Great Expectations

I'm an avid reader, not voracious like some people are, but I do like to read & I have the humble beginnings of a library, both hardcovers & ebooks. I had once thought about buying a Kindle but decided against it as I already have Mobipocket on my old pocket pc. I've downloaded several ebooks in the public domain & this past Winter I've been rekindling (no pun intended) my love of reading & catching up on some books in my e-library.

When I was young, I always loved mysteries; especially the old black & white movies of Sherlock Holmes, Philo Vance & Charlie Chan, as I grew older I watched anything mystery-related: Ellery Queen, Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Nero Wolfe & Poirot; I loved them all.

Well, I decided to start w/ the very first Charlie Chan novel, "The House Without a Key" & I dove in w/ enthusiasm, my mind already salivating w/ the idea of reading one of my favorite detectives fresh & anew. 

I had a hard time finishing it.

So, I then moved onto the first Philo Vance novel, "The Benson Murder Case", again thinking it would be a hardcover version of the screen classics I loved to watch. It was slow, plodding & wordy, quite the arduous read it was.

I couldn't finish it.

Perhaps my expectations were too high; perhaps I was expecting the source material to be more like the adaptations than vice versa, perhaps I should not have locked into any kind of mindset before diving in & that's why I was disappointed...

There's a parallel between this & our personal Bible devotions; sometimes we have something that we grew up w/, whether that be a mindset or a teaching or even a version of the Bible that we read & prefer, but then we go to the source material, 'really dig into the Hebrew, Aramaic  & Greek in context, only to find out that it may be completely different than what we've been used to & are comfortable w/.

My niece explained it nicely, “any version of the Bible, other than in it's original language, is always an interpretation of the original text”.

Is it close? For the most part... pretty much... maybe... but sometimes words are substituted for the original & it takes on a whole new meaning:

“Thou shall not kill” actually reads “Do not murder” = a world of difference.

There are many, many more substitutions of words & rewording of phrases that have really caused me to change my mindset & approach to life. I grew up w/ a lot of different things being poured into me: some good & accurate teachings of Scripture & some not so good & inaccurate teachings...

But like the difference between the Charlie Chan movies & the Charlie Chan books, I have to go back & honor the original, source material & use that as my basis, not the interpretations thereof.