😇 Epiphany 1
Readings: 📜Isaiah 42 :1-9; 🎶Psalm 29; 📜Acts 10 :34-43; 😇Matthew 3 :13-17
From the TRNG Room:
Central Thesis/Theme:
In this first episode of the Epiphany season, I explore what "epiphany" really means in the Greek imagination—a divine appearance when all seems lost—and why the lectionary's focus on Jesus's baptism matters for understanding how we begin our Christian life. I'm particularly interested in how baptism functions as a threshold moment, a vigil where we die to ourselves and are raised in community. This episode is also about my ongoing project to democratize biblical interpretation, taking it away from institutional gatekeepers and making it accessible to rank-and-file believers like us.
Key Textual/Historical Insights:
I make several deliberate translation choices worth noting. First, the "dove" that descends on Jesus is actually a pigeon—the same Greek word used for the temple birds. Second, I distinguish between "am" (the people, meaning us insiders) and "goy/goyim" (all peoples, not "the nations" as other). Third, I render "Yahweh Elohim" as "Lord of Gods" rather than "Lord God," because Elohim is plural—acknowledging that whatever gods we can imagine, Yahweh is Lord of them all. Finally, I note that Acts calls Jesus a "judge" (chafet) rather than king, connecting to pre-monarchic Israel's political imagination.
Theological Argument:
I refuse to read the Bible as tribalistic self-congratulation. Through my Pauline Christian lens, I believe God's work through the Jews to Christ is universally applicable—this isn't about us versus them. The distinction between "am" and "goy" isn't about insiders and outsiders in some hierarchical sense; it's about recognizing that God's design is woven into creation itself for all humanity. I'm also drawing connections between biblical concepts and Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotelian virtue ethics, because I believe multiple wisdom traditions have proximity to truth. The institutional church has failed me, but this text and the people who produced it haven't.
Contemporary Application:
My translation project serves my broader mission: federating biblical interpretation away from institutional gatekeepers. I want rank-and-file believers to have access to these texts on their own terms, through an "everyman perspective" rather than institutional authority. This is what my "Marshall hermeneutic" is about. The Epiphany season is perfect for this work—it's smushed between high holiday seasons, giving us space to explore these foundational questions about how we begin, how we name God, and how we understand power. Whether you're tuning in for theological deep dives or just curious about alternative readings, this season is about making space for the many rather than the few to engage scripture.
Questions Raised:
How does understanding "epiphany" in its Greek cultural context change how we read the baptism narrative?
What's at stake in translating "goy" as "all peoples" rather than "the nations" or "gentiles"?
Why does rendering "Yahweh Elohim" as "Lord of Gods" (plural) matter theologically?
How does viewing Jesus as "judge" rather than "king" reshape our political theology?
What happens when we take biblical interpretation out of institutional hands and put it in the hands of ordinary believers?
Reflection
All right, good morning and welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the chapter house in Albany, Oregon. This morning's readings come to us from, or today's readings come to us from Isaiah 42, Psalm 29, Acts 10, and Matthew 3. This, or today, this year, first Epiphany is often—the first week in Epiphany is the first Sunday following January 6th. January 6th is always called Epiphany. It's a fixed date. It is not the storming of the capitol, it's Epiphany. Before it was that.
And so this is Epiphany One. Epiphany One is always going to be, or in the Revised Common Lectionary, it is the baptism of our Lord, and I don't love that—mostly because Epiphany is a very important thing, especially in the world of the first century Levant or Palestine. And Epiphany, which I talk about—you can go to pewpewhq.com/tng, which stands for training. The training room is where everybody, all the important people hang out and you have to go there and do paperwork. It's basically the office for the unit. But training room is also where you can go and learn stuff from a military perspective on faith and service and et cetera.
Anyway, the training room is the blog for rank-and-file believers at Grunt Works. Epiphany, or Epiphany is a Greek word that is never used in the Gospels. It is only used by Paul and possibly the letters of John, but I don't believe it's in John's gospel. Epiphany is an appearance, sometimes a coming, but not advent—that's a Latin word, that's parousia. But anyway, epiphany is like, you may have been told it's like a dream or it's a vision, and it is because it doesn't really happen. It exists in mythcraft, which is the mythological pseudo-stories that societies across time have used to situate themselves morally in a place.
It's not that it didn't happen there—myth is not assuming that you think that it is telling a factual, linear, objective, scientific truth. Never believed that. Some of the first non-mythological histories in the western world were Herodotus, who was one of the first people in the Western world, which is Hellenic, Greek-speaking world, or what derived from it. That was—I've lost my train of thought, but mythography or myth is common to all cultures. And an epiphany in the Greek imagination with all their gods—an epiphany is when a god comes to the battlefield at the last possible moment, when everything is lost, the god or gods come in and they save whatever people.
Now if you think about that for a minute, before we had—before we thought that they wrote things down to convince other people of things, but rather to convince themselves of things and to give meaning to their own experience—the myth or the stories, the parables that we tell about our own experience are there to try and explain things we can't explain. I can't explain how we won that war. I can't explain how I got out with my life. It must be the gods. This is what myth does. Before we had like the internet and like science, this is how we made meaning.
And so I talk about Epiphany because it's this entire season in the Christian liturgical calendar. Epiphany is the entire season between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday, between Christmastide or Christmas time, the 12 days of Christmas, which follows Advent all the way until the beginning of Lent, Ash Wednesday. It's called Ordinary Time after Epiphany, or in my URL and codification of the liturgical cycle, E1. And I love that it's at the beginning of the year. We begin at the very bottom as a private—Epiphany One, we talk about the baptism because that's when Christians say that we begin our Christian life.
If you read medieval literature and you think about like the vigils of knights, it's basically a vigil, where you die to yourself, you are raised in the community of believers, and then you go out and do the thing as a believer in whatever God, right? And in the early days of Christianity, it was just another drop in the bucket of all these meaning systems that used gods to explain things I couldn't explain.
So in the reading today, we read from Matthew, because it's Year A, we start with Matthew. And we get his baptism story. It's great. If you ask me, Luke has a better version. I like Luke in general. I'm biased. I'm a Gentile, just like Luke. Matthew seems to be writing for a Hebrew audience and trying to fit Hebrew mythological tendencies into what happened with Jesus and his followers. And so there isn't a whole lot for me to say.
He sees the spirit descending as a—I said a pigeon because a dove is like, it's not—they didn't have white doves and a pigeon or a morning dove is like a pigeon. They're very similar birds. But in these baptism stories, in the gospels, the English speakers will say, "Oh, it's a dove," and we think of a bright white bird. I don't know of any—there are bright white doves, but that's not what they had in the Levant, and it's not even what you have later when Jesus goes to flip the temples and it talks about the money changers and what you can buy at the different tables, and then they have the birds—same exact Greek word, but it gets translated as pigeon. So I'm going to say that what descended on Jesus, the Christ whose name is Joshua, was a pigeon.
That's the only alteration I made with Matthew. I hope you read about Epiphany in the Greek imagination on the training room. I also have one on Baptism and Epiphany Sunday, how they kind of get meshed together, which I don't love, but it is what the RCL is.
I did want to point out that some of my translation choices—that if you're reading along, there are some things that I do all the time. Like if the Hebrew "am," which means the nation, us, the people—I translate it as the people and I capitalize the people, because that assumes us. We are the insiders to ourselves. We are the people, right? "We the people, in order to form more perfect union, worship the right God"—whatever that God is doesn't matter. But anyway, on the other hand, if I see "goy" or "goyim," the plural, I will translate that as "all people, all humanity and their different collections of tribes and clans and kingdoms and blah, blah, blah."
So it is important when you hear me talk about "the people" or "all people"—that is what's behind it: "goyim," the nations. We have acquired this sense that "goy" and "goyim" within the biblical imagination is "those people out there." But as a Christian, I believe—and a certain kind of Pauline Christian—I believe that God, the God of the cosmos, was doing something through the Jews to Christ, and then what Christ helps us understand is then universally applicable.
What I mean by that is I will not read the Bible anymore as a tribalistic, self-congratulatory text. This isn't about us and them. This is about creation and our own internal difficulties and issues and concerns and anxieties and insecurities that make us think that we don't have enough, that there is not some good design written into the fabric of creation—maybe not by like some old dude with a beard in the sky, but with a sentient force or forces that is more powerful than we are.
And so when I say "the people," I mean like in the American sense, "We the people," but "goy" is not other. "Goy," "ethnos" in Greek is "all the people including us, but not just us specifically." Not just us. And then "am" is the community of interpretation, the people that are the insider to the thing being said. I do not believe I'm an insider to the God of the cosmos. I don't believe that exists. I am an outsider, as I said at the very beginning. I'm a gentile. I like Luke better than I like Matthew and John. John's weird, but like I do like John in a certain way.
So there's particular decisions I'm making about how to bring some of these old words into the American context. And another one that I did was—you'll see it over and over and over again, you've heard this—"the Lord God." There's a problem with that because there's two things going on. On the one hand, we have Yahweh, which is a tetragrammaton. I'll do a—don't worry about that now. But that's four Hebrew consonants, smooshed together, no vowels. Some say Jehovah, some say Yahweh. It's just YHWH.
And then the second word is Elohim, which is a basic Semitic Canaanite word in plural form for God. So anywhere you see God in Greek, it's usually Theos, but in Hebrew it's usually El, and then Elohim is two, three, four. It's all the Els, and yet it uses Elohim as a proper name. It's like Logan, right? I don't know if there's another equivalent, but like it's using the plural form to address an individual just like Israel. Israel is a deliberate means of mimicking how God is all and yet this one.
Israel means "all of the tribes of Israel." There's not 12, there's actually like 14 when you count two half-tribes and Levi, because Levi's a tribe, even though it doesn't get land. If you think you only count as a tribe if you get land, welcome to entitlement imagination. But if you want a Hebrew imagination, there's some wiggle room. Are there 12 tribes? No, but we're going to keep saying 12 tribes because it's a thing. There's also—there's 13 because the two half-tribes and Levi.
Anyway, so Yahweh Elohim. Yahweh is the name of God, it's given to us, which is fascinating because humanity named the animals and has power over the animals. We don't have power over God, but God has invited us to be familiar with God by giving us their name. Elohim, a plural word that simply means God, means we should translate it as "gods." So instead of smushing them together and using two singulars, "the Lord God," "God is one," but I've rendered it "the Lord of Gods."
Whatever gods you can think of, whatever gods you can imagine, whatever gods you've heard of, Yahweh is the Lord of all of them. I don't feel threatened by all these other little gods, but I do know that there's one God above them all and that God has given us their name, inviting us into relationship with them, and yet is one and many at once.
And the only other thing I wanted to point out, just in terms of what I'm doing in this reading, I'm very much interested in Greek philosophy, Aristotelian and Hellenic philosophy. And so anytime I see a Greek word that I've seen somewhere else, like "arete," which means honor—I'm sorry, excellence. When you have reached excellence or "arete" in a virtue, you are said to be virtuous. If you are neither deficient nor excessive in whatever virtue, when you find that dense golden mean, you have achieved excellence in one particular virtue.
The other one is "time" (timē), and "timē" means honor. And you hear that a couple of times in the Psalm, but I think we also heard it in Isaiah as well. And I'm doing that because I think that Yahweh is the god of everything we've ever encountered. I chose the Christian metaphor and the Christian metaphor on the terms I seem to believe are its own terms have not failed me. The institutional church has failed me. Influential Christians have failed me. But this text and the people that seem to have produced it—my own imagined sense of who produced it—they haven't really let me down.
And the same is true for the Greek philosophers, and I think they had a certain proximity to truth, and especially in the political philosophy, which is to say social philosophy, which is to say economics—oikonomia, households. That kind of political power fascinates me. Virtue, virtue ethics—that fascinates me. So anytime I see stuff that Aristotle was talking about, "timē," "arete," I'm going to point those out to myself and anybody else who's doing similar work might find it interesting.
So those are some of the choices I've made. You heard me stumble over one. "Amen" is a repeating thing in Greek that I think is doing something that not very many theologians are picking up on.
And then finally, I did want to point out that in Acts 42 that Jesus is said to have been appointed by God as "judge"—chafet—and that I think is much closer to what Jesus is doing biblically than "king." Kings were foreign concepts to Israel until Judges 9, and then it was a really bad idea. And so before Judges 9, we have judges, chafet or chafetim. And I think that's a more particular and distinctive form of Hebraic political philosophy that I want to explore further. And so I pointed that out to myself.
So those are some of my translation choices. I want to focus both on the lectionary cycle, the RCL, and baptism and what Epiphany really is supposed to be. And also the weeks after Epiphany are E1 through E7 or eight, I don't know. It'll change depending on when Ash Wednesday is. But this is my favorite season. It's smushed in between these two high holiday seasons, and I can say it's E1 through seven.
So thanks for listening. Thanks for following along.
