Practicing What He Preached

Dr. Robert L. Lindsey, March 1980 (photo: Kurt Ben-Joseph).

In 1962, as a student in Jerusalem, I found my church home at the Narkis Street Baptist Church. Dr. Bob Lindsey was the pastor of this small congregation of about twenty-five people. I particularly enjoyed his Bible studies before the worship service.

What caught my attention was his approach to studying the Gospels. He had been preparing a new Hebrew translation of the New Testament for the Hebrew-speaking, Christian congregations in Israel. As he translated the Greek synoptic Gospels, he discovered, to his amazement, that their word order and idiom were more like Hebrew than Greek. This convinced him that the original Life of Jesus had been written in Hebrew. Consequently, when studying a saying of Jesus, he always liked to ask, “What did Jesus say in Hebrew?”