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The Bible as Literature

The Bible as Literature

By: The Ephesus School
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Each week, Fr. Marc Boulos discusses the content of the Bible as literature. On Tuesdays, Fr. Paul Tarazi presents an in-depth analysis of the biblical text in the original languages.© Copyright The Ephesus School Network, 2013-2024. All rights reserved. Christianity Ministry & Evangelism Spirituality
Episodes
  • A Word Against the Witnesses

    A Word Against the Witnesses
    Jan 11 2026
    Human beings move as a flock. What feels like freedom is motion inside a herd. People act the way they do because of pressure, habit, fear, desire, reward, or past experience. When we make decisions, we are responding to systemic forces already acting on us, even when theologians insist on calling this a free choice, the so-called “free will.” Long before a choice is named, the path is worn.Governments, workplaces, laws, economies, religions, philosophies, ideologies, and social norms all rely on the same logic. If certain behaviors are rewarded and others punished, people will respond in predictable ways. Obedience inside these systems is never neutral. People comply because it benefits them, protects them, or helps them avoid loss. Even rebellion, blind to what it is building, follows recognizable patterns and is absorbed back into the systems it supposedly opposes.But beneath these systems sits something deeper and more diabolical: the human logos. Explanation. Justification. Language itself as causality. Words that govern reality, binding reasons to actions, beliefs to outcomes, and sacrifices to meaning. This is how systems hold together. They are not only structures of power, but temples built of language, narratives, and shared explanations. Propaganda. A world where everything makes sense.Belief, in this sense, is not faith. It is how humans explain themselves to themselves, a projection of the lamp of the body, quieting fear, justifying loss, making obedience reasonable. Over time, this explanatory language becomes a prison people inhabit. A Temple made of human hands, not of stone, but of coherence. An idol constructed from meaning.Inside this Temple, every sacrifice is justified. Every command explained. Every loss serves a purpose. Even love is rationalized. Domesticated. Hope reframed as likelihood. Language does not merely describe the system. It sanctifies it.These systems can even tolerate sacrifice, as long as the sacrifice is made for something abstract: the nation, the tribe, the future, the greater good, the “building” up or the “survival” of the community. Abstract loyalty is calculable. It can be taught, praised, rewarded, and demanded. A person who gives themselves for an idea or a cause is still operating inside logic the system understands and human language can defend.Torah insists that a true command cannot arise from within this Temple or employ its language. Scripture does not perceive human beings as autonomous agents standing outside the flock, freely acting. It finds people as they are: already bound, already oriented, already enslaved to something. That is why Torah does not ask whether people are free, but whom they serve. Egypt is not replaced by false autonomy, but by covenant. Pharaoh is not replaced by the self, the builder of temples, but by the Voice of the Shepherd, that commands, calling us out of the temples that entomb us. According to Scripture, if a rule makes sense because it works, helps, or produces good outcomes, then following it is still a calculation. It may be wise or effective, but it is not obedience. It is sycophancy. That is why the Voice of the Shepherd is heard in the wilderness, away from stable systems and the human Temple of explanation. In the wilderness, people cannot rely on strategy or outcomes. They can only hear and respond. To those who live inside the system, this looks like slavery, or worse, insanity. Far from it.It is trust.This is where love of neighbor enters, and it does not enter as an idea, let alone a Platonic ideal. A neighbor is not humanity in the abstract. A neighbor is not the future, the cause, or the system. A neighbor is the real person who stands before you and whose claim cannot be translated into principle without being lost.Your neighbor is not defined by worth, identity, or moral condition, but by proximity under obedience to the Command. Love of neighbor is irrational by decree. It does not weigh consequences. It does not ask whether the whole will survive. It does not justify itself in language the system can use. Systems assume that when forced to choose, people will sacrifice the one for the many. Love of neighbor refuses that exchange. It does not assume God’s purview. It does not control. It does not judge. It does not choose the right thing. It submits to the Command: love for the one encountered. This is why love of neighbor looks dangerous from inside the Temple. It threatens coherence. It interrupts explanation. It is willing to let the world burn rather than betray the one who stands before you. It does not argue. It does not explain. It does not rebel. The moment it does, it has already been absorbed back into the prison of the human logos. Hope enters here, not as optimism and not as confidence in success. Hope is what remains when explanation fails. Hope is the willingness to act without knowing whether the act will save or destroy everything. It interrupts causality by refusing ...
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • The Sound of God

    The Sound of God
    Dec 24 2025
    Jairus appears as an administrator. He was named, titled, and located inside a functioning system. He knew how things worked, when to ask, when to stop, when a situation was resolved. When he knelt before Jesus, it was already a breach of role, but the text does not stop there. It presses him.While he was still on the way, while the instruction was still unfolding, a message arrived from his own house: Your daughter has died. Do not trouble the Teacher.It sounds compassionate. It sounds final. But it is not merely a report. It is a deception and a false command. Those who pressed Jairus pressed him to stop searching Scripture, to stop pursuing the call of the Prophet. They said: return to your place. Accept the verdict the system of human words has rendered.But there is only one Judge.Jesus answered without addressing death at all. He promised nothing. He uttered the command, Do not fear. Only trust.With that command, the axis of the text shifts. Fear here is not panic. Fear is obedience to human reasonableness. It is enclosure within narrative walls built of human words. Trust is remaining under instruction, exposed to reality, out in the open, where only living, breathing divine words can give life, even when every visible sign says the moment has passed.The crowd moves with them. They are practical. They know how death works. They know when grief must become resignation. They are not simply onlookers. They are the stone Temple outside the synagogue, walls built of human words, set against the living, breathing Word.They do what walls always do. They mark the human boundary. They decide what may pass and what must stop. What they call wisdom is fear of man disciplined into respectability. What they call obedience is resignation taught to bow to something other than God. They are the domesticated gatekeepers of reasonableness, the infrastructure of Herod, the architecture of fear.They are like the children in the marketplace who said:“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.” (Luke 7:32)They do not listen for the sound of God. They pipe their own tune. Whether the sound is mourning or rejoicing, their demand is the same: respond within our script. The problem was not his music. It was their refusal to hear.They are the makers of garments, woven out of fig leaves. As Moses wrote:“Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9)“I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” (Genesis 3:10)Jesus emptied the room. Only Peter, James, John, and the parents remained. When Jesus said She is not dead but sleeping, they laughed. Their laughter was not a misunderstanding. It was fear covered, not by God, but by human craftiness. It restored their order. It set a guard around the girl’s tomb. It domesticated the moment. It said: this voice may sing only within the borders of our melodies.No one expected what was about to happen. No one could later claim trust in his Command:“And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’” (Ezekiel 37:2-3)Jesus took the girl by the hand and spoke: Child, arise. The text is not Greco-Roman. It is not written that her “mind” returns. It is not written that her Platonic “soul” is restored. It is written that her pneuma, her ruaḥ, returns. Breath that had gone out came back in. Life does not rise from within the human system of words. It enters from outside, at the sound of his voice (Genesis 2:7; Ezekiel 37:2-10).“Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” (Ezekiel 37:4)Peter, James, and John, like the parents, said and did nothing. They bore witness. Life does not come from parents. Wisdom does not come from disciples, let alone stone temples:“So I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I prophesied there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, sinews were on them, and flesh came upon them, and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God, Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’” (Ezekiel 37:7-9)The living breath comes not from human words, but from him who commands the four winds, who commanded the Son of Man to breathe his living words upon her.Immediately, Jesus commanded practical care. Feed her. Life is not human spectacle. It is divine instruction, followed by silent obedience:“Tell no one.” (Luke 8:56)Silence is not secrecy. It is judgment. To speak at that moment would rebuild the stone temple of human words in narrative form. It would turn instruction into explanation, breath into human property, life into idolatry.Silence is the test.Like ...
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • God Sees All

    God Sees All
    Nov 29 2025
    Most assume that the difference between Greek literature and the Semitic Scrolls, written in Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Qurʾanic Arabic, lies in narrative. It does not. Narrative is the veil, a carrier wave for what remains unseen. Everything hinges on lexicography. The decisive divide is grammatical.Greek “meaning” is a conceptually “built” construct, grounded in philosophical abstraction and analytic inference. Semitic function emerges from triliteral consonantal roots that test, constrain, and judge the observer. Greek vocabulary operates within a narrow conceptual field, like a teenager wearing a VR headset, viewing an AI paradise while sitting in a garbage heap. Semitic vocabulary operates within an open functional field. The same teenager with the headset removed, discovering he sits in an open field among living, breathing things, where biblical roots carry behavioral consequences.This becomes immediately visible in Luke 8:47. The single Greek verb λανθάνω (lanthano) activates a constellation of six distinct Hebrew roots:ע־ל־ם (ʿayin-lamed-mem, hiddenness)מ־ע־ל (mem-ʿayin-lamed, covert breach)צ־פ־ן (ṣade-fe-nun, stashing, treasuring)ע־ד־ר (ʿayin-dalet-resh, missing from the count)כ־ח־ד (kaf-ḥet-dalet, concealment from the king)ר־א־ה (resh-ʾalef-he, divine seeing)That Scripture draws on such a wide Semitic field to express “not escaping notice” shows how seriously the biblical tradition treats hiddenness and uncovering. Each root contributes a different functional angle: what is hidden to humans, what is hidden in betrayal, what is hidden as hoarded, what is missing from the tally, what is concealed from authority, and what is seen by God. The phenomenon is not Greek versus Hebrew. Multiple Semitic operations of judgment underwrite a single functional moment in Luke. This density is lexical, not narrative, let alone speculative. It reflects how the Semitic system encodes the living, breathing reality around us.Across the Abrahamic scrolls, these triliteral roots operate like living tissue. They replicate, invert, intensify, and map action to consequence. Hidden sin is traceable in Hebrew because ע־ל־ם (ʿayin-lamed-mem) is not a metaphor but a function. It moves. The Qurʾan does the same with خ-ف-ي (khāʾ-fāʾ-yāʾ) and غ-ف-ل (ghayn-fāʾ-lām). Luke’s Greek lexicon operates because a biological Hebrew bone structure undergirds the scroll. Without that structural field, no instance of λανθάνω (lanthano) conveys, or is able to convey, the full weight of divine accounting. However, once the field is “seen” Scripturally, “with the ears,” the semantics are relentless. The Pauline scales (not scales of measurement) fall off. (Acts 9:18)Only a Hellenist, in our time a Westerner, is fooled by what they can see, or worse, by what they imagine they can explain. A true Semite has ears to hear. Through hearing, the blind learn to see, and the deaf and the mute are healed.The unseen, الغيب (al-ghayb) and נֶעֱלָם (neʿlam), is not mysticism. It is judgment. It is the Lord’s test. Hiddenness is God’s domain. Covering belongs to God; uncovering belongs to God; the scales of measurement, المِيزَان (al-mīzān) belong to God; the tally belongs to God. The Qurʾan repeats the decree of Luke, that the Lord is not unaware of what you do. Previously, Ecclesiastes insisted the same. Every hidden deed is brought into judgment. (Ecclesiastes 12:14) Luke and Matthew proclaimed that what is concealed will be shouted openly. (Matthew 10:26; Luke 12:2) This mechanism is not literary ornamentation. It is the biological operating system of the Abrahamic scrolls, coded in living, breathing triliteral grammar.The problem for the now dominant West is that Greek thought presupposes that meaning originates in the human mind. The human city becomes the center, the planted earth becomes a concretized static, or idolized center, human proportion becomes the measure, and vision, human sight, becomes epistemology. Once vision governs understanding, enlightenment becomes darkness, because the logos of the human being projects its categories outward.Scripture dismantles this, not because the Greeks lacked intelligence, but because the entire Greek system assumes the human observer as the reference point.Scripture forbids this. Every consonant is intentional. Greek has letters that should not exist because they collapse two sounds into a single symbol. To the Semitic ear, as Fr. Paul Tarazi explains, “psi, xi, and the Greek chi” expose that Greek writing is constructed, not found. The Greek alphabet was designed, not discovered. It is man-made. It does not correspond to what is heard in nature. The living and moving, breathing triliteral system prevents human projection by preventing morphological collapse. The scriptural lexicon forces the hearer to receive what is written in creation. In Scripture, projection is ...
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    50 mins
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