They Called Themselves Slave
We’ve heard that Jesus is Lord.
Yet in almost all English Bibles, the Koinē Greek word for slave, doūlos is translated “servant”. Why?
For Fr. Brown, this question grew from simple curiosity to deep study of why doūlos has been consistently mistranslated in translations from the King James forward, and why restoring its original meaning is essential to knowing and following Jesus as Lord as Master.
Fr. Brown is convinced that God wanted him to produce the fruits of his research in the form of this book. By reading it, you can share in the fruits of his labor and know Jesus as he was always to be known.
In Fr. Brown’s research he discovered two scholars—F.F. Bruce and Leland Ryken—whose writings point out why the translation of the Koinē Greek word doūlos is to be correctly translated slave.
“A basic requirement for the understanding of these documents [in the Bible] is the grammatico–historical interpretation or exegesis bringing out of the text the meaning the writer intended to convey and which their readers were expected to gather from it…the meaning of the text for hearers today must be related to its meaning for the hearers to whom it was first addressed.”
— F. F. Bruce
“Scholars who deal seriously with literary texts have a name for texts that do not correspond to the actual words of an author. Such a text is called a corrupt text. It is defined as a text that has been changed from its original and reliable form to something different from that standard—a text that has been altered from the original, intentionally or unintentionally.”
— Leland Ryken