greek.

One important use of the dative, not just when the word stands alone but in the prepositional phrase, is the dative of means. In other words, I believe this phrase could and should be translated as "with speed." In other words, Rev. 1:1 is all about the speed with which God will accomplish His purpose once He begins, not about how soon it will happen.

In proof of my position, notice the clear meaning of "with speed" in Acts 25:4--"But Festus answered, that Paul should be kept at Caesarea, and that he himself would depart shortly thither." The idea here is that when you leave with Paul, travel fast, which will hinder the would-be assassins from carrying out their plan. The truth is, if taxos is not the Greek word for "speed," then NT Greek has no such word.

You are welcome to disagree with me. But notice one thing. I've given evidence for my position. I'm not simply saying, "This is the fact. I said it, so you have to believe me." That is something Chilton does over and over in his books, and it is arrogant.

 

Really? What is the "dross," NT Greek? Or what I've said about Chilton? What?

 

We all have defects--brother, do I. But honesty about one's self and toward others is essential in theology and exegesis, which are the Lord's work.

"LORD, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill? 2 He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart" (Ps. 15:1-2).

 

I won't argue with this. I'll just say Chilton offered nothing new except his absolute certainty that his view and that alone could be right.

This is generally true, though the range of meaning of kairos is a little more complicated than this.

This depends on the meaning of eggus.

Interesting website. I had never heard of it, but it looks pretty good.

 

I come from a historic premil background that believed in and taught revival. My grandfather, John R. Rice, was historical premil and a great revivalist, and my father/pastor followed him in that. So I won my first soul to Christ in kindergarten, and have always believed deeply in the Great Commission.

I became a dispensationalist after growing up, but I believe that revival is possible every day, that the primary task of the Christian is to glorify God and the primary way to do that is to obey the Great Commission. Where I teach is a dispensational school, but revival and the Great Commission are the constant themes. I believe that revival is possible and necessary right up to the rapture, and that during the tribulation period some of the greatest revivals in history will occur. I see nothing in premillennialism or dispensationalism to mitigate against these views.

Here is my historic premil grandfather's definition of revival: "And what do we mean by revival? Some would make a distinction between revival of the saints and evangelism, winning the unsaved. But all the great soul winners have used the word revival to include not only the stirring of Christians and winning them to a new consecration, a new cleansing of heart and life and a new obedience, but the winning of the unconverted to Christ. These two greatly-to-be-desired results cannot be far separated" (John R. Rice, We Can Have Revival Now, p. 10).

 

I don't know who did the translations in Chilton's book, he or somebody else. The usual practice when writing a technical commentary is to state somewhere at the beginning who did the translation or what version the translation is. (Devotional commentaries don't do this, nor do they necessarily need to.)

The only information Chilton gives us about the translations in Days of Vengeance is on pp. 44-45:
"The translation in this commentary is based largely on the recommendations of Hodges and Farstad in their "Majority Text" Greek New Testament. The basic arguments for the Majority Text position have been presented in the works of Jakob van Bruggen, Wilbur N. Pickering, Harry A. Sturz, and others; they do not need to be rehearsed here" (44-45). So we don't know who did the translations. (Chilton does refer in a footnote on p. 328 of Paradise Restored to The Interlinear Greek-English New Testament, by Alfred Marshall. But I'm not impressed. Greek students are not allowed to use a crutch like an interlinear.)

Now, for the record, he is mistaken about Sturz, whose argument is not pro-Majority, but that the majority text should be equal to the Alexandrian in textual criticism. But I do appreciate that Chilton took a majority text position, though he knew little about textual criticism.

I said all of this as background for the rendering of one verse that Chilton did take credit for. In Paradise Restored (p. 100), he wrote,

Like most amateurs, Chilton is assuming a single English gloss (one word translation) for each Greek word. It's seldom that easy. Most words have several meanings, and the proper meaning is sometimes difficult. I drill my Greek students over and over on this. I holler, "How do we know which meaning is right?" and they holler back, "Context!" (One girl this past year loved that word, and hollered it out as the answer to anything I asked. )

In this case, the Greek word ouranos (learned on p. 83 of Black's beginning textbook) can easily mean sky (Matt. 16:2-3, Luke 12:56) or outer space (Heb. 11:1) as well as "heaven." This is because the ancients believed in three levels of heaven (so sometimes you have the plural). So what guarantee or proof does Chilton give us that his word is right and other translations wrong? None whatsoever, once again showing his incompetence in Greek.

Another error Chilton makes here is in his assurance that it is the Son of Man who is in Heaven, not the sign. However, in the "Lord's Prayer" we have "Our Father, who art in Heaven," with the article followed by the prepositional phrase. This is how I think Matthew would have phrased 24:30 to show that it should be the Son of Man in heaven rather than the sign, but he leaves out the article in 24:30. So there is strong evidence from the very same book of Matthew against his interpretation. (This analysis doesn't even discuss how all tribes of the earth could see Christ if He were in Heaven.)

P. S. This rendering of Matt. 24:30 is apparently very important to Chilton, since he also mentions it in Days of Vengeance (fn, 287) and The Great Tribulation (20-21).

 

Occasionally Chilton gets something right. He wrote on 479, "The solution is to be found, first, in the fact that the term worship (in Greek, proskuneo) simply means "the custom of prostrating oneself before a person and kissing his feet, the hem of his garment, the ground, etc." So for once, he actually consulted a Greek lexicon. However, he sources Arndt and Gingrich, 1st ed., from way back in the '50s. By the time he wrote his book, scholars and seminarians were using the 2nd ed.

Also, he doesn't finish the thought, which would have been better communicated if he had referenced latreuo (worship/serve), one of the several other NT Greek words for worship.

 

On p. 512 of Days of Vengeance, Chilton writes, "The Greek verb (pelekizo) is not used anywhere else in the Bible, but the act of beheading is mentioned, under a synonym (apokephalizo), in Matthew 14:10, Mark 6:16, 27, and Luke 9:9."

Now, this is essentially correct, but what's his point? It kind of sounds scholarly, but there is not an exegetical point here. In other words, the reference to the Greek has no purpose here and adds nothing to his book.